The use case: Otis is the world’s first cinematic AI experience — a wise elder on a cinematic porch at sunset, back turned, ready to talk through your hardest business decisions, leadership challenges, and high stakes conversations. No scheduling. No small talk. Just honest wisdom on demand.

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OTIS — THE CINEMATIC AI EXPERIENCE

Every C-Suite Executive needs a wise advisor in their corner.

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Follow Otis on Kickstarter now →

The vibes are off at OpenAI

OpenAI’s current batch of public controversies started early in the year. At the end of February, the company agreed to an apparently expansive Pentagon contract that its competitor Anthropic had refused to sign out of concerns about autonomous weapons.

Then came the product announcements. Last month, OpenAI unexpectedly announced it would discontinue Sora, an AI video-generation app that it had planned to roll into ChatGPT. It exited its Disney partnership so rapidly that the companies had reportedly been working together just 30 minutes before Disney found out about the shutdown.

“We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests,” OpenAI’s Fidji Simo reportedly told employees last month, as the company announced it would pivot to focusing on enterprise and coding tools. Even its once-heralded Stargate data center project may have largely stalled.

At the start of this week, a piece in The New Yorker expanded on years of reports of Altman potentially misleading OpenAI’s board, former company executives, and even contemporaries in roles he held before cofounding OpenAI.

As the pressure builds to square OpenAI’s revenue with its nearly unprecedented spending, the company is looking to put its compute behind projects with the highest profit potential. It’s attempting to catch up to leading rival Anthropic’s current popularity in coding, while also facing significant competition from Google, since Gemini is well integrated within Google’s ecosystem of apps and tools. It’s possible the company will find a way to pull ahead — but things may not be going as smoothly as Altman hopes....

Read on The Verge

Silicon Valley forgot what normal people want

What NFTs, AI and the metaverse tell us about “thought leadership”!

One of the most mortifying things about knowing a lot of techies is listening to them tell me excitedly about some very important discovery that they believe they have made. Recently, I ran into an acquaintance of mine, who began talking my ear off about an amazing discovery he’d made with LLMs. Knowledge, it turns out, is structured into language! You could put one word into ChatGPT and it might understand what you wanted, or make up a word and see if it understood what you meant! These amazing new tools have revealed that the English corpus contains so much about its speakers! - He concluded that LLMs are a discovery on par with writing.

While this particular kind of hubris makes people crashing bores, it’s not just an annoying personal trait. It seems to have seeped into the professional side of Silicon Valley as well.

Within recent memory, people who made software and hardware understood their job was to serve their customer. It was to identify a need, and then fill it. But at some point following the financial crisis, would-be entrepreneurs got it into their heads that their job was to invent the future, and consumers’ job was to go along with that invented future. My guess is that they’re aping what they thought Steve Jobs was doing when he, for instance, got rid of the optical drives on the MacBook Air. At some point, our Silicon Valley overlords forgot that in order for their vision of the future to be adopted, people had to want it.

The people who tell us that AI will dominate our future and take our jobs are the people who are hoping that will be true. They may be hoping this because it makes them feel important, or because they want to be billionaires, or because they simply do not understand other people. I think that final point is underestimated. If you are going to provide me with a robot servant, I have a very clear bar: It’s gotta be at least as much bang for my buck as my dishwasher. (famously people’s #1 task for future robots is - do the dishes surveys say)

The actual use for LLMs in most normal people’s lives is cheating on schoolwork. For adults, it’s looking up information — LLMs are in the process of supplanting Google Search. Google had been degrading its search project for some time, and the results just kept getting worse. This opened the door for an alternative, and the LLMs stepped through.

How is it that all these wunderkinds trying to build the next product to take over the world haven’t thought about this? I think the answer is simple. They do not have much in common with normal people, and haven’t thought much about what normal people’s lives are like, or what normal people value. What they have been doing instead is getting high on their own supply — listening to VC podcasts, freaking themselves out about whether they’ll be able to keep up with AI agents, and otherwise getting increasingly more detached from reality.

The hubristic entrepreneurs (and the VCs who need them) are a relatively small slice of the population. It may be the case that the real way to shape the future isn’t to dictate it to consumers. It is simpler just to give people things they actually want….

Read on The Verge

Apple debuts Business Service that includes offering Ads in Map

Apple Inc. introduced a new platform that helps businesses manage devices and reach customers, in part by making it easier to advertise on its Maps app. The offering — called Apple Business — lets users configure employee groups and device settings, the company said in a statement Tuesday. The free service will be available April 14 in more than 200 countries and regions, Apple said.

Apple Business, a new platform for businesses of all kinds that combines cloud services, device management, and collaboration features into one system.Businesses may use the platform to control staff devices, set up applications, and set up email and calendars for their own use. It also has iCloud storage choices and AppleCare+ subscription programs. Companies in the U.S. and Canada will be allowed to put ads at the top of search results and in suggested places. This is a sign that Apple is expanding its advertising business outside its usual offerings.

Apple is more interested in getting businesses to use its products and services, especially because it wants to get more corporate customers….

Read on Bloomberg

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How AI is transforming the C-suite

Mastercard is betting the next wave of AI won’t just analyze transactions — it will help run companies. The payments giant is building what it calls a “Virtual C-Suite,” a group of AI agents designed to give small businesses the kind of financial and operational insights typically reserved for large corporations. The first digital executive, a virtual CFO, is expected to launch later this year through Mastercard’s network of financial institutions, accounting firms, and software partners. A virtual CFO helps owners manage cash flow, working capital, and financial risk.

“Many small-business owners are stretched thin—acting as CEO, CFO, and COO all at once,” Mark Barnett, Mastercard’s global head of small and medium enterprises, told me. The timing may be significant for small businesses, which support the U.S. economy but continue to grapple with economic uncertainty. U.S. small-business sentiment fell again last month, slipping from 99.3 in January to 98.8 in February, according to a report by the National Federation of Independent Business released on Tuesday. The net share of owners expecting higher real sales dropped 8 points, erasing the strong gains seen earlier this year.

At the same time, many small companies can’t afford a full-time finance chief—the kind of expertise that can help navigate an uncertain environment. Instead, they are increasingly turning to fractional or virtual CFOs, a trend that is growing quickly....

Read the original on Fortune

Facebook and AI. It’s actually paying off

Meta Platforms(Facebook) doesn’t sell artificial-intelligence services or data-center capacity, but it might be reaping some of the richest benefits from the AI boom so far. Meta offered evidence that AI is helping its advertising-business boom like never before. “I think what we’re seeing is sort of a sustainable trend that’s largely grounded in some of the AI investments that they’ve made,” said Benjamin Black, an internet analyst at Deutsche Bank.

