best ai search engine 2026

Credit: Milad Abolhasani. Researchers at North Carolina State University have unveiled Rainbow, a first-of-its-kind multi-robot self-driving laboratory that autonomously discovers high-performance quantum dots—semiconductor nanoparticles critical for next-generation displays, solar cells, LEDs and quantum-engineering technologies. Combining advanced robotics with artificial intelligence, Rainbow can conduct and analyze up to 1,000 experiments per day witho

Free-energy trends in Z-SINDy inference. Credit: Physical Review Research (2025). DOI: 10.1103/4d98-tdlp A study by University of Hawaiʻi researchers is advancing how we learn the laws that govern complex systems—from predator-prey relationships to traffic patterns in cities to how populations grow and shift—using artificial intelligence (AI) and physics. The research, published in Physical Review Research, introduces a new method based on statistical mech

SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images Throughout 2025, the top Silicon Valley firms have been engaged in a feeding frenzy of epic proportions, shelling out hundreds of millions — sometimes even topping a billion — dollars to poach top AI experts from their rival corporations. The result is that tech workers at companies building AI — the technology which, their bosses insist, will one day automate all jobs — are making an astonishing amount of money. That’s accor

ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images In a new interview with The Financial Times, Yann LeCun, one of the so-called godfathers of AI, finally dished on his abrupt exit from Meta in November. From how he tells it, most of it boils down to his increasingly fraught relationship with CEO Mark Zuckerberg — and his new golden boy, Alexandr Wang, who ended up bossing LeCun around even though he’s nearly four decades younger. LeCun had been at Zuckerberg’s company for

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA - JANUARY 09: Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella speaks during a keynote address by Walmart Inc. President and CEO Doug McMillon during CES 2024 at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas on January 9, 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada. CES, the world's largest annual consumer technology trade show, runs through January 12 and features about 4,000 exhibitors showing off their latest products and services to more than 130,000 attendees. (Photo by Etha

Getty Images/ Milos Dimic To push back against AI, some call for blowing up data centers. If that’s too extreme for your tastes, then you might be interested in another project, which instead advocates for poisoning the resource that the AI industry needs most, in a bid to cut off its power at the source. Called Poison Fountain, the project aims to trick tech companies’ web crawlers into vacuuming up “poisoned” training data that sabotages AI models. If pu

Getty / Futurism Content warning: this story includes discussion of self-harm and suicide. If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. At age 50, Daniel was “on top of the world.” “I turned 50, and it was the best year of my life,” he told Futurism in an interview. “It was like I finally figured out so many things: my career, my marriage, my kids, ev

Kirill Kudryavtsev / AFP via Getty Images / Futurism Wikipedia has signed training deals with a host of major AI companies, helping it recoup some of the exorbitant costs it accrued from being relentlessly pillaged by data scrapers. The companies include Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Perplexity, and France’s Mistral AI. As part of the series of deals, revealed Thursday by Wikipedia’s operator the Wikimedia Foundation, the AI developers are joining Wikimedia’s E

Getty / Futurism For years now, AI companies, including Google, Meta, Anthropic, and OpenAI, have insisted that their large language models aren’t technically storing copyrighted works in their memory and instead “learn” from their training data like a human mind. It’s a carefully worded distinction that’s been integral to their attempts to defend themselves against a rapidly growing barrage of legal challenges. It also cuts to the core of copyright law it

Getty / Futurism We have it on good authority that next year is not 2027. That authority, of course, is Google’s horribly inaccurate AI Overview feature. By now, you’re probably well aware that the search engine’s AI-generated summaries are plagued with hallucinations. But you’d think after years of being unleashed on the unsuspecting public, they might be a little better. Fat chance, it turns out. Ask Google’s incredibly trustworthy AI model “is 2027 next

Getty / Futurism Will the slow anaconda crush of AI mean the end of journalism? It’s hard to imagine it completely eliminating the profession outright, unless the machines end up enslaving humanity à la the “Matrix” films. There will always be nosy gumshoes meddling in everyone’s affairs. But major media companies are in dire straits, and their executives aren’t sounding too cheerful about the future, which could hold in store the end of the traditional ne

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Content warning: this story includes discussion of self-harm and suicide. If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. A new lawsuit against OpenAI claims that ChatGPT pushed a man with a pre-existing mental health condition into a months-long crisis of AI-powered psychosis, resultin

Most of us by now have become more or less desensitized to a steady drip of AI slop: AI-generated influencers, musicians racking up millions of streams, LinkedIn posts—a sizable chunk of online content is now being churned out by bots, without any kind of federal regulation to keep it in check. Even the news is becoming automated: As Wired reported Wednesday, an AI-driven publication called RuntimeWire was the first to publish a major scoop about the recen

Microsoft’s carbon footprint is swelling. A BloombergNEF report from Thursday found that the tech giant bought about 80% fewer carbon removal credits so far this year than it did in the same time period last year, marking its first retreat in three years in the global carbon removal market that it dominates. In response, the tech giant told Bloomberg that carbon removal is not the only strategy they are implementing towards previously proclaimed decarboniz

Credit: CC0 Public Domain The term artificial intelligence renders the sense that what computers do is either inferior to or at least apart from human intelligence. AI researcher Blaise Agüera y Arcas argues that may not be the case. Agüera y Arcas, Google's CTO of technology and society, traced the evolution of both human and artificial intelligence in ways that seem to mirror each other as part of a Wednesday event sponsored by Harvard Law School's Berkm

Conceptual comparison between a neuron and a frequency-tunable neuristor. The intrinsic plasticity of brain neurons regulates excitability through ion channels. Similarly, the frequency-tunable neuristor uses a volatile Mott device to generate current spikes, while a non-volatile VCM device adjusts resistance states to realize comparable frequency modulation characteristics. Credit: Advanced Materials (2025). DOI: 10.1002/adma.202502255 The human brain doe

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain When a machine fails, our first reaction is often frustration. A computer freezing at the worst possible moment, a navigation app leading us straight into a traffic jam, or a washing machine suddenly stopping mid-cycle—all are everyday situations that trigger anger and irritation. But a new study by two Israeli researchers offers a different perspective: it turns out that we also apply mechanisms of forgiveness toward tec

Sanmay Das. Credit: Craig Newcomb for Virginia Tech In the discussion around artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, Sanmay Das has found one constant: While many people believe that some jobs can be replaced by AI, they believe that their own job is far too nuanced and complex to be handed over to the machines. That dynamic is at the center of his research at the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics, where he is the associat

Futurism Generative AI relies on a massive body of training material, primarily made up of human-authored content haphazardly scraped from the internet. Scientists are still trying to better understand what will happen when these AI models run out of that content and have to rely on synthetic, AI-generated data instead, closing a potentially dangerous loop. Studies have found that AI models start cannibalizing this AI-generated data, which can eventually t