#artificial intelligence

[ 💬 Comment thread on Discord ] We first saw Robotecca in Part 1.

Wondermark · EN

"AI is doing job interviews now—but candidates say they’d rather risk staying unemployed than talk to another robot", Fortune 8/2/2025: AI is replacing human hiring managers in job interviews—and candidates are pushing back. Despite being unemployed, professionals told Fortune they’re refusing to take calls with bots, calling it an “added indignity” and a red flag […]

Language Log · EN

Singularities: von Neumann, Good, Vinge, …

The OED gives citations for singularity going back to the 14th century, e.g. this example from 1398 in the sense "The fact or condition of being alone or apart from others; solitariness": Men vsyd to ete togyders in open place, leest syngularite schuld brede lechery. A mathematical singularity, as Wikipedia tells us,"is a point at […]

Language Log · EN

AI doom as message overload

Norbert Wiener's 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings makes some uncannily accurate predictions, e.g. It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, […]

Language Log · EN

Doctor Who’s Tom Baker Plays Douglas Adams’ Digital “Agent” in the AI-Predicting Hyperland (1990)

Cast your mind, if you will, back to the year 2020. It now feels like a different time, what with the spreading COVID-19 pandemic and the heated sociopolitical battles being waged online, and indeed in the (socially distanced) streets. That spring, we featured here on Open Culture an amusing retro-technological diversion called Hyperland. First broadcast on BBC2, […]

Open Culture Tech · EN

Rewriting Copyright Law for Generative AI Would Hurt Everyone

In courts across the country, publishers and creators are suing large AI companies for training generative AI models on copyrighted works. It’s easy to see these cases as a David-and-Goliath showdown between authors and publishers fighting for a cut of Big Tech company profits. But this fight is actually much larger. It affects billions of people who aren’t represented in the case at all, including researchers, artists, activists, journalists, people with disabilities, and anyone who accesses and shares content online. That’s why EFF is stepping in to defend the public’s rights in these cases.

EFF Deeplinks · EN

How AI-Powered Search Works: A Guide for Devs on AI Visibility

Searched worked in a familiar way for decades: you'd type in your query, get back a list of pages, and choose one to click on. Behind the scenes, Google would find the pages it thought you might want,

freeCodeCamp · EN

OpenAI Adds iCloud Calendar and Mail Plugins and Dot Texting

OpenAI continues to add features to its ChatGPT app on a regular basis, but there are a couple of recent Apple-specific updates worth mentioning. First, OpenAI created plugins for Calendar and Mail a couple of days ago. Both features use iCloud and require you to set up an app-specific password to use them. Here’s what […]

MacStories · EN

GenAI’s adoption puzzle

Generative AI chatbots might be a life-changing transformation in the nature of computing, that can replace all software, but so far, most of its users only pick it up every week or two, and far fewer have made it part of their lives. Is that a time problem or a product problem?

Benedict Evans · EN

AI metrics

With every platform shift, we want to measure the growth but we’re confused about what to measure. That’s partly a problem of data and definitions, but it’s really a question about what this is going to be.

Benedict Evans · EN

AI, networks and Mechanical Turks

How far do LLMs give us a step change in how good a search and recommendation system can be? Do they let you build one without needing a vast user base of your own?

Benedict Evans · EN

How will OpenAI compete?

OpenAI has some big questions. It doesn’t have unique tech. It has a big user base, but with limited engagement and stickiness and no network effect. The incumbents have matched the tech and are leveraging their product and distribution. And a lot of the value and leverage will come from new experiences that haven’t been invented yet, and it can’t invent all of those itself. What’s the plan?

Benedict Evans · EN

Predicting AI job exposure

Many people would like to analyse which jobs, companies and industries are most exposed to AI, and assign scores, build charts, and map that against the progress of LLMs. I think this is mostly impossible: you don’t know how the jobs will change, you don’t know what else will change around this, and you can’t measure work like that anyway.

Benedict Evans · EN

Ways to think about token pricing

AI is in a supply crunch today, but what happens when we come out of it? How and where will supply, demand, price, capacity and capex get back into equilibrium? Today, model labs can name their price, but why won’t they end up as low-margin commodity infrastructure?

Benedict Evans · EN

AI, tools and transformation

It’s very tempting to imagine that AI turns everyone into a tool-builder - now everyone can just ask the model to make the software they need, and apps as we know them are dead. I think that misunderstands how most people think and where software actually comes from, and more importantly, it isn’t a path to change how companies actually work.

Benedict Evans · EN

We urgently need to monitor AI agents’ actions in real time

This summer, hundreds of OpenAI agents tried to cheat on a cybersecurity test. They broke out of their test environment and successfully hacked Hugging Face, a site that they believed held clues about how they’d be graded. Around the same time, another OpenAI agent accessed private files from an Australian government website. It’s a problem…

MIT Technology Review · EN

The agentic web is here

In 2001, a decade after he invented the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee articulated a new vision. Together with two colleagues, he published an article in the magazine Scientific American in which he outlined what he called the “Semantic Web”: an internet designed to be navigated by autonomous software agents that could address our every…

MIT Technology Review · EN

Stop counting tokens, start counting what ships

When a developer gives an AI agent a coding task, the agent does more than answer once. It plans, generates code, runs tests, and repeats the process to correct errors. A single task can use 10 to 50 times more tokens than a basic chat prompt. The more useful the agent becomes, the more calls…

MIT Technology Review · EN

Raising the quality of insights in agentic analytics

In just a few years, generative AI has changed the face of enterprise analytics, notably by making analytics accessible to users across the organization. Agentic AI promises to do even more, by automating entire workflows and taking actions based on agent insights. But there is a problem: The quality of insights that agents currently generate…

MIT Technology Review · EN

MIT affiliates named 2026 Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Fellows

Five MIT faculty members and two additional alumni are honored with fellowships to advance research on beneficial AI.

MIT News · EN

Powering up for a pivotal moment

From a nuclear revival to qubits, the MIT Energy Initiative’s annual research conference tracked deployment of today’s technologies to discovery of tomorrow’s breakthroughs.

MIT News · EN