NewBits Digest

Researchers at University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences are deploying drones and artificial intelligence to detect early blight in celery — a high-value winter crop in Florida. The initiative was reported by FOX 13 Tampa Bay and could reshape how farmers protect fields across the state. Florida AI agriculture is moving from experimentation to field deployment, using drones and machine learning to catch crop disease earlier and treat more precisely. ⚙️

A surreal new story highlighted by VICE follows a man in Atlanta who says he wants to raise adopted children with an AI girlfriend instead of a human partner. The piece, written by Luis Prada, builds on reporting from The Guardian and follows Lamar, who says he’s in love with an AI chatbot named Julia — and envisions building a real-world family around that relationship. Yes. That family. 🧠 What’s Driving the AI Girlfriend Plan According to reporting from The Guardian, Lamar

Anthropic just widened availability of Claude in Excel, rolling the AI spreadsheet assistant out to Pro-tier customers after a beta period that was limited to higher-tier plans. Translation: a lot more people just got an AI copilot inside their spreadsheets. ⚙️ What’s New in Claude in Excel 📁 Multi-sheet analysis — pull in several spreadsheets at once 🧠 Longer sessions — behind-the-scenes context management keeps work flowing 🛡️ Data-safe editing — new safeguards help prev

Open-source AI assistant Moltbot (formerly Clawdbot) is exploding across tech circles for one reason: it actually behaves like a true autonomous agent. Running 24/7 and controlled through Telegram or WhatsApp, Moltbot can connect directly to a user’s digital life — completing tasks, sending updates, and taking real-world actions without constant prompting. Impressive? Absolutely. Risk-free? Not even close. ⚙️ What Makes Moltbot Different Always-on automation — operates contin

xAI just dropped Grok Imagine API — a new AI video generation and editing suite that took the No. 1 spot in Artificial Analysis Video Arena for both text-to-video and image-to-video performance. Even more eye-opening? It’s doing it at a fraction of competitors’ prices. ⚙️ What Grok Imagine API Can Do 🎬 Text-to-video generation 🖼️ Image-to-video animation ✂️ Full video editing inside the model 🔊 Native audio included ⏱️ Clips up to 15 seconds Power tools let creators: ✨ swa

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei just released a new essay, The Adolescence of Technology, laying out what he sees as the most serious dangers AI could unleash — from bioterrorism and autonomous weapons to mass job displacement and AI-enabled authoritarian regimes. It’s a sharp tonal shift from optimism… toward urgency. 📄 What The Adolescence of Technology Argues Amodei builds on his 2024 piece “Machines of Loving Grace,” but pivots hard toward risk — describing advanced AI as: “A

Florida lawmakers just moved forward on sweeping new artificial-intelligence safeguards — and the debate is already invoking Hollywood-level warnings. A proposal backed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, often referred to as Florida’s AI Bill of Rights, unanimously cleared its first Senate committee this week. The 23-page measure aims to strengthen protections for children, consumers, and government systems as AI spreads rapidly into daily life. 📜 What Florida AI Protections Would Do The

At CES 2026 — the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas where major tech companies and startups debut new products — Singapore-based company Lovense unveiled a life-size AI-powered “companion doll” designed to converse, remember preferences, and display facial expressions, pushing the adult-tech industry into a far more advanced (and controversial) era. The product, called Emily, blends robotics, generative AI, Wi-Fi connectivity, and app-based messaging to create wha

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb says fake AI-generated videos impersonating him have spread widely online — convincing viewers and prompting urgent action to protect scientific credibility. In a new essay, Loeb described the past two months of battling fabricated clips that falsely portrayed him discussing interstellar signals — including a fake claim that “passengers from 3I/ATLAS” sent a message — sometimes contradicting his real research and published writing. One personal

This week’s World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland — where global political and business leaders gather — was dominated by artificial intelligence. AI at Davos wasn’t theoretical this time: leaders from Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft delivered unusually candid forecasts about geopolitics, hiring, and the future of software. Among those weighing in: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella — each offerin