“Our world-class recommendation systems are already driving meaningful growth across our apps and ads business. But we think that the current systems are primitive compared to what will be possible soon,” Mark Zuckerberg said on a call with investors and analysts.

Those actions led users to click on ads on Facebook 3.5% more often and to a gain of more than 1% in conversions, meaning purchases, subscriptions or leads, on Instagram, she said. Other AI-related improvements led to a 3% increase in conversions across its family of apps. On the ad-buying side, Meta has also been working toward using AI to automate ad creation for businesses that want to advertise their products or services on Facebook and Instagram. “The more compute the ad platform gets, the far better it performs, and that’s a real structural advantage that Meta has,” said Black, the internet analyst….

Read the original on Wall Street Journal

Google for Nonprofits 10+ new no-cost AI tools

Google for Nonprofits is introducing new Workspace for Nonprofits and Ad Grants features free of charge to support nonprofits in furthering their missions. However, only one in five nonprofits report that at least half their organization uses AI — and this is despite nearly nine out of 10 reporting a positive productivity gain when using AI apps and features. Today Google for Nonprofits is launching three new updates to help nonprofits build AI capacity to continue to serve their communities.

With Workspace for Nonprofits, organizations can help up to 2,000 employees or volunteers do their best work every day at no-cost across Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Meet, NotebookLM and Gemini app. Now, more than 10 additional features are included with enterprise security and data protections through the no-cost Workspace for Nonprofits plan. These include NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews — lively deep dive discussions between two AI hosts who can summarize key topics from your sources in more than 50 languages — and Gemini’s Deep Research, which helps save hours by browsing the web, analyzing information and developing comprehensive research reports in real-time.

Ad Grants can now run on eligible Google Maps’ placements. For more than 20 years, Ad Grants has driven more than 14 billion visits to nonprofits’ websites from no-cost Search ads. With new AI-powered features, like Performance Max Ad Grants campaigns, organizations are able to increase their reach to even more people. Now, we’re expanding Ad Grants to run on eligible Google Maps placements in Performance Max campaigns free of charge. Ads can appear beside, above or below search results on Google Maps, including the Maps app, allowing nonprofits to engage people at a local level. Since its inception, Google.org has provided more than $18 billion in donated products to nonprofits.

How Google Ad Grants works you’ll receive $10,000 USD of in-kind advertising from Google each month to create text-based ads, and get access to tools to help you build effective campaigns that can display on Google Search and Maps....

Read the original on Google.org

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Doomsday AI report goes viral

A new article offering an apocalyptic vision of humanity’s future with artificial intelligence has gone viral and caused stock prices to tumble in major tech and financial firms. “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis,” published Sunday by Citrini Research, strikes a doomsday tone about the looming threat of AI to white-collar work, and what could potentially lead to a “global intelligence crisis.”

“For the entirety of modern economic history, human intelligence has been the scarce input,” wrote Citrini Research in the report. “We are now experiencing the unwind of that premium.” It continued: “Machine intelligence is now a competent and rapidly improving substitute for human intelligence across a growing range of tasks. The financial system, optimized over decades for a world of scarce human minds, is repricing. That repricing is painful, disorderly, and far from complete.”

The authors noted the article was not a prediction, but a hypothetical situation as if it were June 2028, and posed the question of whether “our AI bullishness continues to be right…and what if that’s actually bearish?” Despite the cautionary note, the article spread like wildfire Monday. Shares in software firms that utilize AI - Datadog, CrowdStrike and Zscaler - each dropped more than 9 percent. IBM, which has an integrated AI development studio Watsonx, also saw its stock drop 13 percent, in its worst one-day performance since 2000. American Express, KKR and Blackstone, all mentioned in the Citrini post, also fell, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The fears of AI disruption are “happening sooner than most folks anticipated,” Jordan Rizzuto, chief investment officer for investment strategy research firm GammaRoad Capital Partners, told the Journal. “Such is the nature of an accelerating technology.”....

Read the original on Citrini Research

Some AI gig workers make $1,000 an hour

A common proclamation made by tech leaders is that while artificial intelligence will destroy jobs, it will also create many new ones. But what kinds of new careers will AI spark? And, more importantly, will they last? Few spell out what will replace the swathes of white-collar roles that could be automated out of existence in the coming years. New forms of employment such as AI researchers and prompt engineers are few and far between.

There is one clear example of “new work” being triggered by AI: professional trainers for the software models. Several startups with names like Surge AI (valued last year at $25 billion) and Turing (valued at $2.2 billion, according to Pitchbook) populate a new market hiring white-collar professionals to train AI systems, usually as contractors, to form a new kind of office-worker gig economy. Among the biggest is Mercor.io Corp., founded in 2023 in San Francisco and valued at $10 billion, and frequently named as one of the fastest growing startups in AI. Around 30,000 people from a wide range of disciplines — lawyers, doctors, financial consultants, cooks, osteopaths — are paid hourly by Mercor to train AI models to become more proficient in those fields, often for clients like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Mercor plans to grow its contractor base “by many orders of magnitude,” founder and Chief Executive Officer Brendan Foody tells me.

Their work is done in secret, protected by hefty non-disclosure agreements, and is technically challenging. Contractors sometimes create scoring guides known as “evals” or “rubrics,” which are then used to teach AI models and evaluate their responses, a bit like designing the bar exam to test human lawyers. Grim and paradoxical as it seems to train an AI that could replace you, Mercor’s contractors say the pay is excellent. One of them, who declined to be identified, told me they’ll never make as much money as they are right now.

But let’s presume there are roughly 100,000 professionals doing expert AI training work today, on top of the millions more doing the traditional low-paid data labeling. It is hard to tell if this will be the new form of work that fills the hole AI could leave in labor markets, while many other jobs morph. But for this new generation of professional gig workers, the future looks murky when you consider what happened to the older market of lower-paid data labelers. Many are now being squeezed out of their roles, with software handling simpler tasks and the new, expert trainers taking over complex ones….

Read the original on Bloomberg

Reuters scales AI for regulated industries

One million professionals have chosen CoCounsel, the company’s professional-grade AI technology, across 107 countries and territories. The milestone reflects a broader transition underway across high-stakes industries including legal, risk, compliance, tax, accounting, audit and global trade professionals. AI is moving from experimentation to production. Rather than standalone tools, firms are embedding AI directly into daily workflows where accuracy, sourcing, and data protection are essential.

It integrates into the tools professionals already use, analyzes licensed content refined over 175 years, incorporates expert-developed validation logic, and delivers structured, citation-backed outputs. “Professionals are not deciding whether to use AI anymore. They are deciding which AI they trust when their reputation and their clients’ data are on the line,” said Steve Hasker, President and Chief Executive Officer, Thomson Reuters. “CoCounsel is built for moments when being almost right is not good enough. It is grounded in decades of authoritative content, validated by domain experts.

