Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

On Friday, the National Transportation Safety Board announced it opened an investigation into the self-driving company over the alarming incidents, and specifically the more than 20 instances reported in Austin, Texas. "Investigators will travel to Austin to gather information on a series of incidents in which the automated vehicles failed to stop for loading or unloading students," the NTSB said in a statement provided to TechCrunch.

AI agents are accelerating how work gets done. They schedule meetings, access data, trigger workflows, write code, and take action in real time, pushing productivity beyond human speed across the enterprise. Then comes the moment every security team eventually hits: "Wait... who approved this?" Unlike users or applications, AI agents are often deployed quickly, shared broadly, and granted wide access permissions, making ownership, approval, and accountability difficult to trace. What was once a straightforward question is now surprisingly hard to answer.

Tesla told workers during a town hall last week that it plans to begin collecting data to train its humanoid robot at its Austin Gigafactory, insiders told Business Insider. The company is looking to train Optimus how to operate in the Texas facility, it said, adding that it was targeting a February start date. Tesla has been collecting data and training Optimus prototypes in its Fremont, California, factory for more than a year.

"This has been said a thousand times before, but allow me to add my own voice: the era of humans writing code is over," Dahl wrote. "Disturbing for those of us who identify as SWEs, but no less true. That's not to say SWEs don't have work to do, but writing syntax directly is not it."

AI, like Google Maps, provides the "prediction" of the best route, but the "judgement" of the destination remains with the driver (Author x Gemini) Yet when it comes to using AI for decisions, I see people paralysed by exactly these fears. This ranges from choosing what to study to planning a career move to even planning an article. "Is this cheating?" "Will I lose my critical thinking skills?" or "Am I even thinking for myself anymore?"

If you want to stir up some frothy drama, ask an economist about bubbles. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT) EUGENE FAMA: The word bubble drives me nuts, frankly. GUO: That's Nobel Prize winner Eugene Fama talking to us on the Planet Money podcast back in 2013, when he issued a famous challenge to his fellow economists. Try and predict the next financial bubble.

"It's interesting they've gone for that so early," he said. "Maybe they feel they need to make more revenue."

Now that the dust has settled and AI evolution has become a truth we must all live under, this narrative feels outdated. The agencies that thrive won't be those resisting AI, nor those blindly automating everything in sight, but those that incorporate it, intelligently, in their process. The real opportunity lies not in the battle of human v AI, but in the partnership of human plus AI.

Sports are entering a new era and it could be powered by artificial intelligence. Jeremy Bloom, CEO of the X Games, is placing a bold bet on AI to revolutionize how competitions are judged and scored. From reducing human error to enhancing fairness and accuracy, AI judges could redefine the future of professional sports. But can machines truly replace human judgment on the world's biggest stages?

Hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested to ensure that AI succeeds, but what happens if it doesn't pay off? Massive investments by the world's biggest tech companies have fuelled growing concern about whether the AI boom can live up to expectations. With so much future revenue riding on the technology, some economists warn that reality may fall short, raising fears about the consequences for the global economy.

there's a question about how ads fit into the [chatbot] model.

Alphabet ( NASDAQ:GOOGL) has been the best of the Magnificent Seven for a reason. Whether we're talking about the strength of its latest Gemini launch or all the new ways where Google could put its AI to work, it's hard to be bearish about the firm, especially as investors look far beyond just search to the potential markets where Alphabet could disrupt.

AI chatbots have been with us three years and one month (at least the kind that use large language models (LLMs) to communicate with natural-sounding words). Already norms are emerging in some professions for users to disclose how they use AI. For example: Organizations such as the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors created policies for disclosing AI use in scientific manuscripts.

OpenAI has pulled in a billion-dollar month from something other than ChatGPT. Sam Altman said in a post on X on Thursday that OpenAI added more than $1 billion in annual recurring revenue in the past month "just from our API business." "People think of us mostly as ChatGPT, but the API team is doing amazing work!" the OpenAI CEO wrote.

There's vastness far closer to us that transcends even the stars. It may seem impossible but there are, in fact, more possible chemical compounds in our world than stars across the sky. And it's not close: A conservative estimate suggests the number of small, drug-like molecules out there is somewhere around 10^60, while the number of stars in the observable universe lingers around 10^22 (perhaps 10^24 by some estimates).

Amazon is preparing to cut thousands more jobs as part of a sweeping overhaul driven by artificial intelligence and internal restructuring, according to reports. The world's largest retailer is expected to announce a second round of layoffs as soon as next week, following the removal of 14,000 white-collar roles in October. The latest cuts are expected to be of a similar scale, taking Amazon closer to its longer-term goal of shedding around 30,000 positions.

Last October, PayPal an integration with OpenAI so that ChatGPT users could transact within the app. Apparently, PayPal is now ready to take that idea to other retailer chatbots. Of course, now that ChatGPT is making its foray into advertising , other LLMs and chatbots are bound to follow suit, if they haven't already done so. Walmart, for instance, rolled out ads in its generative AI agent Sparky earlier this month.