Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

The Forecasting Research Institute (FRI) has published a report [PDF] titled "The Longitudinal Expert AI Panel" that attempts to distill the forecasts of knowledgeable folk - mainly men - in industry, academia, and policy about the capabilities, adoption, and impact of AI in the years ahead. The research project, led by Ezra Karger, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, suggests that few AI experts believe "superintelligence" as outlined by the likes of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei will arrive anytime soon.

As explained in this video, flow-matching-based generative methods are a class of models that learn a "continuous vector field" in order to manage and transform what are relatively simple "noise distributions" into more complex data distributions. They do this by following ordinary differential equations. Instead of learning "discrete denoising steps" (that's what diffusion models do), they train the flow to match probability paths directly between data and noise.

Ray Kurzweil (2005) and others have described "the singularity" as the moment when artificial intelligence (AI) surpasses human intelligence and triggers fulminant technological change. We're not at the full singularity yet-when AI "wakes up," when the world radically transforms. Or maybe we are, and we just don't know it yet. Regardless, the shape of things to come is coming into focus.

SoftBank and OpenAI announced a new 50-50 joint venture this week to sell enterprise AI tools in Japan under the brand "Crystal Intelligence." On paper, it's a straightforward international expansion deal. But SoftBank's role as a major investor in OpenAI is raising questions about whether AI's biggest deals are creating real economic value or just moving money in circles. On TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec,

On Friday, Latham & Watkins packed its first-year associate class, more than 400 lawyers in total, into a Washington, D.C., hotel for a mandatory two-day "AI Academy." The firm laid out how partners already use tools like Harvey, an OpenAI-backed legal tech startup, and Microsoft Copilot. It also brought in outside voices, including Meta's top privacy lawyer, Steve Satterfield.

At the core of the new release is Builder agent, a generative AI system that converts plain text prompts into functional, customized map prototypes within minutes. Developers can type natural instructions like "create a Street View tour of a city" or "build a map that visualizes real-time weather in my region," and Builder agent automatically produces an interactive layout using Gemini's reasoning and visualization capabilities.

Comcast, the American media giant behind Universal Studios and owner of Sky, is reportedly in advanced discussions to acquire ITV's broadcasting division for approximately £2bn. The deal would encompass ITV's traditional TV channels and its streaming platform ITVX, but notably exclude ITV Studios, which remains the subject of separate acquisition interest. Apple nears $1bn Deal to Power Siri Apple Inc. is nearing a billion-dollar annual agreement with Alphabet Inc. to license Google's Gemini AI model.

In a blog post, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs the popular online encyclopedia, called on AI developers to use its content "responsibly" by ensuring its contributions are properly attributed and that content is accessed through its paid product, the Wikimedia Enterprise platform. The opt-in, paid product allows companies to use Wikipedia's content at scale without "severely taxing Wikipedia's servers," the Wikimedia Foundation blog post explains.

I would not call myself godmother of anything,

Along with a focus on delivering business growth, Gartner sees an opportunity for CIOs to get out of back office IT. Almost two-thirds of CIOs (65%) are not happy with being constrained to the four walls of the IT department. According to analyst firm Gartner, CIOs want to be customer-facing, where they are involved in the same conversations that people in the business have with their customers and customer prospects.

Cisco is set to launch another such "SLM", following up its Foundation-Sec-8B with 8 billion parameters with a 17 billion parameter count model. It will contain 30 years of threat intelligence emanating from Cisco Talos. However, the company emphasizes the new model is not a direct successor to Foundation-Sec-8B. Cisco currently uses Foundation-Sec-8B in its products. The model analyzes security alerts, checks code for vulnerabilities, and suggests workflows that prioritize security.

The term was coined in February by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, who came up with the name to represent how AI can let some programmers "forget that the code even exists" and "give in to the vibes" while making a computer program. It was one of 10 words on a shortlist to reflect the mood, language and preoccupations of 2025.

Evaluating coding LLMs on well-specified tasks, such as fixing a bug, implementing an algorithm, or writing a test, is not sufficient to evaluate their ability to solve real-world software development challenges, the researchers argue. Instead of maintenance tasks, developers are driven by high-level goals like improving user retention, increasing revenue, or reducing costs. This requires fundamentally different capabilities; engineers must recursively decompose these objectives into actionable steps, prioritize them, and make strategic decisions about which solutions to pursue.

the company said in a press release, adding that "Pfizer will also participate in a direct purchasing platform, TrumpRx.gov, that will allow American patients to purchase medicines from Pfizer at a significant discount. The large majority of the company's primary care treatments and some select specialty brands will be offered at savings that will range as high as 85% and on average 50%."

I smiled tightly as this man described using generative AI for the initial stages of planning the wedding. (They also hired a human wedding planner.) I responded politely. Inside, however, I resolved: if my future spouse came to me with wedding input courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding. Some people have the typical relationship non-negotiables. Doesn't smoke, is a cat person, wants kids.

A wave of horror stories about ChatGPT arrived in California courts on Thursday, with the filings of seven new lawsuits against OpenAI from across the nation. Four focus on suicides, three on other mental health crises. Each blames ChatGPT, and each complaint's first paragraph ends with the same allegation: "This tragedy was not a glitch or an unforeseen edge case - it was the predictable result of Defendants' deliberate design choices."

Why it matters: Alphabet's execution on artificial intelligenceevidenced by strong traction for its Gemini app, which has more than 650 million monthly users, along with its ability to deliver solid advertising revenuecontinues to drive results while refuting the AI-led disruption narrative. Within search, we like AI Overviews and AI Mode as tools that not only retain users but also drive incremental query growth and improved user engagement.

I've been a little over 30 years in the software development area, in a variety of fields, done consulting, done software development, worked on products, worked with customers. Tried to do a variety of things over the years. The last a little over 12 years have been spent specifically on AI and machine learning, in a variety of contexts. I started at Nokia, working in that with maps and data analysis of users on their mobile devices.

amidst all the fervor about AI, another consequential story is unfolding more quietly: "In years to come, we may well look back on September 2025 as the point at which social media jumped the shark and began rapidly accelerating its transition from the place to be seen," he writes, "to a gaudy backwater of the internet inhabited by those with nothing better to do."

You're at home, coffee in hand, scrolling through your personalized news brief. "SophAI," you say casually, "check the fridge and order what's missing." Your AI assistant responds instantly - warm, efficient, endlessly patient. It praises your choices, anticipates your needs, and never judges. SophAI is always there, always helpful, always agreeable. It feels good. Maybe too good. This is happening now.

The nu-blogging platform is an earnestly artisanal space where writers craft their stuff; subcontracting that to a bot seems like the acme of pointlessness. Will Storr, who writes about storytelling, examines this boggling trend and the tells that give it away on his own Substack, including a penchant for what he calls the impersonal universal: sweeping statements that sound deep but aren't. There is, he says, A white-noise generality to its insights, an uncanny vagueness that makes the mind glaze over.

Adobe Firefly feels like the best-kept secret in software right now. Adobe is aggressively talking up the app and its capabilities at events like Adobe MAX, but even with so much limelight, it doesn't get nearly the attention that competitors do. The Firefly app is a creative AI playground that lets you use generative models to create images, videos, and more, but it can do more, from batch editing photos to turning a single frame into a full video.