Remarkably, only half of students say they use AI for schoolwork, while even more report personal use (73 percent). Those non-academic uses of AI raise more alarms, as 42 percent of students said they or someone they know has used AI for mental health support, companionship, or a way to "escape from real life." Nearly a fifth of students (19 percent) said they or someone they know has even formed a romantic relationship with an AI chatbot.
Figure Robotics introduces Figure 03, an upgraded general-purpose humanoid robot that can clean houses, do laundry, wash plates, serve food, and more, as if it were a real human. A step up from its two other siblings, the recent model has redesigned hands with tactile sensors, which let its fingertips detect even the slightest pressure. It's because of this that the AI-powered robot can do house chores, as Figure 03 can sense when an object is slipping or when a light touch is needed.
You could almost call it too much of a good thing. AI models have gone open source -- en masse -- to the tune of millions now competing for a place in our applications. There are echoes of the open sourcing of vital enterprise software and tools, with the opening of operating systems, databases, development platforms, and utilities at no cost. There is a difference this time, however. The AI world has virtually exploded into a mind-blowing array of models that handle everything from neural networks to risk-management tools.
Researchers at the US AI firm, working with the UK AI Security Institute, Alan Turing Institute, and other academic institutions, said today that it takes only 250 specially crafted documents to force a generative AI model to spit out gibberish when presented with a certain trigger phrase. For those unfamiliar with AI poisoning, it's an attack that relies on introducing malicious information into AI training datasets that convinces them to return, say, faulty code snippets or exfiltrate sensitive data.
Service design is all about creating seamless interactions between humans and services. The ultimate goal of service design is to streamline experiences, enabling people to achieve more in less time and with less effort. Traditionally, companies invested significant time and resources into making user journeys as easy as possible. Before the AI revolution, this was achieved through digitalization and automation of routine operations. But in the era of AI, the focus is shifting - from automation to AI agents. In this article, I'll discuss how service design will evolve in this new era.
Think you can distinguish between a human voice and a robot? Think again, because the numbers are starting to say otherwise. Researchers at Queen Mary University of London and University College London found that people can no longer reliably distinguish between genuine speech and cloned AI voices. Their study, published in open-access journal PLOS One, found that when people were played recordings of real people together with AI-generated versions of the same voices, their judgments were little better than random chance.
Marketing research is now having its own AI moment-but it's not just about faster surveys or automated analysis. Something bigger is happening: We're rethinking who we even get feedback from. Should we still spend thousands recruiting panels? Or are AI-generated "societies in a box" accurate enough to replace them? This question might sound like science fiction, but it's the future every research team will soon face.
AI models can tend to be "yes-men." They are sycophantic by design, meaning they agree with us, support our ideas, and want to help. Part of the reason I think so many AI projects fail is because the human factor is overlooked. The same biases that apply to us also apply to AI, so it's important to factor in psychological principles when building experiments, agents, and automation.
According to a new report from Boston Consulting Group, only 5% of companies in its2025 study of more than 1,250 global firms are seeing real returns on AI. Meanwhile, 60% of companies have seen little to no benefit, reporting only minimal increases in revenue and cost savings despite making substantial investments. BCG said that industries like software, telecommunications, and fintech have the highest levels of "AI maturity," which the firm defines as "the ability to create value at scale."
When we said Search will help you ask anything in whatever way is most natural to you, we meant it! As of today, AI Mode is rolling out to 36 new languages and more than 40 new countries and territories, bringing it to over 200 countries and territories total, including many across Europe.
India has kicked off a pilot to let consumers shop and pay directly through AI chatbots, with OpenAI's ChatGPT leading the rollout and integrations with Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude in development, as the South Asian nation becomes the next major market for global AI companies. On Thursday, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the federal body behind the country's widely used Unified Payments Interface (UPI), partnered with OpenAI and fintech firm Razorpay to enable consumers to shop and pay directly through ChatGPT.
OpenAI's launch of its Sora 2 AI video generator and Sora social media app is in disarray after it backtracked following complaints about copyright theft. The company's claim to have been surprised by the controversy and users' rapid circumvention of new controls demonstrates an outstanding lack of thought before the launch of such powerful tech. sora update: cameo and safety improvements inbound!1. cameo restrictions: we've heard from lots of folks who want to make their cameos available to everyone but retain control over how they're used.
Sceptics long saw this as just an amusing theory, an intriguing piece of sci-fi speculation. Yet science generally and AI specifically are now advancing at such a breakneck pace that some people are speculating that the Singularity is real and is almost upon us. Be that as it may, galloping technological change is throwing up new ethical problems almost faster than we can write them down, let alone solve them.
However, Starburst rivals, such as Databricks and Snowflake, offer agent governance features with Unity Catalog and Horizon, respectively. Analysts point out that the agent usage tracking features added to Startburst are not only important for controlling over-expenditure but are also becoming table stakes across data lakehouses. While Databricks' Mosaic AI Gateway offers rate limits, usage tracking, and inference logs and tables, with cost monitoring through system tables, Snowflake's Cortex AI Observability offers tracing, evaluations, and cost and usage analysis, along with community-built cost dashboards.
A court order will require Google to scale back some of its more aggressive tactics to get its search engine in front of as many users as possible, but it's still fighting to make sure new restrictions won't limit its AI expansion. At a hearing in a federal courthouse in DC on Wednesday, Google attorney John Schmidtlein told Judge Amit Mehta that he should not prevent the company from bundling its Gemini AI app with other Google apps like YouTube and Maps, Bloomberg reported.
Meta is already putting Reels in front and center of the Instagram experience on iPad and on mobile in countries like India and South Korea. Now, to allow more people to consume and understand Reels in different languages, the company is adding support for Hindi and Portuguese to its AI-powered translation feature across Instagram and Facebook, as well.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has taken a significant leap toward autonomous and sustainable transportation with the launch of the nation's first commercial fleet of self-driving electric trucks. The milestone, realised through a partnership between Evocargo, a developer of autonomous logistics solutions, and RAK Ceramics, one of the world's leading manufacturers of ceramics and sanitaryware, signals how automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and sustainability are converging to reshape the region's logistics sector.
