#generative-ai

#generative-ai

Ahmad Al-Dahle, who most recently led generative AI at Meta and the team behind its Llama open-source models, joins the company Wednesday and will oversee its engineering and data science teams.

It found that using AI in education can "undermine children's foundational development" and that "the damages it has already caused are daunting," though "fixable." Because generative AI is still young ChatGPT was released just over three years ago the report's authors dubbed their review a "premortem" intended to study AI's potential in the classroom without a postmortem's benefits of time, long-term data or hindsight.

Expect this year to be filled with flux and uncertainty, thanks to lightning-fast changes wrought by AI, and by a Trump Administration that rules by whim and fiat rather than facts and law. So, I know it's something of a fool's game to make predictions about what the year ahead might bring for Microsoft. That said, I've never worried about being called a fool. So here are my five predictions for what Microsoft can expect in 2026.

According to Li Mandri, ING's centralised approach to AI development has resulted in a high success rate for pilot projects, with 90% moving to production compared to the industry average of 30. The bank has standardised on cloud-hosted AI models from preferred partners, which are then made available globally, allowing ING to scale. He says the platform is centrally managed with risk controls, guardrails and real-time monitoring.

Slackbot, the automated assistant baked into the Salesforce-owned corporate messaging platform Slack, is entering a new era as an AI agent. And Salesforce CTO Parker Harris hopes it will be as viral as OpenAI's ChatGPT. The cloud software giant rolled out the new version of Slackbot on Tuesday. This new AI agent version of Slackbot, which is generally available for Business+ and Enterprise+ customers, can find information, draft emails, and schedule meetings, among other things, all within the Slack platform, according to the company.

The feeling you get the first time you vibe-code something is similar to what you probably felt the first time you asked ChatGPT to write an essay. You feel incredibly empowered, and maybe even a bit fooled. "It can't be that easy," is a common thought. And you'd be right: Vibe-coded experiences are visually and technically impressive, but they are almost always one-offs: Turning them into stable tools you can use on an ongoing basis typically requires a wider set of software and developer skills.

Baldur's Gate 3 was the kind of game that could take hours to get started, thanks in part to a rich character customization suite that allowed players to fine-tune everything from their race to several minute details.

We are still at the early stages of another big shift in technology (Generative AI) which threatens to upend the news industry by offering more efficient ways of accessing and distilling information at scale. At the same time, creators and influencers (humans) are driving a shift towards personality-led news, at the expense of media institutions that can often feel less relevant, less interesting, and less authentic. In 2026 the news media are likely to be further squeezed by these two powerful forces.

AI is set to reshape roughly 44% of banking work by 2030, according to consulting firm ThoughtLinks - and Wall Street's biggest firms are racing to get there first. JPMorgan Chase, the largest US bank by assets, is spending $18 billion a year on technology, with AI a central focus. CEO Jamie Dimon is a "tremendous" user of the bank's generative AI tools, which have now been rolled out to more than 200,000 employees.

For the past several months, many of the most pressing questions I have been hearing from clients have come from GEO: What is it, should I be worried about it, how can I make sure my law firm is actually visible in all these AI answers? Here's what your law firm needs to know to stay relevant as the search landscape evolves.

AI-powered enhancement has a tendency to hallucinate facial details leading to an enhanced image that may be visually clear, but that may also be devoid of reality with respect to biometric identification,

Law firms dramatically accelerated their technology investments in 2025, with spending on tech and knowledge management tools growing 9.7% and 10.5% respectively - the fastest real growth likely ever experienced in the legal industry, according to the newly released 2026 Report on the State of the US Legal Market from Thomson Reuters and Georgetown Law's Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession.

On Thursday, the company announced a new "AI Inbox" tab, currently in a beta testing phase, that reads every message in a user's Gmail and suggests a list of to-dos and key topics, based on what it summarizes. In Google's example of what this AI Inbox could look like in Gmail, the new tab takes context from a user's messages and suggests they reschedule their dentist appointment, reply to a request from their child's sports coach, and pay an upcoming fee before the deadline.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly praised for making us sharper, faster, and more productive. From drafting text to solving complex reasoning problems, tools like ChatGPT promise cognitive augmentation at scale. Yet a growing body of psychological research suggests that something subtler, and potentially more consequential, is happening alongside these gains. AI may be improving what we do while quietly distorting how well we understand our own competence.

Minutes into teaching my business school class, I asked what seemed like an innocent question: What is one word that describes how you feel about AI right now? One word. That's it. My students looked up, looked down, looked anywhere to avoid eye contact. Silence. "I promise," I said, "this is a safe space." Something I'd repeat throughout the course-and I meant it. Then the answers came quickly, and the energy in the room shifted as they arrived. You could feel the sheen of performance

For the past decade, the archetypal founder was creeping up from someone in their 20s to someone a bit older. The average age of a "unicorn" founder-an entrepreneur who builds a startup valued at more than $1 billion-had steadily climbed to 33 by 2024, as investors gravitated toward seasoned veterans to navigate a complex market. However, a new report by global venture capital firm Antler, looking closely at the unicorn phenomenon, suggests the artificial intelligence (AI) boom is quickly reversing this trend, empowering a new generation of twenty-somethings to build massive companies at unprecedented speeds.

Snowflake and Google Cloud are deepening their collaboration by integrating the Google Gemini 3 model into Snowflake Cortex AI. Companies can now develop generative AI applications without moving data between platforms. The integration of Gemini 3 into Snowflake Cortex AI marks a significant step forward in both parties' AI strategy. Developers will have access to Google's large language model within Snowflake's secure data environment. This enables building, deploying, and scaling AI agents and generative AI applications without copying or moving data.

By many accounts, those most impacted by the attacks - Venezuelans living and working in Venezuela - are resolutely opposed to the strikes, with thousands mobilizing in numerous Venezuelan cities in protest. (The death toll from the US strikes currently stands at 80 soldiers and civilians, a figure whichwill likely go up as the dust settles.) Though the attacks are still too recent to get accurate polling data of the country's sentiments, a November survey found that 86 percent of Venezuelans preferred for Maduro to remain head of state to resolve the country's economic woes.

There is no question that 2026 is already set up to be something of a continuance of 2025, at least in the sense of moving deeper into the world of AI, automation, and robotics. As companies deploy AI at scale and industrial robots continue to replace human labor slowly, chip manufacturers can't keep up with demand, and the hype isn't really hype anymore, as it's infrastructure being built in real time.

As early adopters have discovered, Copilot delivers real transformation only when it becomes an integral part of critical workflows. Enterprises are beginning to treat generative AI not as an isolated productivity tool, but as the connective layer linking business applications, data, and human judgment. Nowhere is this shift clearer than in organizations using Microsoft 365 Copilot as part of a broader architecture that spans CRMs, low-code platforms, and specialized AI systems.

I've written about all of these before at greater length, but this is a short post because it's not about the technology or making a broader point, it's about me. These are rules for engaging with me, personally, on this topic. Others are welcome to adopt these rules if they so wish but I am not encouraging anyone to do so. Thus, I've made this post as short as I can so everyone interested in engaging can read the whole thing.

If money were no object, I'd want a 100-inch LG Wallpaper TV in my family room immediately. It looks shockingly thin in person - almost as if it's some sort of sci-fi prop - and it delivers the rich colors and dark levels we expect from OLED. Cable management is also a cinch, since it requires just a single power cable. The A/V inputs are handled by LG's One Connect box, which you can position wirelessly up to 10 meters away from the TV.