Artificial Intelligence - Page 5

NVIDIA has officially unveiled a new family of open-source AI models it's calling Ising, which is aimed at solving some of the biggest challenges holding back quantum computing.

Quantum computing is the next stage of computing, and while we know that current quantum computers are intensely powerful, some solving equations that a classic computer would take millions of years to solve, in just seconds, they aren't particularly useful in everyday life. NVIDIA proposes to use AI to bridge the gap between quantum computing and real-world usefulness, and at the core of its recent announcement is its CUDA-Q platform.

NVIDIA explained that this new platform is designed to be "qubit-agnostic," meaning it can work with different types of quantum hardware without being tied to a specific architecture. Think "open-source-level" interoperability, but between hardware powering quantum computers. Ising introduces a layer of intelligence, designed to stabilize quantum processors and yield more consistent results.

We've reached a point where it's getting harder to tell which headlines are supposed to sound unbelievable. If you need the latest proof of that, Meta is reportedly building a photorealistic AI clone of Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook founder is developing an AI-powered 3D version of himself that can respond to queries in his absence and offer feedback to employees.

The AI avatar is being developed using a wealth of data on Zuckerberg's mannerisms, voice, tone, and public statements. According to the Financial Times, the CEO himself is involved in testing and training his AI character, with the team feeding it his latest views on company strategy so that interactions with employees feel more natural. Quite the irony.

The effort comes as Zuckerberg's hands-on involvement in the company is growing, with reports that he spends 5 to 10 hours a week vibe coding AI projects and participating in technical reviews. This isn't Meta's only effort of this kind, either. Reports have also suggested the company is developing a separate "CEO agent" to assist Zuckerberg by streamlining information retrieval and reducing his need to communicate directly with staff.

On Thursday, Intel and Google announced a multi-year collaboration to advance AI infrastructure. Under this program, Google will continue to deploy Intel Xeon systems for its AI and cloud infrastructure going forward. Moreover, both companies agreed to work together on the expanded co-development of custom silicon, especially targeted towards AI applications.

According to Intel's announcement, this collaboration is essential for the future of AI infrastructure, as Google and Intel will work together to improve performance and energy efficiency, and to optimize costs for Google's AI and cloud deployments. In simple terms, both tech giants are going to work together to best capitalize on the AI boom.

The outlined program has two major parts: first, Google will continue to use Intel's Xeon processors for its Cloud, AI, inference, and general-purpose workloads. This will include both current Xeon models and future models that will likely be developed with Google's specific needs in mind.

At a time when the internet is pushing back against AI slop flooding feeds and creeping into game development, YouTube is doubling down on AI features. This time, it is bringing a tool that lets creators build photorealistic AI avatars of themselves for use in Shorts. YouTube is framing the tool as a way to give creators more control over their digital identity and make content creation more flexible. Instead of repeatedly filming themselves, creators can rely on an avatar built using their own face and voice to do the heavy lifting.

Setting up an avatar is a one-time process that can be done through either the YouTube or YouTube Create app. Users capture a live selfie that also records their voice, with the system prompting them to read specific phrases to capture facial expressions and speech patterns. Once done, the system generates a realistic digital version of the user ready for use in short video clips.

From there, creating content is straightforward. Type in a prompt, wait for the AI to generate a clip of up to eight seconds, and stitch multiple clips together to produce a complete Short. YouTube also lets you add your avatar to eligible existing Shorts by tapping "Remix," then "Reimagine" with your avatar selected.

Google has introduced a new Notebooks feature for Gemini that helps you organize research materials. Google describes notebooks as "personal knowledge bases shared across Google products," designed to pull together scattered research, conversations, and documents into a single reusable space.

The feature arrives alongside Google's full integration of NotebookLM, its AI-powered research tool, into the Gemini app. Google launched a standalone NotebookLM app last year and added it as a source within Gemini shortly after, but now you can create and manage notebooks directly inside the chatbot.

Notebooks work similarly to regular Gemini chats but are designed to help you focus on a single topic. They keep all relevant information and resources together, allowing Gemini to reference them throughout your conversation. To get started, select "New notebook" from the side panel of the Gemini app, give it a name, and begin adding sources.

