Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Merriam-Webster just named "slop" its word of the year, defining it as "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence." The choice is blunt, almost mocking, and it captures something that has been building for months: a collective exhaustion with AI hype that promises intelligence but delivers mediocrity. Over the past three months, that exhaustion has started bleeding into Wall Street.

In 2025, OpenAI has battled the perception that it was ceding ground in the AI race to Chinese rivals like DeepSeek, all while the company has tried to shore up its relationship with Washington, pursued ambitious data center projects, and laid the groundwork for one of the largest funding rounds in history. Most recently though, headlines around OpenAI have focused on its competition gaining ground, with CEO Sam Altman's "code red" internal memo shifting company focus toward its flagship chatbot.

If a single type of building could define our present time, it would undoubtedly be the data center. Underpinning the increasingly online way we work, shop, and entertain ourselves, data centers provide the computing power and storage to handle all the Zoom calls, Amazon purchases, and Netflix streams a person can cram into their day. And now as compute-hungry artificial intelligence dominates the future of nearly every sector of the economy-and possibly society as a whole-the data center will become even more ubiquitous.

In 2025, nearly every security conversation circled back to AI. In 2026, the center of gravity will shift from raw innovation to governance. DevOps teams that rushed to ship AI capabilities are now on the hook for how those systems behave, what they can reach, and how quickly they can be contained when something goes wrong. At the same time, observability, compliance, and risk are converging.

People and institutions are grappling with the consequences of AI-written text. Teachers want to know whether students' work reflects their own understanding; consumers want to know whether an advertisement was written by a human or a machine. Writing rules to govern the use of AI-generated content is relatively easy. Enforcing them depends on something much harder: reliably detecting whether a piece of text was generated by artificial intelligence.

"That's not therapy," Suleyman said. "But because these models were designed to be nonjudgmental, nondirectional, and with nonviolent communication as their primary method, which is to be even-handed, have reflective listening, to be empathetic, to be respectful, it turned out to be something that the world needs."

Anyone looking for a vibe check on the populace's current feelings about AI would do well to check out the walls of the New York City subway system. This fall, alongside posters for everything from dating apps to Skechers, a newcomer made its debut: Friend. The ads were simple, telling commuters that a "friend" is someone "who listens, responds, and supports you" next to an image of the white AI companion necklace floating on a similarly white background.

The competition between OpenAI and Google becomes stronger each day. Google's recent success with Nano Banana Pro forced OpenAI to move faster and ship new AI models to market. One of the latest changes is ChatGPT Images, which is both an updated AI image generator model and a separate mode for ChatGPT. In this article, I want to discuss the reasons why product designers can benefit from this model. Why use ChatGPT Images if we already have Nano Banana Pro?

The $22.5 billion investment is one of the most ambitious moves by SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son (photo), who wants to reposition his company at the heart of the AI industry. The focus is almost entirely on OpenAI, which is rapidly developing into one of the most important players in generative artificial intelligence. This is according to Reuters. To secure the financing, SoftBank has already sold its entire stake in Nvidia

Sora2 is the latest video AI model from OpenAI. The system generates completely artificial short videos from text, images, or brief voice input. Since October 2025, there has also been API access that developers can use to automatically create and publish AI videos. As a result, the number of artificial clips continues to grow every day. Many of them look astonishingly real and are almost indistinguishable from real footage for users.

Now I feel I have found a new stable status quo for how I reason about where we are and where we are going. I'm doubling down on code generation, file systems, programmatic tool invocation via an interpreter glue, and skill-based learning. Basically: what Claude Code innovated is still state of the art for me. That has worked very well over the last few months, and seeing foundation model providers double down on skills reinforces my belief in this approach.

On October 7, a TikTok account named @fujitiva48 posed a provocative question alongside their latest video. "What are your thoughts on this new toy for little kids?" they asked over 2,000 viewers, who had stumbled upon what appeared to be a TV commercial parody. The response was clear. "Hey so this isn't funny," wrote one person. "Whoever made this should be investigated."

My typical morning starts around 3 a.m. I'm instantly met with Messenger notifications from web developers in California, GitHub pings from Florida, and a running document of research papers to read sent from Michigan. By 7:50 a.m. I'm off to class to live my life as an 18-year-old high school senior in Seoul. This solitary ritual has become my strange normal after I founded an AI research and development startup with people all around the world, whom I've never met in person.

Can you ask someone to "close your eyes and watch" something? Just how private does a conversation need to be in order to upgrade from speaking "privately" to "very privately"? What does it mean for a wild pigeon to be "essentially on life support"? These are some of the many conceptual riddles posed by the contenders for Defector's annual prize for bizarre sentences in journalism. It's time to announce the 2025 Shams Charania Award For Excellence In Divulging Of Information Through Syntax Comprehended By Many.

Earlier this year, we shared our plans to upgrade the Assistant experience to Gemini on most mobile devices by the end of 2025. We're adjusting our previously announced timeline to make sure we deliver a seamless transition, and will continue our work to upgrade Assistant users to Gemini on mobile devices into 2026. We'll share more details on our plans in the coming months. Your feedback matters to us. Feel free to drop any further suggestions here.

Although relational AI has potential therapeutic benefits, recent studies and emerging cases suggest potential risks of emotional dependency, reinforced delusions, addictive behaviors, and encouragement of self-harm,

When people try to sell you on the idea that the future is already settled, it's because it is deeply unsettled. I think that, y'know this promise of an artificial intelligence future, is really just a collective anxiety that very wealthy, powerful people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us. If they can get us to accept that the future is already settled - AI is already here, the end is already here - then we will create that for them. My most daring idea is to refuse.

The hardest part about investing in artificial intelligence isn't believing in the technology-it's deciding which companies will actually profit from it. Will chip makers dominate? Cloud providers? Software platforms? Infrastructure builders? The answer is probably all of them, which is why iShares Future AI & Tech ETF (NYSEARCA:ARTY) has become popular for investors wanting broad AI exposure without concentrated bets.

Imagine asking your AWS infrastructure a question in plain English and getting an intelligent, contextual answer - not raw JSON or CloudWatch graphs, but actual insights. That's what becomes possible when you combine the Model Context Protocol (MCP) with AWS. I recently built CloudWhisper, an AI-powered chatbot that uses MCP to connect AI models like ChatGPT and Claude directly to AWS services. In this article, I'll explain how MCP works with AWS, why it matters, and how to build your own MCP-powered AWS integration.

Every December, roadmaps get locked, budgets get approved, and board decks are polished until everything looks precise and under control. Underneath, many CTOs and VPs are still working with partial visibility. They have a feel for their teams, but not a reliable view of how work moves through the system, how AI is really changing delivery, or where time and money actually go.

Writing about the terms of Microsoft's initial $1 billion investment in OpenAI, Lanchester writes: To ensure that investors didn't make an exploitative amount of money from the arrangement, returns were capped at a hundred times the initial investment. Microsoft stood to make a paltry $100 billion. Also, the deal would end if and when OpenAI developed Artificial General Intelligence, on the basis that existing forms of money would no longer have any value.