America’s AI watchdog is losing its bite
Most Americans encounter the Federal Trade Commission only if they’ve been scammed: It handles identity theft, fraud, and stolen data. During the Biden administration, the agency went after AI companies for scamming customers with deceptive advertising or harming people by selling irresponsible technologies. With yesterday’s announcement of President Trump’s AI Action Plan, that era may…
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Google DeepMind’s new AI can help historians understand ancient Latin inscriptions
Google DeepMind has unveiled new artificial-intelligence software that could help historians recover the meaning and context behind ancient Latin engravings. Aeneas can analyze words written in long-weathered stone to say when and where they were originally inscribed. It follows Google’s previous archaeological tool Ithaca, which also used deep learning to reconstruct and contextualize ancient text,…
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Five things you need to know about AI right now
Last month I gave a talk at SXSW London called “Five things you need to know about AI”—my personal picks for the five most important ideas in AI right now. I aimed the talk at a general audience, and it serves as a quick tour of how I’m thinking about AI in 2025. I’m sharing…
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AI companies have stopped warning you that their chatbots aren’t doctors
AI companies have now mostly abandoned the once-standard practice of including medical disclaimers and warnings in response to health questions, new research has found. In fact, many leading AI models will now not only answer health questions but even ask follow-ups and attempt a diagnosis. Such disclaimers serve an important reminder to people asking AI…
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A major AI training data set contains millions of examples of personal data
Millions of images of passports, credit cards, birth certificates, and other documents containing personally identifiable information are likely included in one of the biggest open-source AI training sets, new research has found. Thousands of images—including identifiable faces—were found in a small subset of DataComp CommonPool, a major AI training set for image generation scraped from…
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How to run an LLM on your laptop
MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done. Simon Willison has a plan for the end of the world. It’s a USB stick, onto which he has loaded a couple of his favorite open-weight LLMs—models that have been shared publicly by their creators and that can, in principle, be downloaded and run…
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These four charts show where AI companies could go next in the US
No one knows exactly how AI will transform our communities, workplaces, and society as a whole. Because it’s hard to predict the impact AI will have on jobs, many workers and local governments are left trying to read the tea leaves to understand how to prepare and adapt. A new interactive report released today by…
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Google’s generative video model Veo 3 has a subtitles problem
As soon as Google launched its latest video-generating AI model at the end of May, creatives rushed to put it through its paces. Released just months after its predecessor, Veo 3 allows users to generate sounds and dialogue for the first time, sparking a flurry of hyperrealistic eight-second clips stitched together into ads, ASMR videos,…
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AI text-to-speech programs could “unlearn” how to imitate certain people
A technique known as “machine unlearning” could teach AI models to forget specific voices—an important step in stopping the rise of audio deepfakes, where someone’s voice is copied to carry out fraud or scams. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have revolutionized the quality of text-to-speech technology so that people can convincingly re-create a piece of…
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AI’s giants want to take over the classroom
School’s out and it’s high summer, but a bunch of teachers are plotting how they’re going to use AI this upcoming school year. God help them. On July 8, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic announced a $23 million partnership with one of the largest teachers’ unions in the United States to bring more AI into K–12…
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