best ai search engine 2026

Getty / Futurism With great power comes great dupe-ability. Last month, we reported on a new study conducted by researchers at Icaro Lab in Italy that discovered a stupefyingly simple way of breaking the guardrails of even cutting-edge AI chatbots: “adversarial poetry.” In a nutshell, the team, comprising researchers from the safety group DexAI and Sapienza University in Rome, demonstrated that leading AIs could be wooed into doing evil by regaling them wi

Getty Images New research suggests that AI chatbots like ChatGPT can persuade roughly one out of every 25 people to change who they’re going to vote for — with one major caveat. First reported by The Washington Post, the revelation comes as a result of joint international studies led by researchers at MIT. To analyze the potential for AI chatbots to sway voters’ minds, the researchers recruited more than 2,000 voting-aged US citizens sit down to talk to ei

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images There’s sloppy science, and there’s AI slop science. In an ironic twist of fate, beleaguered AI researchers are warning that the field is being choked by a deluge of shoddy academic papers written with large language models, making it harder than ever for high quality work to be discovered and stand out. Part of the problem is that AI research has surged in popularity. The more people who

AI Generated Video via McDonald's Update: McDonald’s has issued a very strange response to the drama. Thanks to the rise in popularity of generative AI, mainstream companies like Coca-Cola and Google are jumping on the bandwagon to plop out new advertisements. There’s just one issue: pretty much everybody hates it. This year, McDonald’s decided to get in on the corporate slopfest with a 45-second Christmas spot cooked up for its Netherlands division by the

Discovery of antibiotics from Archaea using deep learning. Credit: Nature Microbiology (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41564-025-02061-0 They've survived for billions of years in boiling acid, deep-sea vents and salt flats. Now, some of Earth's oldest life forms—microbes called Archaea—are offering a new weapon in the fight against one of today's most urgent health threats: antibiotic resistance. In a study published in Nature Microbiology, researchers at the Univer

Fluorescently tagged neural molecule imaged in a living tadpole, with colors representing imaging depth. The brain and spinal nerves appear near the top in turquoise to purple, the path of peripheral nerves is visible throughout the tadpole. Credit: Taiyo Yamamoto, University of Zurich A research team headed by the University of Zurich has developed a powerful new method to precisely edit DNA by combining cutting-edge genetic engineering with artificial in

Credit: CC0 Public Domain A study published in Nature Biotechnology reveals a powerful new use for artificial intelligence: designing small, drug-like molecules that can stick to and break down harmful proteins in the body—even when scientists don't know what those proteins look like. The breakthrough could lead to new treatments for diseases that have long resisted traditional drug development, including certain cancers, brain disorders, and viral infecti

Fuels map of the 2025 Eaton Fire, as predicted by FuelVision. Credit: Riyaaz Shaik and Patrick Hadinata/UCLA Researchers from the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and their collaborators have developed FuelVision, a new system that could help enhance nationwide wildfire preparedness by combining satellite imagery with artificial intelligence to rapidly and accurately identify wildfire fuel sources. In validation tests using data from two of California's

Fake Zillow pages use ClickFix NetSupport RAT to target apartment hunters EfficientIP Research Labs traced a ClickFix campaign that used fake Zillow apartment-review pages to install NetSupport RAT on visitors’ Windows computers. Each page showed what looked like a routine verification check. Behind it, the page quietly copied a PowerShell command to the clipboard and walked the visitor through pasting and running it. Doing that installs remote-control sof

Suspected North Korean IT workers reached onboarding at companies with open data Material Security followed suspected North Korean fake IT workers through the hiring pipelines of organizations it monitors and counted 27 personas that reached onboarding over one year. At one company where a persona got that far in the past month, about 277,000 files containing Social Security numbers were shared company-wide or by public link. The personas are fabricated jo

AI reverse engineering let researchers add a new feature to Slack Intezer researchers used AI agents to rebuild source code for Slack, Apple’s Finder and a TinyTurla-NG sample, from a backdoor family Cisco Talos attributes to the Turla group. They worked from the shipped programs and vendor documentation. The rebuilt Slack ran well enough that the team added a new feature to it: AI text autocomplete, powered by a small local model. Software vendors that co

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images OpenAI has long published research on the potential safety and economic impact of its own technology. Now, Wired reports that the Sam Altman-led company is becoming more “guarded” about publishing research that paints an inconvenient truth: that AI could be bad for the economy. The perceived censorship has become such a point of frustration that at least two OpenAI empl

AI Generated Image On December 11, OpenAI release ChatGPT 5.2, the latest version of the widely used AI chatbot. As it does every time it releases a minor update, the company hailed its latest version as a “significant improvement in general intelligence,” calling it the “best model yet for real-world, professional use.” In a further display of hubris, OpenAI even went so far as to claim 5.2 is their “first model that performs at or above a human expert le

Getty / Futurism As generative AI seeps into virtually every aspect of our daily lives through jobs, entertainment, and even food, you gotta wonder: is anyone not on board with the AI takeover? Apparently not. Former McKinsey analyst turned Dartmouth University professor Scott Anthony told Fortune that one of the feelings he’s seeing more and more among college students isn’t excitement for the AI future, but utter terror. “One of the things that really su

The adoption rate of AI tools has skyrocketed in the programming world, enabling coders to generate vast amounts of code with simple text prompts. Earlier this year, Google found that 90 percent of software developers across the industry are using AI tools on the job, up from a mere 14 percent last year. But all that convenience has come with some glaring drawbacks. The tools have repeatedly been found to be unreliable and inaccurate, which can lead to mis

There are a lot of reasons to want Flock cameras removed from your neighborhood. That said, harnessing the gold and copper from them is probably not one of them. Unfortunately, Google’s AI Overview may have given people the idea that they can run smash-and-grab operations to cash in on the metals inside the invasive eyes of the surveillance state. It’s become a running joke online and in privacy-focused communities that Flock cameras contain valuable mater

Credit: AI-generated image A £150 billion technology prosperity deal between the US and the UK was announced during President Donald Trump's recent state visit to the UK. But what kinds of technologies could it advance and how will these benefit the British public? The Conversation asked Dr. Dan Nicolau, who researches the interface of biology and computing, medical science and artificial intelligence (AI), at King's College London for his thoughts. AI has

NREL’s extensive portfolio of battery-safety research includes high-speed X-ray imaging to show what happens during battery failure. Credit: Donal Finegan, NREL Tucked into your pocket, packed into warehouses, and embedded into critical infrastructure—lithium-ion batteries are quietly powering much of modern America. Demand for these indispensable energy storage solutions continues to skyrocket, prompting energy experts to explore next-generation (next-gen

Schematic of horizontal elongation in an optimized cell cluster. (a) Left: the final configuration of a simulation with randomly initialized parameters; right: the final simulation state after learning. Source cells, in red, secrete the growth factor and cannot divide. Proliferating cells, in gray, sense the growth factor and divide in response to it. (b) The learned gene network. The receptor gene is activated only by the presence of the external chemical