According to a new report from Nikkei Asia, citing an analysis from RationalFX, there have been approximately 78,557 layoffs in the tech industry so far this year. This covers the period running from January 1 to April 1, with the report also stating that nearly half, or around 37,638, of these job losses were directly linked to "AI implementation and workflow automation."

However, one additional stat adds a new layer to these figures: 76.7% of these cuts occurred in the United States, meaning roughly 60,000 of the 80,000 tech industry layoffs were U.S.-based. And when it comes to jobs being lost to AI for productivity gains and roles that are seemingly becoming redundant, it's believed that a large portion of these cuts could be driven by the expectation that AI will improve productivity, rather than by actual data reflecting this.

"I don't know if they are directly related to actual productivity gains," said Babak Hodjat, chief AI officer at Cognizant, of the job cuts. "Sometimes, you know, AI becomes the scapegoat from a financial perspective, like when a company hired too many, or they want to resize, and it gets blamed on AI." And with that, it would still take up to a year before companies start seeing notable productivity gains from AI.

Two new features aimed at helping users reach a wider audience and edit images are making their way onto Elon Musk's social media platform X. Both features are powered by xAI's Grok models and aim to improve the in-app experience while keeping users inside the app rather than relying on third-party tools.

Late Tuesday, X's head of product, Nikita Bier, announced that automatic translation is rolling out worldwide, allowing users to instantly read content in their preferred language without manually translating it. The feature is designed to give posts in any language a global reach and reduce reliance on Google Translate. Users who prefer the original text can tap the gear icon on a translated post and toggle off automatic translation for that particular language.

Alongside translation, X has also introduced a new in-app photo editor on iOS. The tool gives users access to drawing and text tools, plus a blur feature that lets users hide sensitive information, such as credit card or Social Security numbers, from images.

Anthropic's unreleased Claude Mythos is described as a "general-purpose, unreleased frontier model," but its coding capabilities are so powerful that it poses a real and unprecedented cybersecurity threat. According to the AI company, the Mythos Preview has already "found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities" in every major operating system and web browser.

Its coding capabilities are so strong that, apparently, only the "most skilled humans" could beat it at finding and exploiting these vulnerabilities. "Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely," Anthropic explains. "The fallout - for economies, public safety, and national security - could be severe."

And with that, Claude Mythos won't be getting a public release anytime soon, but it's currently being deployed as part of the new Project Glasswing initiative designed to "secure the world's most critical software."

Tesla's TeraFab project is a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, dubbed by Elon Musk as "the most epic chip-building exercise in history." Tesla claims its $25 billion Austin chip factory would roughly match 70% of TSMC's current global output. This would allow Tesla to reduce its reliance on foundries like TSMC and Samsung by building domestic semiconductor production lines capable of producing chips at volumes significantly larger than those of any other foundry.

However, given that Tesla has no node IP or semiconductor industry experience, many were skeptical about how a car company, a rocket company, and an AI startup could develop 2nm-class process technology from scratch and scale it to 1 million. The most likely path forward was always a partnership with an existing foundry, and it appears Intel has now been chosen for that role.

Intel confirmed its involvement in the TeraFab project on its official X page, stating that it aims to help TeraFab reach 1 trillion watts of compute per year for future AI and robotics workloads.

Recently, several people noticed that Microsoft's Copilot Terms of Use page for its AI tool, which has become increasingly embedded in the company's Windows 11 operating system and Microsoft 365 Office suite, included several notable disclaimers.

"Copilot is for entertainment purposes only," one reads. Adding that "it can make mistakes," "may not work as intended," and that users should not "rely on Copilot for important advice." And to top it all off, there's a final "Use Copilot at your own risk." Naturally, this statement makes it sound like Copilot should not be used in any formal or business-facing capacity, which runs counter to the company's AI push to get its vast customer base to use Copilot for everything from search to summarizing documents, and even when firing up Paint or Notepad.

To make matters worse, the disclosure also states that Microsoft makes "no guarantees" that Copilot will operate as intended, which kind of makes it seem more experimental than practical. Again, this contradicts Microsoft's big Copilot marketing push across all its software offerings, as well as the arrival of Copilot+ PCs, which include dedicated NPUs to run local AI Copilot tools.