The next generation of CoCounsel Legal, entering beta soon, is designed around conversational task execution. Soon, legal professionals within law firms and corporations, will be able to describe an objective as they would brief a colleague. CoCounsel will build a plan, retrieve authority from Westlaw and Practical Law, search relevant user documents and precedent, analyze the material, verify that citations remain in good law, and deliver structured work product within a single system....

Read the original on PR newswire

At some point, your job changes. You probably thought you were done managing inboxes, double-checking CRMs, or chasing follow-ups across Slack threads.

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At some point, your job changes. You probably thought you were done managing inboxes, double-checking CRMs, or chasing follow-ups across Slack threads.

But as the business grows, those small things multiply. And suddenly you’re the one who still oversees everything.

The next level of growth isn’t about adding more tools. It’s about removing yourself from the middle of routine execution.

That’s where Wing comes in. Wing embeds managed support into the parts of your business that require steady follow-through—sales, operations, admin, and customer support.

• Follow-ups

• CRM upkeep

• Inbox triage

• Reporting

• Scheduling

—Handled.

With Wing in place, you focus on direction instead of coordination.

If you’re tired of being the bottleneck, this is a good moment to change the structure.

For Small Business Alley readers, Wing is offering $900 off onboarding only this week.

Remove the bottleneck - $900 off

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Inside Apple’s AI shake-up

In June 2025, I reported on a major inflection point inside Apple Inc. After a disappointing launch of the Apple Intelligence platform and delays to a new Siri digital assistant, software chief Craig Federighi and other executives were seriously considering sidelining the company’s internal AI models in favor of a third-party provider. The story sent shockwaves through Apple’s foundation models team, which builds its underlying AI technology. Beyond the reputational sting, the report raised existential questions about the future of the group — and the jobs of its employees. Within hours of that story’s publication on June 30, Apple’s top AI leadership moved to contain the fallout.

Mike Rockwell, who oversees Siri, and John Giannandrea, then Apple’s head of AI, convened an emergency all-hands meeting with the foundation models team. The message from leadership was unequivocal: Apple wasn’t putting its own models on the back burner. Rockwell even dismissed the article as “bulls--t,” according to people in the meeting. Few in the room were persuaded. It was obvious that Apple Intelligence lagged behind rival platforms and that the Siri delay was deeply embarrassing. The company was at risk of missing the biggest technology shift since the internet, and seeking outside help made a lot of sense. Over the following months, the models group steadily lost talent — including its leader, Ruoming Pang.

At the time, the company was already in discussions with both Anthropic PBC and OpenAI about supplying models to rebuild Siri and power parts of Apple Intelligence. At the start, Google wasn’t considered a likely partner for this. The Alphabet Inc.-owned company wasn’t seen as the leading tech provider. By August, negotiations with Anthropic had stalled. The startup was seeking several billion dollars annually over multiple years, terms that weren’t favorable to Apple. And partnering with OpenAI posed its own problems: That company was actively poaching Apple engineers and pursuing its own hardware. That left Google....

Read the original on Bloomberg

***

AI’s next frontier

The English engineer, Henry Mill, submitted the first-ever patent for a “machine transcribing letters” in 1714. It never actually went into production, but it was a forerunner of the typewriter and then the electronic keyboard: 312 years later, Christian Klein, CEO of software giant SAP, is noting the end of an era. “The end of the keyboard is near,” he tells me. “When you encounter voice recognition from many of these large language models, [it] is super strong. Now we have to do some work to translate voice into business language and business data.” SAP’s prediction that “data-inputting” via typing will end in the next two to three years at the firm has significance well beyond the death of QWERTY.

“The future will be, for sure, that you are not typing any data information into an SAP system. You can instead ask certain analytical questions with your voice. You can trigger operational task workflows. You can also make entries in the system with your voice—performance feedback, pipeline entries, et cetera. The technological capabilities are there, it really is now about the execution.”

He argues that there are two broad categories of businesses when it comes to AI adoption. First, the company that says, “AI is really changing the way I run my business.” Then the other that says, “I invested a ton of money, but I see rather low value in it.” The latter might be viewing AI as an efficiency hack for one division or function. The issue here is that there is no reach across to other parts of the firm.

He gives an example of a large consumer goods company SAP is working with which is beginning to link customer-demand planning with company financial planning and then with inventory control—a laborious, often monthslong process. “They said, ‘Okay, this agent really is predicting the demand much more intelligently than all the human beings I had in planning,’” he said. “‘But it still always takes months until I adjust the inventory—and the inventory is dependent on procurement and the manufacturing side.’ So we are now building, with agents, an end-to-end planning scenario which helps them optimize inventory by 20%. This is real money.”

Applying AI horizontally throughout the business, rather than vertically in divisions, is key. Add in training of your employees, and the transformational effects of AI can finally begin to be realized....

Read the original on Fortune

***

CEO of Glassdoor and Indeed - AI is not replacing workers

Diane Brady talks to Recruit Holdings CEO about current hiring and firing trends. As CEO of Recruit Holdings, the $23 billion-a-year parent of Indeed and Glassdoor, among others, Hisayuki “Deko” Idekoba thinks a lot about global labor markets. Down in Europe; up everywhere else.

Only a small fraction of layoffs are directly attributed to AI so far. Yet perceptions among workers (especially Gen Z) are far more pessimistic, feeding distrust and “AI anxiety.” “People are screaming that AI is replacing people. That’s totally not true. We’re not seeing that kind of data at all,” he told me. (U.S. employment data and my conversations with other leaders reinforce that conclusion.) Tech layoffs are highly visible but represent a small share of total employment; he believes they reflect post‑pandemic over‑hiring more than AI‑driven job destruction.

Big changes are coming in terms of how leaders source and assess talent. AI is creating a host of new challenges for employers, from generating a tsunami of automated applications—often in the millions for Fortune 500 companies—to enabling applicants to hide deficits in writing, thinking and analysis because of LLMs. As a result, sites like Indeed are playing a bigger role in verifying qualified candidates to narrow the funnel, even doing basic background checks upfront and helping employers assess how the roles they’re hiring for are likely to evolve. “Your team is spending a crazy amount of time on this,” he said. “This year, I think CEOs will be a little more sophisticated about the ROI.”

His teams are designing AI agents to reach out to job seekers on behalf of employers on his platforms, to screen and interact with applicants. Not only does that ease the workload and cut costs for HR teams, it creates better interactions with applicants and hopefully more affection for the employer’s brand, even if they don’t end up getting hired….

