#generative-ai

#generative-ai

Databricks finds itself in an awkward situation following the departure of Naveen Rao, its head of artificial intelligence, as rivals like Snowflake, Teradata, and hyperscalers such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, intensify their push to develop offerings for building generative AI applications. Rao's exit comes at a time when Databricks is aggressively trying to expand its offerings inside the Data Intelligence Platform, mainly with Lakebase and Agent Bricks, thanks to the infusion of capital from this week's $1 billion Series K funding round.

The internet was built to connect machines, not people. Its basic architecture maps servers to domain names and uses cryptographic certificates to prove websites are authentic. Yet it lacks a built-in way to bridge the gap between our offline identities - citizen, taxpayer, patient, employee, student - and the digital systems on which we increasingly rely to conduct our economic, civic, and personal lives.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized everything from copywriting to medical imaging, but it's a huge time-saver for development teams, too. If your DevOps team is looking for a magic wand to boost security and accuracy, you need an AI tool. This isn't just a nice-to-have, either. AI-powered coding tools enhance the software development lifecycle, making continuous integration and delivery more efficient. They even have the firepower to automate workflows for the most complex development projects.

I would use it for almost everything, like math problems.

Winning attention and establishing authority as a brand is about ensuring your brand resonates with the algorithms that power large language models (LLMs)-the backbone of generative AI (GenAI) engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or DeepSeek. A Forrester Buyers' Journey Survey revealed that a vast majority of B2B buyers have begun using GenAI- as many as 89%. This once-emergent technology is quickly becoming mainstream, being utilized at every stage of the buying process.

The high-contrast footage was scrutinized for evidence that it had been manipulated by artificial intelligence, and some viewers claimed they found undeniable proof. At one point in the clip, Trump's left pinky finger appears to merge with the others as he clasps his hands on the desk. Conspiracy theorists have seized on this, arguing it showed the president as proof that Trump didn't make the statement at all, or that it was highly doctored.

Progress Software has announced Progress Agentic RAG, a RAG-as-a-Service platform that helps companies extract meaningful information from unstructured data. With the help of Nuclia, which it acquired in July, Progress is focusing on democratizing generative AI for organizations. The platform supports all leading LLMs and offers support for different languages. This flexibility is crucial in a market where companies have often already made investments in specific AI models.

According to a new study by Accenture, generative AI has officially taken the lead as the go-to source for beauty recommendations-overtaking old standbys like in-store consultations, social media influencers and even trusted friends and family.

The short version: IT is broken. It's not working, to the point where people are ready to give it up, just like they would a mangled hammer. I think the brokenness is rooted in a lack of humanism: it doesn't work for people; it uses people towards the builders' ends. It's also more complicated than that, which I parse through while also giving a clue about how to get out of being stuck.

In 2019, as an entrepreneur in residence at Alphabet's X, the Moonshot Factory, Sarah Russell created Bellwether, which harnesses AI and data to assess natural disaster risk and mitigate impact on communities. Bellwether forecasts probabilities for severe weather, provides aerial images to first responders, and helps insurers understand disaster risk. When Hurricane Helene struck last September, the tool processed 75,000 images from Civil Air Patrol in a matter of minutes rather than days.

For 25 years, search engines like and Microsoft's Bing crawled and indexed websites, sending users to relevant pages. This drove traffic, supporting the web's grand bargain: sites let tech firms copy their data for free in exchange for referrals. Ads and subscriptions funded content creation, which in turn improved search results. In today's new AI era, products such as Google's AI Overviews and , OpenAI's , and Perplexity deliver answers directly, often eliminating the need to visit the original source.

Homework has always played a key role in learning. It helps reinforce what students learn in class and gives them a chance to practice skills on their own. For years, homework has been seen as a way to build discipline, improve problem-solving skills, and encourage independent thinking. However, not everyone views homework positively. Many people argue that much of it feels like a chore, and it doesn't promote real learning.

I opened TikTok while visiting Germany last week and stumbled across a Vodafone ad being presented by a woman who probably doesn't exist. The ad includes several "tells" that suggest the presenter was artificially created using generative AI - the unnatural style and movement of her hair, the way her moles disappear, and the uncanny valley vibe of her facial expressions - and Vodafone confirmed my suspicions in its video comments.