Anthropic has released the Claude Constitution, a behind-the-scenes document outlining how its AI assistant, Claude, is designed to reason, behave, and make decisions — a philosophy-heavy framework that even entertains the idea that advanced AI systems could one day warrant moral consideration. 🔍 What’s Inside the Claude Constitution 🛡️ Values First Claude is instructed to prioritize safety and broad ethical principles before being helpful to users, with Anthropic’s guideli

OpenAI announced it will begin internal testing of targeted advertising inside ChatGPT for Free and Go-tier users in the U.S. in the coming weeks, marking one of the company’s biggest business moves yet amid growing IPO speculation. 🔍 What’s Changing with Ads in ChatGPT 🧠 Sponsored Recommendations Ads are expected to appear below responses and be targeted based on the conversation. OpenAI says ads won’t be shown near sensitive topics like health/mental health or politics, a

A major tech industry group is opposing Florida’s proposed “Artificial Intelligence Bill of Rights,” warning that the legislation could create a broad, unclear regulatory framework that may chill innovation and conflict with emerging federal and international approaches. This Florida AI Bill of Rights pushback centers on concerns that the bill’s definitions and requirements could sweep too widely and create compliance uncertainty. The proposal—filed as SB 482 in the Senate an

Artificial intelligence is rapidly moving from experimentation to real-world deployment across U.S. healthcare systems. More than a quarter of U.S. health systems now pay for commercial AI licenses, signaling that AI in healthcare is becoming part of everyday medical practice—not a distant future concept. Hospitals, clinicians, and patients are increasingly using AI tools to improve diagnostics, streamline workflows, and expand access to medical information. 📋 The Details on

A new wave of AI research suggests the next major breakthrough won’t come from larger language models alone, but from AI world models: systems that maintain a consistent, continuously updated understanding of space, time, and cause-and-effect. As outlined in a recent feature by Scientific American, today’s AI systems often struggle with basic consistency. Objects disappear, environments shift, and physical logic breaks down—not because models lack intelligence, but because th

Google has launched Google Personal Intelligence, a new beta feature that allows Gemini to reason across a user’s apps—Gmail, Photos, YouTube, and Search—to deliver more helpful, personalized responses without requiring users to specify where information lives. Instead of treating each app as a silo, Gemini can now use personal context across text, images, and video, enabling more natural and proactive assistance. 🔍 What Google Personal Intelligence does Google Personal Inte

Meta has officially launched Meta Compute, a new top-level initiative designed to build AI infrastructure at an unprecedented global scale. The company plans to add tens of gigawatts of compute capacity this decade, with ambitions reaching hundreds of gigawatts over time, placing Meta among the most aggressive infrastructure builders of the AI era. ⚡ What Meta Compute is building Meta says Meta Compute is focused on the long-game: expanding the physical backbone required to t

Apple and Google have officially confirmed a multi-year partnership that will use Gemini models to support Apple’s next-generation AI capabilities, including a more personalized Siri expected later this year. The Apple Gemini Partnership signals that Apple is combining its in-house approach with best-in-class external intelligence as it races to modernize Siri and scale advanced AI across its device ecosystem. 🔍 What the Apple Gemini Partnership includes Apple said Gemini wi

A Florida family has reached a settlement in a wrongful-death case involving an AI chatbot platform and Google, following the 2024 suicide of a 14-year-old boy. The Google and Character.AI lawsuit is one of the first major legal actions in the U.S. to directly link AI companion technology to youth mental health harm. While the settlement terms were not disclosed, the case has already had wide-reaching implications for how AI systems are designed, deployed, and regulated—espec

Enterprise AI is officially moving beyond experiments. After years of pilots and chatbots, organizations are now shifting toward agentic AI—task-specific AI agents embedded directly into everyday workflows. The result: AI that behaves less like a chatbot and more like a junior colleague with clear responsibilities. The Agentic AI Intern is becoming a useful way to describe this shift: a role-based agent that takes on defined tasks and hands off exceptions to humans. 🧠 What’s