On Friday, Epic Games announced Darth Vader would be returning to Fortnite as an in-game boss—but this time, players would be able to chat with him through conversational AI. “Ask him all your pressing questions about the Force, the Galactic Empire … or you know, a good strat for the last Storm circle,” Epic said…
OpenAI is launching a cloud-based software engineering agent called Codex in an attempt to ride a wave of hype surrounding vibe coding or building software using AI. It says this tool will let developers automate more of their work in a way that should be both safer and less opaque than existing tools. OpenAI’s Codex…
I say … no. In fact my mission today is to tell you that your education was not in vain. You do have a great future ahead of you no matter how smart and capable ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Llama get. And here is the reason: You have something that no computer can ever have….
Donald Trump’s jaunt to the Middle East featured an entourage of billionaire tech bros, a fighter-jet escort, and business deals designed to reshape the global landscape of artificial intelligence. On the final stop of the tour in Abu Dhabi, the US President announced that unnamed US companies would partner with the United Arab Emirates to…
Through the Bing APIs, Microsoft helped other search engines save on the cost and time of crawling billions of web pages and developing a searchable index of all available content. The tools allowed them to automatically submit queries and get back results that they could present to their own users for what had been an…
A confession: This dispatch will not be coming to you from one of the long-devout Martha Wells faithful. I’m a convert, a curious reader who turned to Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries series after reading my colleague Meghan Herbst’s fantastic 2024 profile of the author, which left me questioning who would be challenged with taking on…
A key question in artificial intelligence is how often models go beyond just regurgitating and remixing what they have learned and produce truly novel ideas or insights. A new project from Google DeepMind shows that with a few clever tweaks these models can at least surpass human expertise designing certain types of algorithms—including ones that…
Google I/O is on May 20, but the annual developer conference will be so jam-packed with announcements that Google is opening the valve to release some news early. Today, during a virtual event dubbed The Android Show, the company showed off several features coming to the Android 16, starting with a fresh redesign. Here’s everything…
With the rise of mercenary spyware and other targeted threats, tech giants like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have spent the last few years trying to figure out how to protect the digital lives of their most at-risk, vulnerable users around the world. On mobile, the launch of Apple’s iOS Lockdown Mode in 2022 was one…
Digital scammers have never been so successful. Last year Americans lost $16.6 billion to online crimes, with almost 200,000 people reporting scams like phishing and spoofing to the FBI. More than $470 million was stolen in scams that started with a text message last year, according to the Federal Trade Commission. And as the biggest…