AMD has announced that its annual AMD Advancing AI 2026 event is scheduled for July 22 to 23 in San Francisco, California. The annual AI everything event is designed to bring together developers, researchers, partners, and other customers to "experience the latest in AI infrastructure, architecture, and development."

As the company's flagship AI event, similar in scope to NVIDIA GTC, we can expect a few announcements during the opening keynote with AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su. During last year's event, AMD lifted the lid on its Instinct MI350 accelerators, teased its Helios rack, and even presented a look at EPYC CPUs powered by next-gen Zen 6 architecture.

With the AMD Instinct MI450 and Zen6-powered EPYC Venice CPUs on track for release this year, this will probably be the venue and time we get a deep dive and more details on these new technologies. Plus, introduce the next-gen Instinct MI500 accelerators, reportedly on track for 2027, and additional software updates.

Salesforce is bringing a massive overhaul of its popular enterprise communication platform, Slack. The headline is a serious makeover for Slackbot, the platform's AI-powered personal agent, transforming it from a simple chatbot into a full-fledged enterprise agent capable of drafting emails, scheduling meetings, and going through your inbox for specific information. This release puts Slack closer to what the company describes as an agentic operating system.

The most useful addition is "reusable AI skills", which let users define specific tasks for Slackbot from start to finish. Once created, these tasks can be deployed on demand across a variety of scenarios. There is also a strong focus on sharing and co-developing tools within an organization, meaning if you find a prompt useful, you can share it with your team. Slack comes with a built-in library of AI skills, but users can also create their own.

Slackbot also gets a Deep Research mode, and the chatbot will now conduct multi-step investigations rather than instantly responding. The new version also brings MCP (Model Context Protocol) client integration, allowing Slackbot to connect to and coordinate with external services and tools. This includes creating Google Slides, drafting Google Docs, and interacting with more than 2,600 apps in the Slack Marketplace.

Anthropic is one of the biggest AI companies on the planet, and a leak was detected on Tuesday morning that exposed the source code of Claude Code, a developer-focused capability that integrates Anthropic's AI assistant, Claude, into programming workflows.

According to the company, the leak was detected shortly after version 2.1.88 of Claude Code was made public, as the newly released version mistakenly included a source map file that exposed more than 500,000 lines of code and nearly 2,000 files. As you can probably imagine, internet sleuths were able to extract the files before Anthropic could deploy a fix, as a link to an archive containing them was posted to X by security researcher Chaofan Shou. The post caught the attention of more than 27 million users.

An Anthropic spokesperson confirmed the leak, saying the company is now reviewing steps to prevent a similar egregious human error from occurring again. The spokesperson provided a statement, saying, "Earlier today, a Claude Code release included some internal source code. No sensitive customer data or credentials were involved or exposed."

Meta has launched its newest smart glasses, developed in collaboration with Ray-Ban, aimed specifically at prescription wearers. Although people have already used Meta's current glasses with prescription lenses, the company has not actively targeted this market until now.

Meta claims its new glasses support nearly all prescriptions and are the most comfortable it has ever designed. CEO Mark Zuckerberg highlighted that billions of people wear glasses or contacts for vision correction, a market that Meta is now entering more deliberately.

The new glasses start at $499 and come in two styles: the Blayzer and the Scriber. The Blayzer adopts a rectangular design similar to the existing Wayfarer frames, while the Scriber offers a more rounded approach, close to the Headliner style. Both are part of the Gen 2 Ray-Ban Meta glasses lineup, but are significantly more customizable.

Meta is currently building a new $27 billion data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana, the company's biggest to date. Naturally, it's all about AI, with Meta noting that this 4 million-square-foot Richland Parish Data Center will play a "vital role in accelerating our AI progress, delivering over two gigawatts of compute capacity to train future open-source large language models."

With the energy requirements of these new data centers straining local grids and energy supplies, Meta has reportedly struck a deal with Entergy Louisiana to fund and help build seven new natural gas power plants in the region. With a combined power output of 5,200 megawatts, this is enough to cover "two gigawatts of compute" of the data center and then some.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the energy deal also includes 240 miles of 500-kilovolt transmission or power lines and battery storage. Now, although "natural gas" might sound good on paper, it's not exactly clean - it's still a fossil fuel. Albeit one with fewer emissions than coal-fired plants.