Read the original on Fortune

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***

Life template for the AI era

Most of us are still living by an Industrial Age life script — learn, work, retire. Yet, AI with human-like capabilities, able to operate around the clock, is making that script irrelevant. Businesses are at the forefront of this shift — they operate at the edge of change, where new skill demands surface long before traditional systems can respond. For the past century, the broad framework for life progression — learning, career, retirement — has been largely unchanged. Innovation did occur within each stage, yet it did so largely within the existing framework, and new pathways to support a more fluid reality have not materialized at scale. And while AI is now seen as indispensable in the workplace, with businesses considering its use critical to adaptation, teachers are struggling with how to integrate it into the educational experience.

Our scaffolding for work and retirement similarly lacks the plasticity needed to support more dynamic career paths and people’s desire to continue making meaningful contributions into later life. Longer lifespans and rapid skill turnover suggest careers will be more fluid and people will have to cycle through multiple “learn – unlearn – relearn – work” phases over a lifetime, with periods of renewal built in. Finally, we lack widely-adopted pathways for late career contributions. Too often, experienced workers end up competing for roles optimized for early-career strengths, when competencies that often deepen with experience – judgment under ambiguity, systems thinking, the ability to mentor, to de-escalate, to build trust — could deliver significant value. Intentional redesign must yield systems that allow for a gradual ramp-down without losing status, income, or belonging.

Education, work, and retirement are ultimately institutional answers to fundamental societal needs: turning people into capable, value-anchored individuals who can navigate and improve their world; converting human potential into value, for oneself and society; and providing structured support for the work transition that comes with age, health changes or changing priorities.

In the US, apprenticeships have historically been associated with the trades, but that’s changing. At Cognizant, we’re partnering with educational institutions on paid apprenticeships that offer work-based learning and serve as early talent pipelines. A new life template also needs explicit structures for later-life contribution, with recognized roles and pathways that enable workers to change how they contribute over time. With life expectancy at around 78 years in the US and evidence linking a strong sense of purpose to better cognitive health. Businesses play a critical role in building a new, integrated system of learning and work because they see change first. They own the tools and data shaping modern work, and they sense when a capability becomes obsolete or when a new one is needed....

Read the original on Fortune

***

Recruiters vs AI

Manny harried recruiters would have greeted the release of ChatGPT with glee. At last, a tool that could ease the burden of drafting job descriptions, scheduling interviews and rejecting candidates. Like happy beachgoers who cannot see an approaching tsunami, they failed to predict what came next. A giant wave of AI- generated applications has washed over them. The number of job applications an average candidate sends has risen by 239% since ChatGPT’s release in 2022, according to global data collected by Greenhouse, a provider of applicant-tracking software. Paid services like LazyApply and aiApply let candidates submit applications while they sleep, tailoring résumés and cover letters to a tee.

AI has even made it easier for spies and fraudsters to infiltrate companies. Last month Amazon blocked 1,800 applications from North Koreans applying for remote IT jobs. Gartner, a consultancy, predicts that by 2028 as many as one in four candidate profiles could be fake. Inundated recruiters are taking various steps in response. Some are politely asking candidates to refrain from using chatbots. Anthropic, an AI lab, asks candidates not to submit entirely AI- generated cover letters. So does Mastercard, a payments provider. Others are capping the number of applications a person can submit. OpenAI, another AI lab, limits candidates to a maximum of five over a six-month period. Companies are also speeding up their use of AI to help winnow the growing pile of résumés and cover letters. Two-thirds of recruiters plan to increase their use of the technology to conduct screening calls, according to data from LinkedIn, a social network for professionals. Many also use AI to sift through applications and flag those that match the criteria for a job, though firms such as KPMG, a professional-services giant, are keen to emphasize that humans make final decisions. AI models can even recommend applicants for one role as candidates for another, says Alicia Pittman, who directs hiring for BCG, a consultancy. Still, the time it takes for companies to fill vacancies has declined only slightly since 2021, according to Ashby, a recruiting-software company. When it comes to adopting AI, recruiters face a structural disadvantage compared with job applicants, reckons Robert Newry, co-founder of Arctic Shores, a psychometric testing firm. Jobseekers need not worry whether an AI tool will run afoul of anti-discrimination or data-protection laws. They do not need to check with their boss or IT department before adopting the latest technology. “I say to my clients: ‘In the arms race between you and the candidate, you will lose,’” says Mr Newry.

Eventually the rise of AI may change hiring more fundamentally. Companies could rely more on tasks that cannot be pasted into chatbots, such as visual puzzles, says Mr Newry. They might also rely more on finding candidates before they even think to apply. Juicebox, a recruitment startup, offers a service called “PeopleGPT” that automates the process of hunting for possible hires across the web. It says that many of its clients have reduced the time it takes to find candidates by half. LinkedIn has rolled out a “Hiring Assistant” for recruiters that trawls the site for suitable candidates.

Companies may one day abandon the job application entirely, to the delight of recruiters and candidates alike. Daniel Chait, boss of Greenhouse, reckons that both sides will eventually use AI agents to talk to one another and determine whether they might be a match. “We’re at the point today where it’s automating tasks,” Mr Chait says. “I’m eager to get to the part where we can think about why we have job posts at all.” Until then, recruiters will have to wade through a sea of em-dashes and eerily polished résumés as they search for the perfect hire....

Read the original on the Economist

***

Gemini AI-powered Electric Vehicle

Volvo’s ground-breaking, mid-sized electric SUV will be the first to ship with Google’s Gemini AI assistant already baked in, allowing for more natural conversations between occupants and the car itself. Combining hardware from Nvidia and Qualcomm with both Google and in-house developed software, Volvo says its brilliantly-named ‘HuginCore’ system is powerful enough to deliver highly personalized and deeply integrated responses via Google’s Gemini voice assistant.

Complex tasks can be managed through more natural and “multi-turn” conversation, rather than drivers having to remember specific commands or by having to prod various menus that pop up on the touchscreen display. Volvo gives a number of potential use cases for the technology, such as searching for a hotel booking address in a linked email account (Gmail presumably works best), checking if a recently bought item fits in your EX60 trunk, or brainstorming ideas for an upcoming road trip.

Rather than merely acting as a built-in voice assistant that takes care of a limited amount of vehicle functionality, Gemini integration means drivers and occupants can deal with life admin via any linked Google services, as well as ask more generic questions. It’s also tipped to play nicely with Google Maps, which has become widely regarded as the dominant mapping and navigation service for drivers. This means owners can check if locations are open and even book hotels and restaurants on the move with natural voice prompts, in theory at least. The next-generation Snapdragon Cockpit Platform from Qualcomm provides the highest levels of processing power ever seen on a Volvo, while Nvidia’s latest Drive AGX Orin system-on-a-chip runs the operating system as a whole. Combined, this is said to offer a lag-free infotainment system with maps that load instantly and voice assistants that don’t take an age to compute the request and respond.

The race is now on for automotive manufacturers to deliver AI-powered voice assistants that are actually useful. Up until this point, they have been clunky, to say the least, with response times long and multiple attempts often required to get the desired answer….

