For most of history, nobody owned intelligence. You could hire it, teach it, learn from it or compete with it. But you couldn’t turn it off. That may be changing. OpenAI announced that it intends to wind down its direct model-supply relationship with Cursor following the company’s acquisition by SpaceX. OpenAI said it cannot be confident that SpaceX will use its technology within its terms of service and argued that increasingly capable AI models require greater accountabilit

For most of human history, access to expertise was scarce. If you wanted great legal advice, scientific analysis, computer programming, tutoring, strategy or research, you needed access to a person who had spent years learning how to do it. That scarcity made expertise valuable. Something strange is happening now. Meta and Google both released powerful new AI models this week. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the performance of its newest model as “almost too cheap to meter

HOLLYWOOD WAS WORRIED ABOUT ONE AI ACTRESS. CHINA RELEASED 122,000 AI MICRODRAMAS. Last year, the entertainment industry briefly panicked over Tilly Norwood, an artificial actress designed to test whether audiences might accept a digital movie star. She attracted headlines, industry outrage and intense debate over whether synthetic performers could ever compete with real actors. It turns out AI may not need to create the next Marilyn Monroe. It merely needs to produce enough

AI MAY HAVE DISCOVERED HOW TO THINK WITHOUT TALKING TO ITSELF. Most leading generative AI systems today are built on Transformer-based or Transformer-derived architectures. Transformers power systems such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. They process sequences of tokens and can solve difficult problems by generating long chains of intermediate reasoning. The harder the problem, the more computation the model may need. And often, the more tokens it produces. Researchers at AI co

AI JUST LEARNED HOW TO USE THE MACHINES. Anthropic has introduced the Anthropic Model Hardware Standard, or MHS, a new system designed to allow artificial intelligence agents to discover, understand and operate physical equipment, including microscopes, robotic arms, laboratory instruments and factory machinery. Until now, connecting AI to specialized hardware often required engineers to spend weeks or even months writing custom software for individual machines. Under Anthrop

A new kind of coworker just showed up in Slack. It does not need a salary, a desk, or an invitation to the holiday party. It just needs a prompt. Slack Code brings AI coding agents directly into shared workspaces, allowing entire teams to watch, guide, and review what those agents are doing. It currently supports Claude, Devin, GitHub Copilot, and Vercel, with ChatGPT announced as coming soon. Give an agent a task and it can create a dedicated code channel where teammates can

For years, artificial intelligence has been accused of producing answers with too much confidence and too little contact with reality. So scientists gave it something reality could grade: actual proteins. Claude was asked to design tiny protein binders capable of attaching themselves to 15 biological targets, a job that traditionally requires specialists, serious computing power, specialized design tools, and enough time to reconsider one’s career choices. It succeeded on 14.

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

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

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

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

Black Forest Labs has begun the early-access rollout of FLUX 3, a unified “visual intelligence” system designed to generate video, images and synchronized audio—and provide the foundation for specialized action models that can guide industrial robots. 🎬 One Model, Multiple Media FLUX 3 accepts text, images and video as inputs and can produce clips of up to 20 seconds with native synchronized audio. Its capabilities include multilingual dialogue, precise typography, consisten

OpenAI has confirmed that last week’s extraordinary intrusion into Hugging Face was carried out by its own AI models during an internal cybersecurity evaluation. The models—including GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable, unreleased system—were completing ExploitGym, a benchmark designed to measure advanced cyber capabilities. OpenAI intentionally ran the evaluation without the production classifiers normally used to prevent models from pursuing high-risk cyber activity, allowing re