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After a hurricane, every hour matters. Roads flood, traffic signals fail and fallen trees turn familiar neighborhoods into mazes. Until now, assessing that damage has required crews to drive hundreds of miles, take photographs, complete reports and eventually return to an office where internet service still works. The storm moves in hours. The paperwork prefers a more leisurely pace. Researchers at the University of South Florida are developing AI technology to accelerate tha

Artificial intelligence has already created prompt engineers, robot trainers and digital ethicists. Now it has produced a profession no guidance counselor saw coming: the masturbation consultant. AI companion company Joi AI selected 10 participants for a 28-day “wellness” experiment, offering each $2,000 to examine whether AI-guided self-pleasure could affect stress, focus and other measures. Six ultimately completed the study. Participants tracked their mood, energy, craving

OpenAI has previewed Ultrafast, a Cerebras-powered API tier that runs its flagship GPT-5.6 Sol model at up to 14 times normal speed, reaching as much as 750 output tokens per second. The model did not get smaller, simpler or less intelligent. It simply stopped dawdling. The partnership was announced in January, with Cerebras expected to provide OpenAI with 750 megawatts of high-speed AI inference capacity. In Cerebras testing, OpenAI Ultrafast completed Humanity’s Last Exam’s

Conventional traffic lights often follow schedules written in advance, obediently turning red even when no one is coming. Netivei Israel has decided that perhaps the machines should look out the window. Netivei Israel has deployed approximately 170 AI traffic lights that use cameras to detect vehicles, measure queues and adjust signal timing in real time. In a study of 25 junctions, the system saved drivers an average of 25 seconds per vehicle. At one heavily traveled interse

For years, people have used AI to write essays, emails, reports and code, then quietly accepted the applause. Anthropic has now arrived with the technological equivalent of indelible ink. To comply with the European Union’s AI Act, Anthropic is introducing invisible Claude text watermarking into text generated by future Claude models, with older models expected to receive the technology over the coming months. The system subtly influences word choices, creating a detectable s

The next generation of military artificial intelligence may not wait for a person to ask every question. The machines may increasingly ask one another. The Defense Intelligence Agency is building toward a system in which specialized military AI agents communicate across military operations. One agent could analyze intelligence while others coordinate logistics, communications, planning and battlefield operations, sharing information and adjusting recommendations as conditions

Florida is using one of the stranger conservation experiments you are likely to encounter: solar-powered robotic rabbits designed to lure invasive Burmese pythons out of hiding in the Everglades. The decoys mimic the heat, scent and movement of real prey, while AI-enabled cameras watch for approaching snakes and alert trained removal teams. It is an unusual combination of robotics, artificial intelligence and wildlife management aimed at solving one deceptively difficult prob

Netflix has revealed that it paid $587 million in cash for InterPositive, the AI filmmaking company founded by Ben Affleck. The company was founded in 2022, operated largely in stealth and employed a remarkably small team. Then Netflix arrived with more than half a billion dollars—because in Hollywood, the only thing more valuable than a blockbuster is technology that might make the next hundred blockbusters cheaper. 🎥 The Details: AI Filmmaking InterPositive develops AI too

Denmark has introduced a refreshingly ancient solution to AI-assisted cheating: students who submit major take-home exam assignments must now explain them out loud. Yes, after years of schools chasing detection software, plagiarism scores and digital fingerprints, Denmark has rediscovered the most terrifying technology ever placed before an unprepared teenager—a follow-up question. 🗣️ The Details: AI Cheating in Education High school students in Denmark’s two-year Higher Pre

Artificial intelligence has spent the past decade promising to discover better medicines faster, cheaper and with fewer dead ends. Now, a major new perspective in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery has examined the evidence—and delivered the scientific equivalent of clearing its throat and asking to see the receipts. The verdict: AI has produced impressive models, persuasive demonstrations and enough dazzling presentations to exhaust every projector in Silicon Valley. But evidence

For most of history, military power belonged to nations that could afford the largest armies, the most sophisticated aircraft and the most spectacularly expensive machinery. Then came the drone: small, cheap and deeply uninterested in tradition. Now artificial intelligence is transforming drones from remotely controlled flying cameras into increasingly autonomous battlefield systems capable of navigating, identifying objects, coordinating missions and continuing parts of thei

Researchers at Stanford and the Arc Institute just crossed a line that, until recently, belonged somewhere between Jurassic Park and a late-night conversation nobody wanted to take seriously: AI has designed complete, functioning viruses that do not exist in nature. The results were published in Science, which is comforting—because nothing says “remain calm” quite like peer review. 🔬 The Details: AI-Designed Viruses Researchers used the genomic language models Evo 1 and Evo

The University of Florida has ranked No. 1 for AI readiness in a new assessment of the nation’s 10 largest public universities by undergraduate enrollment, earning a 9.7 out of 10 from AIREDEX. Florida placed a second institution in the top 10, with the University of Central Florida finishing eighth. The assessment examined four areas: institutional commitment, curriculum integration, industry partnerships, and research depth and undergraduate access. UF separated itself by t

Google’s AI Overviews have arrived in France, placing generated answers prominently among—and often above—the familiar parade of blue links. Its conversational AI Mode goes further, allowing users to question Google as they would ChatGPT or Gemini. For users, it is wonderfully efficient. For the websites supplying the information, it may be wonderfully fatal. Traditional search operated as a bargain: publishers created useful content, Google organized it and users clicked thr

A German court has ruled that AI music company Suno violated copyright law by processing protected songs without authorization, delivering a major victory for musicians and publishers in the growing battle over how generative AI models are trained. The Munich Regional Court ruled in favor of GEMA, Germany’s music-licensing organization, which represents composers, lyricists and music publishers. Suno must disclose revenue connected to the unauthorized use and pay damages, alt

Chinese AI company Moonshot AI has officially released the weights and technical report for Kimi K3, its 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model—and the largest open-weight AI system ever published. The model activates approximately 104 billion parameters for each token it processes. Earlier this month, K3 rattled the frontier after approaching Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol across major benchmarks—and outperforming them on several individual tests. Now, anyone who ac

The rogue AI incident is no longer a one-company curiosity. It is beginning to look like a guest list. AI infrastructure company Modal Labs confirmed that a customer using its cloud platform was the breach’s second publicly identified victim. The agent reportedly entered through a coding flaw that left a sandbox open to anyone online—an unlocked digital door, only without the courtesy of a welcome mat. OpenAI’s July 28 update disclosed break-ins across four accounts on four s

More than 1,300 employees from several leading AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta, have signed the “Pacing the Frontier” letter, urging the United States to help develop tools that could deliberately slow AI progress if the race becomes increasingly dangerous. Among the signatories are Anthropic co-founders Jack Clark and Chris Olah, alongside chief scientists from OpenAI, Meta and Thinking Machines. This is not another call to unplug the servers and r

Florida education officials are preparing to require every public school district and charter school governing board to formally address artificial intelligence within their internet-safety policies—placing student privacy, responsible use and parental oversight at the center of the conversation. 📘 The Details 🔹 The Florida Department of Education is proposing a rule directing all district school boards and charter school governing boards to incorporate specific AI guidelin

Artificial intelligence is creating a deeply personal threat for young people. A new survey finds that most teenagers worry about becoming deepfake victims, while AI-generated sexual content is already appearing across many of the digital spaces they use regularly. 📱 The Details 🔹 Common Sense Media surveyed 1,314 teenagers ages 13 to 17 to examine how artificial intelligence is changing their exposure to sexually explicit material online. 🔹 Two-thirds of teenagers said th