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Anthropic’s new ‘Cowork’ AI agent

Anthropic’s Claude Code tool is having a moment: It’s recently become popular among software developers for its use of agents to write code, run tests, call tools, and multitask. In recent months the company has begun to stress that Claude Code isn’t just for developers, but can let other kinds of workers build websites, create presentations, and do research—and stories about non-coders completing interesting projects have filled social media.

The latest offering, called Cowork, is a new version (and a rebranding) of Claude Code for work beyond coding, and it could dramatically widen the audience for Anthropic’s tools within the enterprise. Cowork is in “research preview” and is available only to Anthropic’s $100-per-month Max plan subscribers; there’s a waitlist for users on other plans.

While Claude Code requires an API key and runs in the terminal, users can access Cowork through the Claude desktop app with a familiar chatbot interface. Most important, Cowork is built to access content stored in the file system on the user’s computer. A user can give the tool permission to modify, or just read, files in a given folder. They can also allow Claude to create new files or organize existing ones. The new tool could help Anthropic as it eyes an IPO in 2026 (reportedly at a $350 billion valuation), and may put additional pressure on Microsoft, which offers a number of predesigned AI agents (for things like research, analysis, and meeting facilitation) as part of its Copilot AI assistant.

Cowork can do simple things like organize a user’s desktop folders or the contents of a “downloads” folder. Or it can search folders and emails for recent expenses and collect them in a new folder. But its most powerful use cases involve more complicated tasks. The tool can produce slide decks, large reports, or spreadsheets by calling up local (folder) data or data from connected business tools (such as Microsoft Teams or Zendesk) and then synthesizing the information. For multipart tasks, Cowork can create subagents for each part. Each of the subagents start with a clean context window so it has plenty of room to gather and remember information about its task. (In single chats with complex tasks, chatbots sometimes run out of context window memory, or become overwhelmed with data and then fail to make sense of it.)

For example, a user might present the tool with a long document, then ask the AI to analyze it from different perspectives (legal, financial, ethical, public relations, etc.). A main agent might assign each perspective to a subagent. Each subagent would work independently to collect data and form a draft document, then return to sync up its work with that of the other subagents. A master document would be created and delivered to the user. Then the user might begin talking to the chatbot about how to refine the result. Anthropic’s models, workers may find in Cowork their first taste of AI agents that build trust through quality—which could change how people see the technology as a tool that can actually help them at work....

Read the original on Fast Company

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Scotland Yard(Met) arrests 100 using AI

Police have arrested more than 100 wanted criminals thanks to a live facial recognition (LFR) pilot programme. The live facial recognition cameras were fixed to structures like lamp posts in Croydon, and their feeds monitored remotely, for the first time in London in October. The cameras scan the faces of pedestrians walking and compare them to a digital watchlist of 800 suspects and “high-harm” offenders. The move has enabled officers to run deployments without a van and has so far led to 103 arrests. Since the start of 2024, the Met has taken more than 1,700 offenders off the streets of London using LFR and the force has hailed its “impact and success”.

The LFR cameras in Croydon are only activated when officers are present and conducting a deployment, according to the Met. On each five or six-hour deployment, 50,000 to 60,000 faces are scanned in seconds. The system measures metrics, such as the distance between people’s eyes, nose and mouth, and creates a “digital signature” of the face. Each is processed and cross-referenced by an algorithm against a watchlist generated the night before.

People wearing baseball caps, beanies or balaclavas can still be identified. When the computer throws up a match, officers take over and approach the individual, treating the images as “intelligence” to be checked. They can override a match if they believe it is inaccurate. The force said Croydon was selected because it is a “crime hotspot” and that at present there are no plans to extend the scheme to other areas....

Read the original on the Telegraph

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OpenAI cofounder’s journal outlines plot

Court files from Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI revealed that Greg Brockman, one of its co-founders, wanted to get the company out from the Tesla founder since 2017. According to a document from the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, posted on X, case discovery revealed that Brockman didn’t just want to remove Musk from OpenAI, but also tried to convert it into a for-profit company without him. In a publicly-posted rebuttal of some aspects of the journal, OpenAI has acknowledged that the journal is real.

“This is the only chance we have to get out from Elon. Is he the ‘glorious leader’ that I would pick? We truly have a chance to make this happen. Financially, what would take me to $1B?” Brockman wrote in his personal files revealed during the lawsuit. “Accepting Elon’s terms nukes two things: our ability to choose (though maybe we could overrule him) and the economics.” In another extract, Brockman wrote, “can’t see us turning this into a for-profit without a very nasty fight. i’m just thinking about the office and we’re in the office. and his story will correctly be that we weren’t honest with him in the end about still wanting to do the for profit just without him.”

According to the court files, “Brockman wrote after the meeting [with Musk to reaffirm OpenAI’s commitment to the non-profit structure] that the ‘conclusion is we truly want the b-corp. Honestly, we also want to get back to work, but it’s super clear how we get there.’ He also continued, ‘cannot say that we are committed to the non-profit, don’t want to say that we’re committed, if, three months later, we’re doing B-Corp, then it was a lie.” The document also revealed that Brockman did not like the situation and the “the true answer is that we want [Musk] out.”

With the way things are shaping up, this case seems set to be an epic court fight between two AI tech bros, with billions of dollars at stake. Elon Musk is reportedly seeking damages ranging from $79 billion to $134 billion, as well as an unspecified punitive penalty….

Read the original on Tom’s Hardware

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Small businesses use AI 3.5x more than enterprises

Bosses want to fill roles with human specialists, not AI, it turns out - as a new Monday study has uncovered mixed feelings about artificial intelligence in the workplace. For example, while 94% of directors use it at work, many leaders still feel judged for using AI tools. And that guilt is at its highest in enterprises, rather than Small & Medium Businesses, where it’s often perceived as a shortcut rather than a productivity tool. The reality is that the tech performs best as a productivity tool rather than a job replacer, allowing humans to take on higher-value and strategic work with the free time they’ve gained from handing over repetitive and administrative tasks to the computer.

Small businesses use AI 3.5x more per employee than enterprises, which are more likely to face siloed workflows and compliance hurdles, while marketing, tech and finance businesses may actually be underperforming with AI compared with construction and real estate workers. Then, there’s the overwhelm. Three in four (76%) directors regularly switch between multiple AI tools, with only 2% relying on one single tool.

However, while some hesitations still remain, the report does prove that AI is complementing human work rather than displacing workers. Most leaders aren’t actually adopting AI to reduce staff, and many are making changes to hire more AI-literate talent to pioneer this new human-machine collaborative style of working. With only around one-third (38%) of directors citing labor reduction as a motivator for adopting AI, Monday says AI-induced mass job losses are being challenged as a myth. “While concerns about AI-led job displacement haven’t disappeared, there is a different reality also unfolding in the workplace,” the report concludes....

