Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

In Las Vegas, the Boring Company operates the Vegas Loop, an underground tunnel system that uses Teslas to drop people off at various hotspots on the strip. It's been active for a few years now and is expanding to other resorts, hotels, and destinations. Currently, there are stops at three resorts: Westgate, the Encore, and Resorts World. However, there will eventually be "over 100 stations and span over 68 miles of tunnel," the Vegas Loop website says.

If you want to work in AI, you need to show that you can actually do the work. Launch real projects using public datasets, deploy a demo, post your work on GitHub, or write about it on a blog. Participate in hackathons - they're a fantastic way to demonstrate initiative and teamwork in a short time. We organize hackathons ourselves and are often impressed by what participants produce. It's concrete proof of what you can do.

What we found is that employees want about five hours of hands-on training, and coaching, and mentoring. Only about a third are actually getting that.

Meta is rolling out a new Facebook feature that the company says will help users share more photos-but which could also be used to help train its AI. The opt-in feature allows Facebook's AI to access your phone's camera roll in order to find photos it finds "shareworthy," and to suggest edits using its AI tools. Users can then decide if they want to share the images or not.

The system combines ceiling-mounted cameras with computer vision and large language models (LLMs) to monitor what humans are doing and deciding when to lend a hand. When a person begins an action - say, reaching for papers or chopping vegetables - the AI generates a short text description of the scene and uses it to infer what might happen next. Movement commands are then sent to small, wheeled robotic bases under the objects, which the researchers call "proactive assistants."

A vertical agent is more than a chatbot. It's a core part of the martech stack, built with autonomy, context and memory to drive business goals. Vertical agents are powered by the LLM of choice but are trained on a company's catalogs, knowledge base, policies, and brand tone - all centralized in a unified data source. They: Embody the roles a brand requires (i.e., sales, support, etc.). Understand industry language. Adapt across multiple languages. Deliver credible responses.

Around the middle of last year, Pim de Witte started reaching out to a handful of prominent AI labs to see if they'd be interested in using data from Medal, his popular video game clipping platform, to train their agents. Within weeks, it became clear that Medal's data was more valuable to the labs than he expected. "We received multiple acquisition offers very quickly," he told me.

"No, I don't know him," one disgruntled father messaged their son in one TikTok video that got millions of views. "What does he want?" "He said you guys went to school together, I invited him in," the son replied, posting an AI-edited image of a man sitting on presumably the family's couch. "JOE PICK UP THE PHONE," the alarmed parent replied. "I DON'T KNOW HIM!!!!!"

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. ( NYSE: GS) has made it plain that it will start to cull its workforce based on the ability of some artificial intelligence (AI) programs to do what humans do better than humans. However, the AI-based decisions are not entirely about AI advantages. The bank has always been known for ruthless management. It has asked executives to find "underperformers." This could affect about 1,000 people this year.

Microsoft has officially ended support for Windows 10, all but forcing users to either upgrade or pay more money to keep getting essential security updates for the OS they already own. No matter that its replacement, Windows 11, can't be run on nearly half a billion machines, meaning it'll create mountains of e-waste as those old, perfectly usable PCs get thrown out for new ones.

Cisco has presented a new open-source project designed to help make AI-generated code more secure. The initiative, called Project CodeGuard, provides a framework that allows development teams to integrate security rules directly into the workflow of AI coding tools. Examples include GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Windsurf. AI coding agents are increasingly being used worldwide to accelerate software development and increase productivity. At the same time, the security of the generated code is often inadequate.

Claude will now connect with Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive to search and analyze documents without you needing to upload them manually. The Microsoft 365 connector is available now for all Claude Team and Enterprise plan users, but administrators need to enable the integration before end users can connect up their accounts. The Microsoft Outlook integration with Claude lets the chatbot access email threads and analyze communications to surface relevant context in its answers.

Large language models are currently everyone's solution to everything. The technology's versatility is part of its appeal: the use cases for generative AI seem both huge and endless. But then you use the stuff, and not enough of it works very well. And you wonder what we're really accomplishing here. On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay rejoins the show full of thoughts about the current state of AI - particularly after spending a summer trying to get his smart home to work.

A customer support rep escalated a technical issue last week that had stumped three different team members. Meanwhile, buried in a GitHub comment from a few months ago was an engineer's documentation for the exact fix. The knowledge existed, the solution was there. But connecting those dots required someone to remember a conversation that happened months ago in a completely different context.

OpenAI brings ChatGPT Go plan to 16 more Asian countries OpenAI is expanding its affordable ChatGPT Go plan, priced under $5, to 16 new countries across Asia, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Thailand, Vietnam, and Pakistan. In some of these countries, users can pay in local currencies, while in others, payments are required in USD, with final costs varying due to local taxes.

Starting in the coming months, parents will be able to turn off chats with AI characters entirely for teens. This action won't block access to the Meta AI chatbot - the company's general-purpose AI chatbot - which will only discuss age-appropriate content. Parents will also be able to turn off chats with individual characters if they prefer more selective control.

According to Uber, beginning later this year, drivers and couriers who opt into the program can complete "digital tasks" within Uber's Driver app. These tasks can include submitting a video of themselves speaking in their native language, uploading pictures of specific everyday items, or presenting documents written in a different language. After tasks are completed, the earnings will be in the users' balance within 24 hours. Compensation depends on the time commitment to complete tasks and their complexity.

It's certainly got some pretty prominent features of what looks like a bubble,

The AI-powered image editor makes it easy to change images with natural language user prompts. Also: You can test Microsoft's new in-house AI image generator model now - here's how The model became generally available earlier this month, but was only accessible in the Gemini API or for enterprise use via Vertex AI. Here's how to get started in these recently added applications.

Last night I was flicking through a dating app. One guy stood out: Henry VIII, 34, King of England, nonmonogamy. Next thing I know, I am at a candlelit bar sharing a martini with the biggest serial dater of the 16th century. But the night is not over. Next, I am DJing back-to-back with Diana, Princess of Wales. The crowd's ready for the drop, she shouts in my ear, holding a headphone to her tiara.

Internal Amazon documents reveal that AI startups have been delaying AWS adoption, diverting early budgets toward AI models and tools, inference platforms, and new "neoclouds" that sell GPU access, according to a blockbuster scoop from Business Insider's Eugene Kim. Instead of relying on AWS for traditional cloud compute and storage, founders are starting with OpenAI, Anthropic, and AI tool providers such as Vercel, along with specialized GPU providers like CoreWeave.

Don't credit OpenAI's ChatGPT, credit corporate LLMs - enterprise RAG is what's creating royalty revenue for publishers. RAG - retrieval augmented generation - kicks in when a user (or system) prompts the LLM, which then pulls the relevant content from various sources to deliver the best answer. Over the last two years, it has been quietly expanding its licensing agreements for generative AI usage, with approximately 5,000 publishers from its 30,000-strong publisher network now opted in for this.

Tim Higgins: Today on Bold Names, Liz Reid. She oversees Google Search and is something of a Google lifer. Having been there more than 20 years, she has seen some of the biggest moments for this company.

In a space where tech providers like to stake out a cozy niche, Clio is going to do... everything. Well, not everything, but most everything. Small law firm practice management remains at the core, but now they have a completely separate unit working on Biglaw and large corporate legal departments. Business of law remains their legacy, but now they're a practice of law provider. Legal research? Sure! Law firm AI? Why not? CRM? Of course!