Late last year, Bell, Blackwell, and Aguilar decided to dust off the old playbook. They commissioned a legal memo that reiterated the power of the attorney general over the irrevocable status of charitable funds and called up their contacts to form a coalition of what is now over 50 community …
Read More »Business / Artificial Intelligence
2025 Is the Year of the Humanoid Robot Factory Worker
Later this year, Boston Dynamics plans to put its all-electric humanoid Atlas robot to work in a Hyundai factory. The new version of the bot, evolved from the hydraulic Atlas model that’s been performing viral video demos since 2013, made its public debut last spring. But while the company’s dog-like …
Read More »Think Twice Before Creating That ChatGPT Action Figure
Any data, prompts, or requests you share helps teach the algorithm—and personalized information helps fine tune it further, says Jake Moore, global cybersecurity adviser at security outfit ESET, who created his own action figure to demonstrate the privacy risks of the trend on LinkedIn. Uncanny Likeness In some markets, your …
Read More »These Startups Are Building Advanced AI Models Without Data Centers
Researchers have trained a new kind of large language model (LLM) using GPUs dotted across the world and fed private as well as public data—a move that suggests that the dominant way of building artificial intelligence could be disrupted. Flower AI and Vana, two startups pursuing unconventional approaches to building …
Read More »AI Code Hallucinations Increase the Risk of ‘Package Confusion’ Attacks
AI-generated computer code is rife with references to non-existent third-party libraries, creating a golden opportunity for supply-chain attacks that poison legitimate programs with malicious packages that can steal data, plant backdoors, and carry out other nefarious actions, newly published research shows. The study, which used 16 of the most widely …
Read More »AI Is Using Your Likes to Get Inside Your Head
What is the future of the like button in the age of artificial intelligence? Max Levchin—the PayPal cofounder and Affirm CEO—sees a new and hugely valuable role for liking data to train AI to arrive at conclusions more in line with those a human decisionmaker would make. It’s a well-known …
Read More »‘You Can’t Lick a Badger Twice’: Google Failures Highlight a Fundamental AI Flaw
Here’s a nice little distraction from your workday: Head to Google, type in any made-up phrase, add the word “meaning,” and search. Behold! Google’s AI Overviews will not only confirm that your gibberish is a real saying, it will also tell you what it means and how it was derived. …
Read More »AI Is Spreading Old Stereotypes to New Languages and Cultures
So, there’s the training data. Then, there’s the fine-tuning and evaluation. The training data might contain all kinds of really problematic stereotypes across countries, but then the bias mitigation techniques may only look at English. In particular, it tends to be North American– and US-centric. While you might reduce bias …
Read More »Stumbling and Overheating, Most Humanoid Robots Fail to Finish Half Marathon in Beijing
While capabilities like dancing can be fun and eyecatching, they don’t actually show how useful humanoid robots are in real-world situations, says Fern. Even being able to run a half marathon isn’t a very useful benchmark for their skills—it’s not like there’s market demand for robots that can compete with …
Read More »An AI Customer Service Chatbot Made Up a Company Policy—and Created a Mess
On Monday, a developer using the popular AI-powered code editor Cursor noticed something strange: Switching between machines instantly logged them out, breaking a common workflow for programmers who use multiple devices. When the user contacted Cursor support, an agent named “Sam” told them it was expected behavior under a new …
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