Read the original on TechRadar

***

Air Force AI chatbot lost job to better AI

One of the big worries surrounding generative artificial intelligence is that it will put lots of humans out of work. But what if the same thing happened to AI tools? What if one AI took away another AI’s job?

That’s what appears to have happened to the Air Force’s popular NIPRGPT chatbot - short for Non-Classified Internet Protocol Router Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. NIPRGPT was developed in-house by the Air Force Research Laboratory and was introduced in June 2024. The aim was to give Air Force personnel a way “to responsibly experiment with Generative AI, with adequate safeguards in place,” the Air Force said at the time. Air Force leaders said they launched the chatbot even though it hadn’t been perfected because military personnel “need advanced technologies at the speed of relevance.”

Like other Gen AI tools, NIPRGPT could answer questions and help with tasks such as research, writing memos and generating computer code. And it was popular. Within three months, more than 80,000 service members had taken it out for a ride. In all, more than 700,000 people across the Defense Department have used it. “Technology is learned by doing,” said Chandra Donelson, chief artificial intelligence officer for the U.S. Space Force, part of the Air Force.

Now, NIPRGPT’s time is up. It’s being shut down as of New Year’s Eve, the niche news site Defense Scoop reported. It is being replaced by the Pentagon’s new GenAI.mil system, which is intended for all branches of the armed forces - nearly 3 million users in all. That AI tool, described as vastly more powerful than NIPRGPT, will live on Google’s Gemini for Government environment, which was unveiled in August....

Read the original on Yahoo News

***

Nvidia CEO says we shouldn’t talk badly about AI

Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, is calling out those who are critical of AI, believing that they don’t have the best interests of society as a whole in mind. More specifically, the criticisms that AI could make large portions of the workforce unemployed. Huang labelled this kind of opinion as the “doomer’s narrative”. He went on to claim that this kind of labelling does no good, and more importantly, believed that those pushing this narrative aren’t ordinary people.

“I think we’ve done a lot of damage with very well-respected people who have painted a doomer narrative, end of the world narrative, science fiction narrative. And I appreciate that many of us grew up and enjoyed science fiction, but it’s not helpful. It’s not helpful to people. It’s not helpful to the industry,” he said. “There are many people in the government who aren’t as comfortable with the technology and when PhDs and CEOs go to the government and describe these end-of-the-world scenarios and extremely dystopian futures, you have to ask what is the purpose of that narrative?”.

Most notably, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has been widely critical of AI, despite developing Claude, one of the best-known chatbots on the market right now. In the past, Amodei has highlighted the role AI plays in unemployment, stating last year that it would cause mass unemployment within the next five years….

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Google’s AI to tackle your email inbox

New Year, new Gmail. Google announced on Thursday that it is further integrating Gemini 3 into its email service and its more than 3 billion users. The expanded features, which include AI summarization and writing tools, come as Google responds to users wanting more personalized AI experiences.

“We recently surveyed our users and found that 85% of them think that AI in Gmail is most helpful when it leverages their content to generate tailored responses,” Gmail’s Head of Product, VP Blake Barnes, told reporters in a conference call on Wednesday. “They don’t want a generic assistant.” A December poll by Google Workspace and The Harris Poll found that 92% of knowledge workers ages 22-39 want AI with personalization. As part of the rollout, an AI Overview tool similar to the one found on Google Search will summarize email threads. Paid users will be able to ask their inboxes and receive an AI Overview.

The biggest update is to how Gemini will assist users with writing and replying to messages. The “Help Me Write” tool, previously available as a paid service on Gmail, can draft emails from a single prompt. According to internal company data, 70% of enterprise users who use “Help Me Write” in Google Docs or Gmail took Gemini’s suggestion.

“AI securely analyzes your past emails. It understands your writing style, the typical greetings you have, the sign-offs, and also what’s going on in your life to generate the suggested response that’s really personalized to you,” Barnes said. Next month, the Help Me Write tool will be updated to include information from users’ other Google apps.

The existing “Smart Replies” feature, now called “Suggested Replies,” can write responses that better match a user’s tone and style. While both of these features are free to all, the AI-powered proofreading tool that addresses word choice, concision and active voice is only available to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. Test thoroughly before switching emails....

Read the original on Fortune

***

LinkedIn AI-powered job and people search

LinkedIn’s AI-powered job search feature is expanding to new audiences. The tool—which lets job seekers find relevant open positions without needing to exactly match keywords in the job title or description—will soon be available to all LinkedIn members using the site in English. AI-powered job search is already used by 1.3 million people daily, with more than 25 million job searches conducted via the tool every week. And initial data indicates that job seekers without a four-year college degree who use the tool are 10% more likely to get hired than before, according to the company.

“This is a really meaningful shift, because our vision is economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce,” says Rohan Rajiv, senior director of product management and product lead for job search at LinkedIn. “We know that in the past, if you were a line cook or a taco chef, it wasn’t that easy to find those jobs on LinkedIn.”

The AI search tool even lets users specify general properties of a job, like saying “I want to protect the world’s oceans,” and find relevant listings, he says. That’s a result of careful, iterative development of a large language model-powered system that can parse job titles, descriptions and other data, understanding the nuances of how listings may vary by location and industry. One job listing may refer to “partnerships,” while another listing for a similar position refers to “business development” work, for example. And the AI is able to deliver both listings to potential applicants without them needing to search for a specific keyword.

“Compared to traditional keyword searches, it felt more intuitive and less mechanical,” writes Anderson Cheng, who recently found a job at the Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency via the tool, in an email to Fast Company. “The biggest surprise was how well it surfaced roles I might have skipped over based on title alone, but that were actually a strong fit once I reviewed the description more closely.”

The AI is carefully designed to be speedy, so users don’t have to wait long for results, as well as accurate and internally cost effective, Rajiv says. The results are created in part by LinkedIn staff evaluating them using a second LLM-powered system, then providing the core AI with additional examples in areas where it underperforms. Using AI to evaluate results lets the company check a broader sample than they could practically look at by hand.

Another recently released AI feature, known as AI-powered people search, helps users find potential connections based on plain language criteria, like “investors with FDA experience for a biotech startup” or “Northwestern alumni who work in entertainment marketing,” rather than simply looking people up by name and employer. While job description language have historically sometimes been an afterthought, providing clear detail about what a position entails helps ensure it shows up in AI-powered searches, says Rajiv. “We are moving away from a world focused on keywords to a world where you need to say things as they are,” he says....

Read the original on Fast Company

***

Physical AI is ‘going to be massive’

Artificial intelligence is stepping out of the virtual world and into the real one — and that shift is called physical AI. What does that mean? Instead of working only on computers or digital data, it enables machines to sense, think, and act in the real world. Physical AI was a key topic of discussion during a Fortune Brainstorm Tech dinner on Monday at Consumer Electronics Show 2026 in Las Vegas.