Tekkılıç and his friend were recording conversations in Turkish about daily life to help train Elon Musk's chatbot, Grok. The project, codenamed Xylophone and commissioned by Outlier, an AI training platform owned by Scale AI, came with a list of 766 discussion prompts, which ranged from imagining living on Mars to recalling your earliest childhood memory. "There were a lot of surreal and absurd things," he recalls. "'If you were a pizza topping, what would you be?' Stuff like that."

Developers often spend significant time on necessary, but undifferentiated work, or "toil". Toil is often manual, repetitive, and of limited enduring value, making it a strong candidate for automation or delegation to generative AI tools. The re:Invent 2024 session Unleashing generative AI: Amazon's journey with Amazon Q Developer (DOP214) discussed how toil and productivity have an inverse relationship. Amazon Q Developer can help decrease toil and free up your developers to work on more productive tasks.

Zoom in: ProRata.ai's product, Gist Answers, lets publishers embed custom AI search on their websites. Publishers can show AI-powered summaries and recommendations exclusively based off their own content or showcase content from ProRata.ai's broader network of 750 publishers. "It's absolutely free to all the websites, and it's actually profit-making, small profit, but profit-making," Gross tells Axios. "Our whole goal is to get this ethical search distributed as far and wide as possible."

On average, younger respondents tended to use the technology for a far greater variety of purposes. For example, 55% of Generation Z respondents said they've used generative AI "to create imagery/art," compared with 46% of millennials and smaller proportions of Generation X and baby boomers. That trend held true almost completely across the board: the younger you are, the more likely you are to have experimented with generative AI in a greater number of ways.

Snapchat is launching a new Lens that lets users create and edit images using a text-to-image AI generator, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. The new "Imagine Lens" is available to Snapchat+ Platinum and Lens+ subscribers. Imagine Lens allows users to create, edit, and recreate Snaps by entering their own prompts. They can then share the image with their friends, post it to their Story, or share it outside out Snapchat.

"Technology is now well-integrated within classrooms. Teachers use it, school boards use it, schools use it, and of course, students are using it. That creates a large attack surface for cyberattackers who want access to information," said Charles Finlay, executive director of the Rogers Cybersecurity Catalyst at Toronto Metropolitan University.

ODSC AI West 2025 brings together the leading voices, tools, and ideas shaping the future of data science and AI. This year's program features a diverse lineup of sessions that go beyond theory to deliver practical, hands-on strategies for tackling today's most pressing challenges - from building production-ready generative AI systems and deploying resilient agentic workflows to advancing data governance, computer vision, and Bayesian modeling. Whether you're a data scientist, engineer, researcher, or business leader, you'll find sessions designed to give you the skills,

In a 230-page ruling, District Court Judge Amit Mehta wrote that Google can no longer enter into exclusive distribution deals around making its search engine or its Gemini AI technology into a default option, and that it must share some search data with competitors, but stopped short of requiring it to spin off key assets, especially its Chrome web browser.

The Premiere app features a familiar multi-track timeline, with support for an unlimited number of video, audio, and text layers. There's automatic captioning, 4K HDR support, and one-tap exporting to TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram - including automatic resizing that frames content for each platform. The iOS version of Premiere will be free to download and use, though Adobe says there will be charges for additional cloud storage and generative AI credits.

In case you missed it last week among other big news items, Google shipped a phone camera with a zoom feature that uses generative AI. That's right: the Pixel 10 Pro comes with AI right inside the camera app that cleans up otherwise crappy digital zoom images all the way up to 100x. It's a what-is-a-photo nightmare, but it's also pretty good - at least it seems to be.

Can you create a histogram of game total scores to see the distribution of scoring? Could you make a box plot comparing home vs away team scores? Let's create a scatter plot of temperature vs total score to see if weather affects scoring. Can you show me the distribution of betting spreads and how they relate to actual game results? Could you create a visualization showing win/loss records by team?

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) published a study tracking the most popular gen AI apps and what we use them for. ChatGPT and Gemini take the first and second spots on the list, respectively, for most unique monthly visits on the web and most monthly active users on mobile (though it did not specify exact numbers -- ZDNET has requested them from a16z). The rest of the list suggests shifts in global gen AI superpowers and why consumers seek specific platforms.