Google has developed three AI compression algorithms designed to reduce the memory footprint of large language models without sacrificing performance and quality. Published on Google Research, the tech is described as a way to shrink AI's working memory, known as the "KV cache", by using a form of vector quantization.

The company plans to present its findings at the ICLR 2026 conference next month, along with the three algorithms making this possible, namely TurboQuant, PolarQuant, and Quantized Johnson-Lindenstrauss.

TurboQuant would allow AI to remember more information while taking up less space and maintaining accuracy. There is a lot more detail in the Google Research article on how the compression technology works, but the results are what's exciting.

Apple is planning to open Siri to third-party artificial intelligence systems to bolster the iPhone's value proposition, as it is falling far behind in the race to develop the best AI-powered personal assistant.

Apple is lagging behind the competition in rolling out its own in-house AI-powered service, as the company initially intended that its AI-infused Siri upgrade would be released alongside the iPhone 16 line-up. However, due to technical difficulties and the product not meeting Apple's exceptionally high standards for uniformity across its product line, the company delayed the release of the new, smarter version of Siri until sometime in 2026.

Now, a report from Apple insider and Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman has revealed that the Cupertino company is planning to open up Siri to artificial intelligence systems as part of its Siri overhaul in the upcoming iOS 27 operating system update. Notably, Siri is already capable of pulling up ChatGPT for any answers that it can't work out on-device, but following this update, users will reportedly be able to select from other competing services.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang recently sat down for an interview where he asked about his estimated timeline on a company achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), to which he answered, "I think we've achieved AGI," albeit with some caveats.

For quite some time, Huang has been an advocate for the achievement of AGI being determined by the definition of AGI, and that definition is entirely dependent on how any given person would describe what an AGI is. In the instance of the interview with Huang, Lex Fridman proposes that an AGI would be capable of replacing Huang at the helm of NVIDIA, or be able to achieve what Huang has achieved with the company.

For example, Fridman says this particular AGI would be capable of starting, growing, and running a successful technology company, and that company needs to be worth more than $1 billion. Fridman asked Huang how long he thinks an artificial system such as this is away. In response, Huang said sharply, "I think it's now. I think we have achieved AGI". Fridman followed up by asking if it's possible for a company to run on an AI system. Huang replied, "Possible. And the reason for that is this. You $1 billion, and you didn't say forever."

President Trump has announced a list of appointees to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). The newly formed council will have one goal: advising the President and providing recommendations on strengthening American leadership in both scientific and technological fields.

The council will be co-chaired by David Sacks and Michael Kratsios. Sacks, a general partner in Craft Ventures, a venture capital fund, and Kratsios, the current Science Advisor to the President of the United States, will be at the helm of the council, which includes some extremely notable names in the technology space, particularly, NVIDIA's Jensen Huang, AMD's CEO Lisa Su, and Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Additionally, Marc Andreessen, former software engineer and venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz, is a named member, alongside Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, David Friedberg, founder of Climate Corporation, and others. Notably, since the PCAST council was formed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, each President has chosen their own PCAST advisory board, which typically consists of scientists, engineers, and industry leaders at the current time.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, like other technology leaders, is all in on AI. According to a new Wall Street Journal report, Meta is building an AI agent to help Zuckerberg with his duties as Meta CEO. This could be as simple as assisting him with information retrieval, though the report is light on details on how it will work and fit into the CEO's day-to-day.

Interestingly, the report notes that information retrieval would help Zuckerberg obtain answers without having to "go through layers of people," suggesting that one of its functions is to reduce his need to engage and communicate with his team. This news of a potential AI agent serving as a co-CEO of sorts at Meta, or as an assistant to the CEO, doesn't come from Meta itself but from a "person familiar with the project."

However, when it comes to leveraging AI and integrating it into Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed that it's happening. During the company's January earnings call, he said, "We're investing in AI-native tooling so individuals at Meta can get more done." Adding that it's going to help flatten teams and help the company "get more done."