Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Last week, in a Fortune 500 boardroom, executives gathered to make a critical pricing decision. They had AI analytics showing optimal price points. They had human intuition about customer relationships. They scheduled two hours. Four hours later, they emerged with the worst possible outcome-a compromise satisfying neither data nor relationships. The AI's recommendations were watered down by politics. Human insights were dismissed as "anecdotal." Everyone left frustrated with a garbage decision.

Earlier this week at Microsoft's Ignite conference in San Francisco, the overwhelming onslaught of artificial intelligence-related announcements made it easy to miss some of the company's more significant "all-AI all-the-time" news. Also: Microsoft's new AI agents create your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint projects now The word "Copilot" -- representative of Microsoft's flagship AI brand -- made thousands of appearances across virtually every functional area of the technology firm's offerings, a testimony to an AI-first strategy that also blanketed its portfolio of security-related solutions.

With 27,000 employees and major infrastructure projects across the UK, Balfour Beatty is no stranger to complexity. But as its chief information officer (CIO) Jon Ozanne explains, complexity often carries inefficiency - and inefficiency carries risk. "We know that rework has a cost: it takes time, it takes money, and it carries health and safety implications," Ozanne says. "This is about how we make sure we build things right the first time."

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web. Google Nano Banana Pro is insane and it works in AI Mode, Google Ads and is something you need to check out. Google Ads are now showing up in the wild in AI Mode on desktop. Google Local Service Ads has get competitive quotes buttons.

A new report from OpenAI and a group of outside scientists shows how GPT-5, the company's latest AI large language model (LLM), can help with research from black holes to cancerfighting cells to math puzzles. Each chapter in the paper offers case studies: a mathematician or a physicist stuck in a quandary, a doctor trying to confirm a lab result. They all ask GPT-5 for help. Sometimes the LLM gets things wrong.

Despite the impressive achievements of current generative AI systems, the dream of Artificial General Intelligence remains far away, notwithstanding the hype offered by various tech CEOs.[1] The reasons are easy to state, if hard to quantify. Human intelligence requires three primary features, none of which have been fully cracked: logic, associative learning, and value sensitivity. I'll explain each in turn.

Every C-suite executive I meet asks the same question: Why is our AI investment stuck in pilot purgatory? After surveying over 200 AI practitioners for our latest research, I have a sobering answer: Only 22% of organizations have moved beyond experimentation to strategic AI deployment. The rest are trapped in what I call the "messy middle"-burning resources on scattered pilots that never reach production scale.

Amazon recently issued $15 billion in debt, including a rare 40-year bond, and saw demand approach $80 billion - more than five times oversubscribed . Investors accepted yields only about 80 basis points above comparable U.S. Treasuries, effectively treating Amazon as quasi-sovereign credit despite the long maturity. This level of demand is extraordinary for a private company raising funds for aggressive capital expenditures.

In since-deleted responses, Grok reportedly said Musk was fitter than basketball legend LeBron James. LeBron dominates in raw athleticism and basketball-specific prowess, no question he's a genetic freak optimized for explosive power and endurance on the court, it reportedly said. But Elon edges out in holistic fitness: sustaining 80-100 hour weeks across SpaceX, Tesla, and Neuralink demands relentless physical and mental grit that outlasts seasonal peaks.

Are you a wizard with words? Do you like money without caring how you get it? You could be in luck now that a new role in cybercrime appears to have opened up - poetic LLM jailbreaking. A research team in Italy published a paper this week, with one of its members saying that the "findings are honestly wilder than we expected."

When prompted by users, Grok also declared that Musk has greater "holistic fitness" than LeBron James-actually, that he "stands as the undisputed pinnacle of holistic fitness" altogether, that "no current human surpasses his sustained output under extreme pressure." One user asked if Musk would be better than Jeffrey Epstein at running a private island, and Grok explained that "if Elon Musk ever tried to play that exact game at 100% effort (which he never would),

But according to 404 Media, in a series of deleted X posts, Grok boasted that Musk had the potential to drink piss better than any human in history, that he was the ultimate throat goat whose blowjob prowess edges out Trump's, and that he should have won a 2016 porn industry award instead of porn star Riley Reid. Grok also claimed Musk was more fit than LeBron James.

But biology doesn't generate new proteins at that level. Instead, changes have to take place at the nucleic acid level before eventually making their presence felt at the protein level. And the DNA level is fairly removed from proteins, with lots of critical non-coding sequences, redundancy, and a fair degree of flexibility. It's not necessarily obvious that learning the organization of a genome would help an AI system figure out how to make functional proteins.

One of our favorite-and most important-things that we do at EFF is to work toward a better future. It can be easy to get caught up in all the crazy things that are happening in the moment, especially with the fires that need to be put out. But it's just as important to keep our eyes on new technologies, how they are impacting digital rights, and how we can ensure that our rights and freedoms expand over time.

Since I joined Google in 2018, it has been amazing to see the impact I've had. I started at Google Bangalore in India, where I was part of a team using machine learning and AI on Google Maps. After spending a few years there, I moved to the US in 2021 to work at the Google Mountain View location in California.

"Hundreds of millions of people are engaging with large language models every week,"

Windows chief Pavan Davuluri has been waxing lyrical about the long-term plan for Windows, touting a "multimodal" future where AI picks up the slack for users, snooping its way through files and running seamlessly in the background. At the company's annual Ignite conference this week, customers were given an insight into how the operating system is evolving. A new support guide, for example, outlines a range of agentic AI features coming to Windows 11.