Qualcomm(5G) President and CEO Cristiano Amon. “It’s going to be massive,” Amon said. Physical AI is grounded in real-time sensor data. “You train on things that you see, things that you sense, things that you do,” he explained. This enables robots and self-driving cars, for example, to handle complex tasks, adapt to changing environments, and make split-second decisions while moving and interacting with the world around them.

Physical AI is emerging in automotive, Amon continued. When you think about assisted driving and autonomous driving, that’s a physical AI problem, he explained. You have sensors and cameras observing everything around you and telling the car where to go and when, he said. Qualcomm has transformed into a major automotive technology provider, positioning itself as a key player in the industry’s shift toward “software-defined vehicles.”

“The same thing that made Qualcomm successful in automotive will make us successful in robotics,” Amon said. The conversation around physical AI, he added, naturally extends to robotics—and he believes its impact will go far beyond humanoid robots. At CES, Qualcomm announced a full suite of robotics technologies.

A 2026 tech trends report by Deloitte explores how AI and robotics are converging. “Robots powered by physical AI are no longer confined to research labs or factory floors,” the report states. “They’re inspecting power grids, assisting in surgery, navigating city streets, and working alongside humans in warehouses.”….

Read the original on Fortune

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How CEOs are using AI

During an interview published in May, CEO of Microsoft said he enjoys podcasts but doesn’t listen to them. Instead, he uploads the transcripts of podcasts to the Copilot app on his phone so he can discuss the content with a voice assistant during his commute. When he reaches Microsoft’s headquarters in Washington State, Nadella uses Copilot to summarize his Outlook and Teams messages. He utilizes at least 10 custom agents from Copilot Studio to help with meeting prep and research. “I’m an email typist,” Nadella told the outlet.

It’s unsurprising that Altman of OpenAI uses AI to streamline tasks his his personal life. Altman appeared on Adam Grant’s “ReThinking” podcast this January, saying, “Honestly, I use it in the boring ways.” Altman said the AI bots help him process emails or summarize documents. The tech has also helped him with fatherhood. During an OpenAI podcast interview published in June, Altman said he used AI “constantly” after welcoming his first child in February. “Clearly, people have been able to take care of babies without ChatGPT for a long time,” Altman said. “I don’t know how I would have done that.” Now, Altman said he mostly uses ChatGPT to research developmental stages.

Cook, who became Apple CEO in 2011, publicly spoke about how he uses AI day-to-day in a 2024 interview with The Wall Street Journal. He said Apple Intelligence helps him summarize long emails. “If I can save time here and there, it adds up to something significant across a day, a week, a month,” Cook told the outlet. “It’s changed my life,” he says. “It really has.”

During the 28th annual Milken Institute Global Conference in May, Huang CEO of Nvidia told the audience he uses AI programs to learn new concepts. “I use it as a tutor every day,” Huang said. “In areas that are fairly new to me, I might say, ‘Start by explaining it to me like I’m a 12-year-old,’ and then work your way up into a doctorate-level over time.” AI’s ability to rapidly collect, analyze, and communicate information could close the tech gap, according to Huang. “In this room, it’s very unlikely that more than a handful of people know how to program with C++,” Huang said. “Yet 100% of you know how to program an AI, and the reason for that is because the AI will speak whatever language you wanted to speak.”....

Read the original on Business Insider

***

‘The bubble is ahead of us’: Bridgewater exec

Investors who are convinced the AI boom has gone too far should brace for what’s about to hit the market, Greg Jensen, co-chief investment officer at Bridgewater Associates, said in a recent interview. Jensen — who said he has spent more than a decade working with machine learning — said the market still hasn’t grasped how transformative the technology will be or how much capital is about to flood into it.

“The bubble is ahead of us, not behind us,” he said in an interview on the “In Good Company” podcast on Wednesday with Norges Bank Investment Management CEO Nicolai Tangen. While some business leaders and investors, such as Bill Gates and Michael Burry, have said that the AI boom resembles the dot-com era, Jensen said the world hasn’t even reached the speculative phase.

Instead, he said, we’re still in the phase “where people have no idea what’s hitting them,” and that most investors don’t yet understand how radically AI will reshape markets, geopolitics, and economic growth. That has triggered what Jensen calls a “resource grab phase,” unlike anything the tech industry has experienced before. Jensen said one reason the cycle is different from past tech manias is that AI leaders, including Elon Musk, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, and Google, believe the stakes are existential. They “believe that the power to control Earth and the universe is only a couple years away,” he said, adding that “they’re not motivated by this normal profit incentives of the typical cycle.” That mindset means capital expenditure won’t slow just because valuations look stretched or funding gets expensive. “This money is going to get spent,” he said....

Read the original on Business Insider

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Bridgewater is building an AI run fund

Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund, is building a machine-learning engine to predict global economic events and invest clients’ money accordingly. The efforts have been led by a new group at Bridgewater, called the Artificial Investment Associate (AIA) Lab. It’s made up of 20 investors and machine-learning scientists on the mission “to do everything that we do via machine-learning techniques,” Jensen said.

For Bridgewater, the largest hedge fund in the world, that means replicating every step of the investment process with AI and machine learning, from understanding global financial and economic patterns, to creating investment theories, and plugging those theories into machine-learning models to check if the theories are accurate or not. Risk controls and oversight will still be in the hands of humans, Jensen said, and there will be a kill switch if there’s ever a need to turn it off. Jensen will have oversight over the fund. But the rest, from idea generation to testing and the models used to make trades, will all be developed through AI and machine learning.

Bridgewater’s so-called “artificial investor” is exceeding expectations by making solid predictions about what’s next for the euro, or what’s next for inflation, Jensen said. And once the fund launches, Jensen is hoping the AI investor will get “much more powerful” as a “loop of learning” mints more data. “In some sense, I feel we’ve been able to create the bones of something that will be more than the sum of its parts,” Jensen said. “We won’t describe specifics, but I do expect we will be able to generate a unique source of returns. AIA Labs will play a critical role as Bridgewater looks to transform itself with AI. At AIA Labs, much of the work is focused on combining statistical models with language models “It’s really that this moment is the integration of language models, with the type of time-series models Jensen has been working on a long time, combined with how far — in part by our own pushing — but how far diagnostic tools have come to understanding machine learning algorithms,” Jensen said. “Those pieces coming together is what has made this point so incredibly special.”….

Read the original on Business Insider

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OpenAI declares Code Red

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared a “code red” on Monday—around 3 years after ChatGPT was released to the public—urging staff to prioritize improving ChatGPT as competitors like Google and Anthropic close the gap. The startup once dominated the AI market but now faces growing pressure to maintain its position.

