#generative-ai

#generative-ai

Airbnb says its custom-built AI agent is now handling roughly a third of its customer support issues in North America, and it's preparing to roll out the feature globally. If successful, the company believes that in a year's time, more than 30% of its total customer support tickets will be handled by AI voice and chat in all the languages where it also employs a human customer service agent.

According to a UK casting notice viewed by Variety, the producers of Killing Satoshi reserve the right to "change, add to, take from, translate, reformat or reprocess" actors' performances, using "generative artificial intelligence (GAI) and/or machine learning technologies." No digital replicas will be created of performers, but it sounds like plenty of other AI-driven tweaks are on the table.

People who enter phrases such as best flowers for Valentine's Day, might see ads from an Albertsons banner in their area. Albertsons' participation in the pilot program follows other steps the company has taken to integrate agentic and generative AI tools into its operations. Albertsons said its retail media unit, Albertsons Media Collective, will be looking to help brands reach shoppers through ChatGPT as the pilot program progresses.

Few tools have reshaped day-to-day work in tech as quickly as generative AI; coding tasks that once took developers days-or weeks-can now be spun up in seconds. So naturally, many workers are now embracing "vibes" to program, instead of writing software line by line. But Minecraft creator Markus Persson, the billionaire developer better known as "Notch," is sounding an alarm: even if tech companies are embracing coding with AI, that doesn't make it a good thing.

Zach Stauber's day begins before the first customer support ticket even lands in the queue.

Wizard, an AI-native shopping agent cofounded by Marc Lore and CEO Melissa Bridgeford, is coming out of a nearly 5-year private beta with an ambitious promise: to end the era of endless scrolling in ecommerce and replace it with a personalized and streamlined shopping experience. Launched publicly on Feb. 11, the New York-based startup is betting that the next wave of online retail will be driven not by bigger marketplaces,

The idea of machines that can build even better machines sounds like sci-fi, but the concept is becoming a reality as companies like Cadence tap into generative AI to design and validate next-gen processors that also use AI. In the early days of integrated circuits, chips were designed by hand. In the more than half a century since then, semiconductors have grown so complex and their physical features so small that it's only possible to design chips using other chips.

Meta has been going all in on AI, whether people want it or not, and now it's bringing more features in that vein to Facebook. The network's latest move is to let people use Meta AI to animate their profile photos. Because what better way to express your individuality than to use a pre-canned AI-generated animation on your own face?

AI was supposed to lessen your workload, but it's actually making you work more. That's the finding of an eight-month study from UC Berkeley. Researchers tracked 200 employees at a U.S. tech company and discovered workers using generative AI didn't work less-they worked faster and took on broader projects, often extending work into more hours voluntarily. The main culprits were task expansion, with employees doing work that previously belonged to others, and blurred boundaries as workers prompted AI during lunch or breaks.

Ghostnote is a fast-growing music startup based in Berlin. Since launching in 2025, our mission has been to create the biggest label you've never heard of. At Ghostnote, we create ambient music universes with their own identities - shaped by shared moods, passions, and repeat rituals. We mix startup energy with a deep love for music, creative design, and community-building.

The rise of generative AI is often seen as an existential threat to the SaaS model. Interfaces would disappear, software would fade away, and existing players would become irrelevant. However, new figures from Databricks paint a different picture. Rather than undermining SaaS, AI appears to be increasing its use. This week, Databricks reported a revenue run rate of $5.4 billion, a 65 percent year-on-year increase. More than a quarter of that now comes from AI-related products.

Across industries, artificial intelligence is being framed as the next major force reshaping operations, customer expectations, and the way businesses evaluate risk. Real estate is at the center of that conversation, and title and settlement companies are not just on the sidelines. In fact, the title industry has already moved quickly. According to a recent survey conducted by Qualia, more than 90% of title and escrow professionals have adopted generative AI in at least one form.

The profile also explains why "Ambersons," while much less famous than Welles' first film "Citizen Kane," remains so tantalizing - Welles himself claimed it was a "much better picture" than "Kane," but after a disastrous preview screening, the studio cut 43 minutes from the film, added an abrupt and unconvincing happy ending, and eventually destroyed the excised footage to make space in its vaults.

Google sidestepped the toughest penalties in a landmark antitrust clash, retaining control of Chrome and Android. In a court ruling, Judge Amit P. Mehta barred the search giant from exclusive search deals, ordered limited data sharing with rivals, and restricted its app store tie-ins. The decision comes after the Justice Department's landmark monopoly case against Google. Judge Mehta rejected the Justice Department's call for drastic remedies, declining to force a divestiture or unwind Google's multibillion-dollar default search arrangement with Apple's Safari browser.

