Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

For the last two decades, whether you used Chrome, Edge, or Firefox, the fundamental paradigm remained the same: a passive window through which a human user viewed and interacted with the internet. That era is over. We are currently witnessing a shift that renders the old OS-centric browser debates irrelevant. The new battleground is agentic AI browsers, and for security professionals, it represents a terrifying inversion of the traditional threat landscape.

In this comprehensive interview at SAP Connect in Las Vegas, Stephan de Barse, President of Global Business Suite at SAP, makes the case for why best-of-breed enterprise software is being replaced by best-of-suite approaches, driven by the commoditization of the application layer through AI. De Barse, who previously spent seven years at o9 Solutions, a best-of-breed supply chain vendor, brings a unique perspective to the debate.

Tim Metz is worried about the "Google Maps-ification" of his mind. Just as many people have come to rely on GPS apps to get around, the 44-year-old content marketer fears that he is becoming dependent on AI. He told me that he uses AI for up to eight hours each day, and he's become particularly fond of Anthropic's Claude. Sometimes, he has as many as six sessions running simultaneously. He consults AI for marriage and parenting advice, and when he goes grocery shopping, he takes photos of the fruits to ask if they are ripe. Recently, he was worried that a large tree near his house might come down, so he uploaded photographs of it and asked the bot for advice. Claude suggested that Metz sleep elsewhere in case the tree fell, so he and his family spent that night at a friend's. Without Claude's input, he said, "I would have never left the house." (The tree never came down, though some branches did.)

Google is reportedly working on a new Gemini App user experience, which it is calling 2.0. The company is putting "huge investment" into this update of the Gemini user experience but we are not sure when this new look and experience will be released. Logan Kilpatrick, product lead for Google AI Studio, said this on X over the Thanksgiving holiday.

The researchers examined how many occupational tasks could be automated by AI, along with the dollar value of each task. The total vulnerable tasks - representing an astonishing $1.2 trillion in wage value - give a rough idea of the potential scale of disruption to the $9.4 trillion American labor market, and the huge windfall for any companies that could actually deliver all that automation.

The California Gold Rush left an outsized imprint on America. Some 300,000 people flocked there from 1848 to 1955, from as far away as the Ottoman Empire. Prospectors massacred Indigenous people to take the gold from their lands in the Sierra Nevada mountains. And they boosted the economies of nearby states and faraway countries from whence they bought their supplies. Gold provided the motivation for California a former Mexican territory then controlled by the US military to become a state with laws of its own.

In a blog post on Monday, Runway says its Gen-4.5 model can produce "cinematic and highly realistic outputs," potentially making it even more difficult to distinguish between what's real and what's AI. "Gen-4.5 achieves unprecedented physical accuracy and visual precision," Runway's announcement says. It adds that the new AI model is better at adhering to prompts, allowing it to produce detailed scenes without compromising video quality. Runway says that AI-generated objects "move with realistic weight, momentum and force," while liquids "flow with proper dynamics."

German AI lab Black Forest Labs said on Monday that it has raised $300 million in a Series B funding round that values the company at $3.25 billion. The round was co-led by Salesforce Ventures and Anjney Midha (AMP), and saw participation from a16z, NVIDIA, Northzone, Creandum, Earlybird VC, BroadLight Capital, General Catalyst, Temasek, Bain Capital Ventures, Air Street Capital, Visionaries Club, Canva, and Figma Ventures.

The $400 million deal helps Snap's Snapchat capitalize on Gen Z while exposing Perplexity to nearly a billion users. Snap is once again looking to differentiate itself from other social media platforms; this time, it's an announced partnership with Perplexity that could do the trick. Snapchat, with its nearly 1 billion users, will embed Perplexity within its app and allow people to ask questions and converse with the artificial intelligence (AI).

The German software company offers European organizations full control over data, infrastructure, and AI applications without dependence on American hyperscalers. SAP presents EU AI Cloud as the next phase in its vision for European digital sovereignty. The solution combines infrastructure, platform, and software in various implementation models. Organizations can choose between SAP's data centers, trusted European infrastructure, or fully managed on-site implementations. The launch follows SAP's €20 billion investment in sovereign cloud solutions for Europe, which was announced earlier this year.

Employees who take the initiative to reshape their roles around artificial intelligence - rather than simply using it to speed through tasks - are more engaged, motivated, and creative at work, according to new research from Multiverse, the upskilling platform for AI and tech adoption. The study, conducted in June and July, analyzed 295 UK full-time professionals across industries, including finance, government, and technology, all of whom had used generative AI for at least six months.

Google announced Private AI Compute, a system designed to process AI requests using Gemini cloud models while aiming to keep user data private. The company describes Private AI Compute as a technology built to "unlock the full speed and power of Gemini cloud models for AI experiences" and claims it "allows you to get faster, more helpful responses, making it easier to find what you need, get smart suggestions and take action."

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become one of the most transformative technologies of the 21st century, influencing almost every aspect of modern life, and education is no exception. In recent years, AI has played a vital role in reshaping how we teach, learn, and interact within digital learning environments. The integration of Artificial Intelligence into eLearning systems has revolutionized the educational landscape, enabling smarter, more adaptive, and deeply personalized learning experiences for students around the world.

It can't be seen or touched, but it's shaking up markets and attracting investment. Artificial intelligence (AI) has become the object of desire for Big Tech, which is pouring astronomical sums into its development, fueled by record profits. The other side of this frenzy is workforce reductions, with automation as the backdrop, announced by multinationals like Amazon, Meta, and UPS, which, incidentally, threaten to extend

ChatPlayground AI is a platform that lets you explore and compare outputs from 25+ top AI tools side by side, in a single place. A one-month subscription usually costs $29, but Stacksocial is offering lifetime access to the platform for just $80, after a whopping 87% discount. It's a leftover Black Friday deal, but it's selling out fast. At the time of writing, over 500 subscriptions have already been sold, so you don't have a lot of time left to save.

Streaming service Deezer ran an experiment recently, with the help of research firm Ipsos. The finding - that 97 percent of people can't tell the difference between fully AI-generated and human-made music - was alarming. But it's also not the whole story. In the survey, 9,000 participants listened to three tracks and were asked to guess which, if any, were completely AI-generated.

If you're a teenager with access to OpenAI's Sora 2, you can easily generate AI videos of school shootings and other harmful and disturbing content - despite CEO Sam Altman's repeated claims that the company has instituted robust safeguards. The revelation comes from Ekō, a consumer watchdog group that just put out a report titled "Open AI's Sora 2: A new frontier for harm,"

Israeli tech founder Maor Shlomo, whose vibe coding startup Base44 sold for over $80 million when it was acquired by Wix, said on the podcast " 20VC " that "it's relatively easy to create a vibe coding tool." "Every feature that we put out, we know that's going to take either a few weeks or a few months for competitor to copy," he complained.

In many ways, it feels like the ongoing AI boom (or revolution) is mirroring the ends that unfolded prior to the big dot-com internet bubble burst of 2000-01. We've seen quite a bit of circular financing among the giants, and, as Dr. Michael Burry of The Big Short fame outlined in a recent note, Nvidia ( NASDAQ:NVDA), which is leading the charge on the AI chip race, seems to draw similarities with Cisco ( NASDAQ:CSCO) from the internet boom days.