best ai search engine 2026

From left, engineering professor Morteza Lahijanian and graduate student Karan Muvvala watch as a robotic arm completes a task using wooden blocks. Credit: Casey Cass/University of Colorado Boulder Imagine for a moment that you're in an auto factory. A robot and a human are working next to each other on the production line. The robot is busy rapidly assembling car doors while the human runs quality control, inspecting the doors for damage and making sure t

Ralstonia solanacearum in a potato plant. The bacterium destroys the vascular system in plants, causing them to succumb to wilt disease. Credit: Amilcar Sanchez Perez Scientists at the University of California, Davis, used artificial intelligence to help plants recognize a wider range of bacterial threats — which may lead to new ways to protect crops like tomatoes and potatoes from devastating diseases. The study was published in Nature Plants. Plants, lik

Credit: University of Maryland One afternoon in September 2020, Loran Hughes noticed an ominous plume forming in the Southwest Oregon sky, shrouding the sun in darkness. The 62-year-old amateur astrophotographer, who had weak lungs, uploaded an image from his sky camera and fired off a tweet (below). "These are not clouds," it read. "Wildfire smoke *cough*." Hughes feared the blaze was headed his way, as winds began spitting out debris. "We had ashes as bi

Fake GTA 6 download goes after Steam logins and crypto wallet data Cynet researchers followed a “GTA 6 EXE file download” link from a Google Colab notebook to a ZIP archive and found a WARDEN Stealer loader inside. The malware takes saved passwords, browser cookies, Steam and Roblox credentials, and cryptocurrency wallet data from the machine it runs on. A Google Colab notebook promotes a fake GTA 6 executable download (Source: Cynet) Grand Theft Auto VI l

Getty / Futurism Experts have long warned that artificial intelligence could soon put countless white collar workers out of a job. It’s an alarming prospect, at least if that’s currently your career. But first, a practical question: how close are today’s AIs to being able to actually run a company on their own, with little to no human oversight? In a fascinating experiment, journalist Evan Ratliff populated his own fictional tech startup that he called Hur

Getty / Futurism As the holiday season rolls in, parents eager to impress their young children with a splashy present might be tempted to gift them an AI-powered toy or teddy bear, which are popping up everywhere. What’d be more fun for a child than a tiny companion that they can have endless conversations with? It’s gotta be better than having their face shoved into a tablet screen all the time, right? But you may want to hold off on that purchase. There’

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Anna Moneymakey / Getty Images We’re well into the AI boom, and AI chatbots still suffer from the small problem of being serial liars. Public figures are still finding that out the hard way. Late last month, Republican senator Marsha Blackburn tore into Google after its AI model, Gemma, falsely claimed that Blackburn had been accused of rape when asked if there were any such allegations against her. T

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Back in August, a retiree and single mother booked a flight to go see her son. He was in a bad way. Formerly a successful young professional in his early thirties, his mother and other family members were shocked to discover that he’d become addicted to a toxic mixture of methamphetamine and an all-consuming relationship with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which was feeding his paranoia and anger as h

The DSA has struck again, and corporations are trembling. No, not the Mamdani DSA, the other DSA, the EU’s Digital Services Act, Europe’s legal framework for regulating the tech industry, which is also arguably the entire world’s de facto legal framework for regulating the tech industry. The targets today: Roblox, the gaming sandbox and online space where kids can interact, and where, perhaps too often, adults can interact with kids, along with ChatGPT, th

It’s become a distressingly familiar sequence of events: A frontier AI model pulls off some alarming new feat that not so long ago would’ve seemed impossible, anxiety runs rampant, safety experts cry out for more robust oversight and regulation, and the powers that be respond by doing… not much at all. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, therefore, that a coalition of AI safety and policy researchers are now calling on the Trump administration to investigate

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain A year ago, Google faced the prospect of being dismantled. Today, artificial intelligence (AI) and a new court judgment has helped it avoid this fate. Part of the reason is that AI poses a grave threat to Google's advertising revenues. "Google will not be required to divest Chrome; nor will the court include a contingent divestiture of the Android operating system in the final judgment," according to the decision. Google

The photonic microchip (below) developed for the study on physical neural networks, along with the electronic chip (above, the yellow one) of control. Credit: Politecnico di Milano, DEIB—Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering Artificial intelligence is now part of our daily lives, with the subsequent pressing need for larger, more complex models. However, the demand for ever-increasing power and computing capacity is rising faster than t

Credit: Rachel Barton/Texas A&M Engineering Concern over pollution and its impact on weather patterns continues to increase—but what if severe weather events are also impacting pollution? Researchers from Texas A&M University are using artificial intelligence to track pollution caused by accidental chemical emissions following natural hazards. An increased understanding of the relationship between natural hazards and unplanned chemical emissions may help r

The space of the possible as a directed graph: it grows downward into new ideas (the adjacent possible) and fades upward into outdated ones (the adjacent obsolescent). Connectivity γ ranges from tree-like (0) to truss-like (1). Credit: Complexity Science Hub Research shows that while connections between innovations speed discovery, they also sharply increase the risk of total system collapse—with the sweet spot for sustainable innovation proving surprising

What is AI overview?It’s a feature that gives users the answer they’re looking for right at the top of the search results. Google’s AI pulls information from all over the web and gives a short response to the user’s query. Instead of making them click on multiple links, the AI compiles all the relevant info into a summary.The answers are usually 160-170 words, just enough to give the user what they need, fast. But here’s the catch: when users get answers t

OpenAI raises top bug bounty payout to $172,000 with bonuses OpenAI increased its security bug bounties to encourage independent researchers to find vulnerabilities in its software. The program now offers bonuses for high-quality reports. The program encourages researchers to disclose vulnerabilities responsibly and complements OpenAI’s Defense Factory, where engineers use the company’s models to find and reproduce vulnerabilities and test fixes. New bount

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images Brace yourselves, for your cozy little conversations with OpenAI’s ChatGPT are about to be stuffed with ads. At least, that’s the findings of a software engineer who dug through the code of an experimental build of the chatbot’s app. The engineer, Tibor Blaho, flagged roughly a dozen lines of code in the latest beta release of the ChatGPT app for Android, 1.2025.329, label

Getty / Futurism We’ve heard story after story about people becoming obsessed with AI chatbots and experiencing profound breaks with reality. But there was always an ambiguity: was AI use pushing people into psychosis, or were people already suffering from mental health problems seeking out AI as a means to cope? Now, new research has provided an important clue. As PsyPost reports, scientists have found that people who use AI chatbots tend to experience hi

Getty / Futurism Rumors surrounding OpenAI preparing to stuff ads into ChatGPT are hitting a fever pitch. Last week, engineer Tibor Blaho made headlines after discovering references to an “‘ads feature’ with ‘bazaar content,’ ‘search ad’ and ‘search ads carousel'” hidden inside the code of ChatGPT’s Android app. Now, users are starting to notice strange inclusions at the end of the chatbot’s output as well, encouraging users to download the apps of sometim

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Earlier this year, Microsoft officially yanked the cord on Windows 10, ending support for an operating system that had been superseded by Windows 11 four years earlier. But the tech giant’s controversial attempts to shoehorn AI into every aspect of the software appear to have turned off a staggering number of users from upgrading. While it’s to be expected at this point that not everybody