Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

2025's words of the year reflect a generation frustrated with job prospects, AI, and online culture. Platforms have chosen terms like "fatigue," "AI slop," and "rage bait." For the first time, Dictionary.com chose a word that is also a number as its Word of the Year. Everyone is over 2025. Various platforms and dictionaries released their word of the year in December, and the choices widely reflect a sense of inescapable uncertainty, exhaustion, and skepticism of the tech world.

One of the twists in the AI wars has been Google sort of bouncing back, this surge by Gemini versus OpenAI's ChatGPT. Sam Altman calling this code red. You've said before that it's hard to know who a winner will be. Interestingly, on Pivot, we thought Google was going to do this because they had all the pieces. If they didn't, what a bunch of idiots, that kind of thing.

The U.S. Olympic men's and women's sprinting teams have won more gold medals than any other country in history, but the men's 4×100-meter relay team has suffered four blistering defeats in the past two decades. Why? An absolute whiff at the critical point when a runner has to instinctively reach back and trust their squadmate enough to perfectly place the baton in their hand.

through Google's new Interactions API, which is designed to give devs more control in the coming agentic AI era. The new Gemini Deep Research tool is an agent equipped to synthesize mountains of information and handle a large context dump in the prompt. Google says it's used by customers for tasks ranging from due diligence to drug toxicity safety research. Google also says it will

The new intelligent dialogue application developed by HKChat OmniServe achieved a significant milestone within five days of its trial launch release on November 20. In that short time, HKChat claimed the top spot on the city's app store free app rankings, a success which underscores the strong demand in the local market for homegrown artificial intelligence (AI) services.

Google has released a new version of Gemini Deep Research. This is an agent designed to automate complex research tasks. The agent runs on Gemini 3 Pro. The model can process handwriting, graphs, and mathematical notation. It incorporates this visual information directly into reports and search queries. As a result, the system can not only search textual sources, but also retrieve data that was previously difficult to automate, according to SiliconANGLE.

A new global survey encompassing the views of 1,540 board members and C-suite executives reveals that while corporate leaders are embracing artificial intelligence (AI) with optimism, a far more profound and existential talent crisis is emerging: the disappearance of the pathways that traditionally developed senior-level strategic expertise. AI is exposing not merely a lack of technical skills, but a critical thinking gap threatening the organizational pipeline needed to oversee and optimize these powerful new systems. In a moderated discussion with Joe Kornik, Senior Director, Editorial Programs, Protiviti, a series of experts and top executives from the consulting firm revealed the biggest concerns on executives' minds heading into 2026, during a lunchtime panel in New York City.

What I didn't know was that the role would require me to assume multiple fabricated identities, and use pseudo profiles created by the company to engage in intimate and explicit conversations with lonely men and women,

The firm said in November it was testing the "first-of-its-kind" tool in the US to help viewers catch up on some of its shows on streaming service Prime Video - including Fallout, its adaptation of the popular video game franchise. But it has since disappeared from the site after users highlighted mistakes in its video summarising the events of Fallout season one - including claiming one scene was set more than 100 years earlier than it was.

Disney's billion-dollar OpenAI deal isn't the only way the company is embracing AI. In recent months, the Mouse House has been quietly adding new AI tools to its arsenal and encouraging staff to use them. "They clearly see where things are headed," a longtime software engineer at Disney said. This marked a shift from this summer, when Disney had seemed "hesitant to rely on AI tools," they said.

US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at blocking states from enforcing their own artificial intelligence (AI) regulations. "We want to have one central source of approval," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday. It will give the Trump administration tools to push back on the most "onerous" state rules, said White House AI adviser David Sacks. The government will not oppose AI regulations around children's safety, he added.

It's hard to believe that just a few short years ago a video of Will Smith eating spaghetti generated by ModelScope, a text-to-video AI model, was the peak of AI slop. Fast-forward to today and our trust for CCTV footage of cute animals has been eroded, slop is showing up across marketing and music playlists, and Sora 2 deepfakes are fooling both grandparents and politicians nationwide.

AI Overviews are AI-generated answers to the questions you ask on Google search. Google said AI Overviews would start appearing at the top of Google search starting May 14 whenever Google's search systems determine that these types of AI-generative responses can quickly provide useful information. For example, if you typed, "What's the shortest war in history?" in Google search, you may see something about the Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896, thanks to AI Overviews.

The rise of GenAI tools has introduced a new paradigm for design work - rather than crafting interfaces by directly manipulating elements in design tools, designers can prompt AI-prototyping tools to generate designs. When you're working with AI, the output quality will be largely dependent on the specificity of the prompt. This article discusses common issues with vague text prompts and offers recommendations on how to achieve better results from AI-prototyping tools without undertaking the bulk of the design work yourself.

"I expect to be in 10-plus markets by next year. And we want those markets to be in the Asia-Pacific region as well," Khosrowshahi said.

"The vast majority of Codex is built by Codex," OpenAI told us about its new AI coding agent. In interviews with Ars Technica this week, OpenAI employees revealed the extent to which the company now relies on its own AI coding agent, Codex, to build and improve the development tool. "I think the vast majority of Codex is built by Codex, so it's almost entirely just being used to improve itself," said Alexander Embiricos, product lead for Codex at OpenAI, in a conversation on Tuesday.

The numbers looked solid on the surface. Q4 revenue hit $18.02B, topping the $17.49B estimate, while adjusted EPS of $1.95 beat the $1.87 consensus. AI semiconductor revenue surged 74% year over year, and management guided Q1 revenue to $19.1B, well above the $18.27B Street estimate. Tan projected AI chip sales would double to $8.2B next quarter. But CFO Kirsten Spears flagged a problem that sent the stock lower.

It is happening again, Agent Cooper. Jimmy Fallon is shilling for a tech venture. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was a guest on The Tonight Show on December 8, and Fallon was all about this nascent technology and Altman's claims that it can be used to help raise your children. The whole thing was eerily similar to when Paris Hilton gifted Fallon a Bored Ape NFT. What does Altman think of simulation theory, I wonder?

To use the interface, ChatGPT users need to make an Instacart account and then surface Instacart within their chat thread using a prompt like, "Instacart, help me shop for apple pie ingredients." From there, they can discuss recipes, ingredient swaps, and their preferred store with ChatGPT, which will help them order all of the items they need from Instacart without ever changing tabs or leaving the chat.