In 2024, Scottish futurist David Wood was part of an informal roundtable discussion at an artificial intelligence (AI) conference in Panama, when the conversation veered to how we can avoid the most disastrous AI futures. His sarcastic answer was far from reassuring. First, we would need to amass the entire body of AI research ever … Read more
Artificial intelligence (AI) models can blackmail and threaten humans with endangerment when there is a conflict between the model’s goals and users’ decisions, a new study has found. In a new study published 20 June, researchers from the AI company Anthropic gave its large language model (LLM), Claude, control of an email account with access … Read more
The more advanced artificial intelligence (AI) gets, the more it “hallucinates” and provides incorrect and inaccurate information. Research conducted by OpenAI found that its latest and most powerful reasoning models, o3 and o4-mini, hallucinated 33% and 48% of the time, respectively, when tested by OpenAI’s PersonQA benchmark. That’s more than double the rate of the … Read more
China has launched its first cluster of satellites for a planned artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer constellation in space. The 12 satellites are the beginnings of a proposed 2,800-satellite fleet led by the company ADA Space and Zhejiang Lab that will one day form the Three-Body Computing Constellation, a satellite network that will directly process data … Read more
Scientists have devised a way to store and read data from individual atoms embedded in tiny crystals only a few millimeters in size (where 1 mm is 0.04 inches). If scaled up, it could one day lead to ultra-high density storage systems capable of holding petabytes of data on a single disc — where 1 … Read more
Scientists say artificial intelligence (AI) has crossed a critical “red line” and has replicated itself. In a new study, researchers from China showed that two popular large language models (LLMs) could clone themselves. “Successful self-replication under no human assistance is the essential step for AI to outsmart [humans], and is an early signal for rogue … Read more
Scientists have just resurrected “ELIZA,” the world’s first chatbot, from long-lost computer code — and it still works extremely well. Using dusty printouts from MIT archives, these “software archaeologists” discovered defunct code that had been lost for 60 years and brought it back to life. ELIZA was developed in the 1960s by MIT professor Joseph … Read more
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) poses questions not just for technology and the expanded plethora of possibilities it brings, but for morality, ethics and philosophy too. Ushering in this new technology carries implications for health, law, the military, the nature of work, politics and even our own identities — what makes us human and … Read more
The next evolution of the internet could involve digitally transmitting the sense of touch, which may transform remote surgery and usher in a whole new era of online gaming. Researchers have developed a “Haptic Codecs for the Tactile Internet” (HCTI) standard that allows haptic information to be sent both ways across a network via data … Read more
We are interacting with artificial intelligence (AI) online not only more than ever — but more than we realize — so researchers asked people to converse with four agents, including one human and three different kinds of AI models, to see whether they could tell the difference. The “Turing test,” first proposed as “the imitation … Read more