ChatGPT owner OpenAI has a workforce double the size of Anthropic, while Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google have 228,000 and 183,000 staff respectively, and boast enormous capital positions and distribution networks. Yet Anthropic's AI tools for generating computer code and operating computers go beyond anything these larger companies have managed to launch. OpenAI and Microsoft have struggled to ship products with as much impact recently.

Generative AI exponentially brings down the cost of building solutions. It lets people build exactly what they need to solve an exact problem in an exact moment. It lets people own their own solutions. This is great for a lot of specific problems that need specific solutions that wouldn't normally get solved easily. This has been the evergreen promise of computers and programming and hacking. But there's a difference between solving your specific problem, and owning a problem domain.

As AI continues to encroach on game development, the worry that the studios that make your favorite games are dabbling in the tech, especially for art assets and written dialogue, grows ever greater. Sometimes this concern and the scrutiny that comes with it are well-founded, but other times it leads to witch hunts with fans seeing AI-generated art where it actually doesn't exist. Blizzard's has been the subject of these moments of mass hysteria .

In the last decade, AI-powered chatbots have taken the realm of customer service by storm.

Google has been on a three-month tear since its last check-in, launching Gemini 3 to much fanfare and joining the $4 trillion market-cap club. The string of successes put it at the front of the highly competitive AI race. (A quick aside on these arbitrary rankings. You could argue Nvidia's the biggest winner of the AI race, but it's really in its own bucket. I'm talking about companies with competing chatbots. No further questions at this time.)

Amazon has announced that its generative AI-powered digital assistant Alexa Plus is now available to all Prime members in the US via any Alexa-enabled device, Alexa.com, and the Alexa mobile app. If you don't have Prime, you can access the assistant on a new free tier on the web and app, or pay $20 a month for unlimited access to Alexa Plus, without Prime.

That was a year or so ago, and my first brush with what generative AI could do. Like many, I started using it for fun: planning trips, finding nineteenth century authors I could recommend to fantasy-loving students (a genre I don't read), and making a holiday card starring my dog, Harry. But as work piled up, I didn't have time for new toys, so now I use AI for work.

Kennedy has also called for overhauling the current safety monitoring system for vaccine injury data collection, known as Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, claiming that it suppresses information about the true rate of vaccine side effects. He has also proposed changes to the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program that could make it easier for people to sue for adverse events that haven't been proven to be associated with vaccines.

Sounds radical, doesn't it? The Touch Bar was such a waste of space on the MacBook Pro when it was first introduced exactly a decade ago in 2016. It shipped with a lot of potential but barely any real-world use, and Apple even considered swapping it out for a slot that housed the Apple Pencil back in 2021. While that feature never really came to pass, something else happened in 2021 that blew everyone's minds - OpenAI's Dall-E.

As Valentine's Day approaches, finding the perfect words to express your feelings for that special someone can seem like a daunting task - so much so that you may feel tempted to ask ChatGPT for an assist. After all, within seconds it can dash off a well-written, romantic message. Even a short, personalized limerick or poem is no sweat. But before you copy and paste that AI-generated love note, you might want to consider how it could make you feel about yourself.

Much of the conversation about how to work effectively with generative AI has focused on prompt engineering or, more recently, context engineering: the semi-technical skill of crafting inputs so that large language models produce useful outputs. These skills are helpful, but they are only part of the story.

OPINION - A few weeks ago, Al Jazeera Google Cloud as its primary technology provider for "The Core," a sweeping program designed to integrate generative artificial intelligence (AI) throughout its production process. The move, which further deepened the relationship between the two companies, should sound alarm bells for policymakers and anyone concerned with the accuracy, credibility, and transparency of the news media and information space, which impacts nearly every aspect of society.

An obvious and important caveat: neither our respondents nor we have a crystal ball, and nobody knows for sure what the future holds. Nonetheless, we found five recurring themes in their forecasts: Audiences will increasingly access news through AI There will be increased demand for verification work Automation and agents will reshape newsrooms Newsrooms will upskill and build AI infrastructure AI will further empower data journalists

At a time when memories are increasingly flattened into folders, feeds, and cloud backups, a new experimental device from MIT Media Lab proposes a far more intimate archive: scent. Developed by Cyrus Clarke, the Anemoia Device is a speculative yet functional prototype that translates photographs into bespoke fragrances using generative AI, inviting users not to view memories, but to inhabit them through the body.