In an internal announcement reviewed by The Information, Altman said OpenAI will delay several initiatives to focus on improving ChatGPT. The company is pausing work on advertising, shopping agents, health agents, and a personal assistant called Pulse. This reallocation of resources means teams will concentrate on core improvements such as speed, reliability, enhanced personalization, and the ability to answer more questions accurately.

The company will now conduct daily calls with teams working on ChatGPT, and Altman is encouraging temporary team transfers to accelerate development. Google is the main concern. The search giant’s AI users are growing steadily. Google’s latest AI model, Gemini 3, has outperformed competitors on many industry benchmarks and popular metrics. OpenAI reportedly called an internal “code orange” in October as competition increased; this new “code red” marks a move to its highest urgency level. This comes after Google itself declared its own “code red” when ChatGPT first arrived, marking a full-circle moment in the AI race....

Read on PC MAG

***

Inside Silicon Valley’s ‘soup wars’

In the high-stakes arms race between Meta and OpenAI for AI dominance, the weapon of choice has evolved. First, it was unlimited compute, then $100 million signing bonuses. Now, the battle has entered a new, bizarrely intimate phase: soup wars.

Mark Chen, chief research officer at OpenAI, said on a podcast with tech podcaster Ashlee Vance that the recruitment war has shifted. According to Chen, Meta has aggressively pursued half of his direct reports—backed by a $10 billion war chest for talent—but CEO Mark Zuckerberg has added a personal touch to the poaching attempts. Zuckerberg, Chen said, has personally “hand-cooked” and “hand-delivered” soup to researchers he wanted to recruit away from OpenAI. And it wasn’t a joke, the executive insisted.

“It was shocking to me at the time,” Chen admitted. But in Silicon Valley, if the enemy brings broth, you must respond in kind. Chen confessed he has now adopted the tactic, delivering soup to his own recruits as he hopes to poach talent from Meta. However, he draws the line at manual labor. “No, no, no … It’s better if you get, like, Michelin-star soup,” Chen said.

The cozy theatrics disguise a harsher reality: The pool of people who can design and train cutting-edge large language models is microscopic. Industry insiders estimate there are fewer than 1,000 researchers globally with the expertise to push the frontier on their own. The soup is somewhat reminiscent of earlier tech talent wars, when Google and Facebook tried to outbid each other with free sushi, in-house baristas, and on-campus gyms....

Read on Fortune

***

To advance AI: ‘It’s back to the age of research again’

OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever believes the tides of the AI industry will have to shift back to the research phase. On an episode of the “Dwarkesh Podcast” published Tuesday, Sutskever, who is widely seen as a pioneer in modern artificial intelligence, challenged the conventional wisdom that scaling could be the key road map to AI’s progress.

The wisdom goes that the more compute you have or the more training data you have, the smarter your AI tool will be. Sutskever said in the interview that, for around the past half-decade, this “recipe” has produced impactful results. It’s also efficient for companies because the method provides a simple and “very low-risk way” of investing resources compared to pouring money into research that could lead nowhere. However, Sutskever, who now runs Safe Superintelligence Inc., believes that method is running out of runway; data is finite, and organizations already have access to a massive amount of compute, he said.

“Is the belief really: ‘Oh, it’s so big, but if you had 100x more, everything would be so different?’ It would be different, for sure. But is the belief that if you just 100x the scale, everything would be transformed? I don’t think that’s true,” Sutskever said. “So it’s back to the age of research again, just with big computers.”

One area that will require more research, according to Sutskever, is getting models to generalize — essentially learn using small amounts of information or examples — as well as humans do. “The thing, which I think is the most fundamental, is that these models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people,” he said. “It’s super obvious. That seems like a very fundamental thing.”….

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ChatGPT sparked the AI race. Who is winning

OpenAI released ChatGPT and accidentally started an arms race. The chatbot hit a million users in five days, forced Google to declare a “code red,” and convinced Silicon Valley that artificial general intelligence was just around the corner and whoever got there first would win big. Microsoft poured $10 billion into OpenAI. Google scrambled to release Bard. China’s tech giants rushed to build their own chatbots. It looked like OpenAI’s race to lose. Now, as ChatGPT’s third birthday approaches, the lead has changed hands so many times the race is starting to look like musical chairs.

OpenAI entered 2025 as the undisputed leader. By late January, it was already under pressure. Chinese startup DeepSeek released models that matched OpenAI’s performance at a fraction of the cost, sending Nvidia’s stock plummeting and raising questions about whether American tech giants had been spending too much on the wrong approach. DeepSeek claimed it trained its model for under $6 million. Even if that was understated, the cheaper approach had shaken up assumptions about what it takes to compete.

Then came summer. GPT-5, released in August after nearly two years of development, was supposed to deliver what CEO Sam Altman called “PhD-level intelligence.” Instead, users got a model that labeled Oklahoma as “Gelahbrin” on maps and couldn’t solve basic algebra. Prediction markets that had given OpenAI a 75% chance of having the best AI model collapsed to 14% in a single hour. Now Google is pressing its advantage. Gemini 3, released this month, has drawn rave reviews.

Yet amid all the frenzy, at least one person warned this would happen. In May 2023, six months after ChatGPT launched, an internal Google document leaked that predicted the ups and downs that were coming. “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI,” a researcher wrote. Unlike search algorithms or social networks — where data, infrastructure, and network effects create lasting advantages — AI models could be copied, improved upon, and shared freely. The researcher argued that open-source developers would eventually eclipse the big players, that the industry’s obsession with scale was misguided, and that trying to control AI development was a losing game. Google ignored it. So did OpenAI....

Read on Quartz

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AI consultants are small, fast, and driven by AI

Now, a new wave of AI-driven startups is challenging that dominance, trying to make consulting services more accessible. Many of the founders of these new firms come from the traditional consulting realm. Their experiences not only give them marketable skills but have also helped them identify new opportunities in the industry. They are much smaller than the established ones, often run by teams ranging from just a few people to a few hundred. They’re also more specialized, focusing on areas like pricing strategy, cost reduction, or refining slide decks. And, importantly, they are all in on AI.

Many of them said their methods help them reduce old-school bureaucracy, offer more competitive rates, and make the human side of consulting work easier. Xavier AI describes itself as the world’s first AI strategy consultant.

He said Xavier can provide both strategy recommendations and actionable plans for implementation. “99.9% of businesses could really never afford McKinsey or any of the MBBs,” Filipe told BI. “We created Xavier AI so that anyone could have the power of a consulting firm at their hands when they need it.”

Nexstrat.ai positions its product as a multifunctional agent that can automate many of the typical tasks of a consultant. The platform mirrors the “hypothesis-based problem solving” typically used by consulting firms. Behind the scenes, the platform leverages multiple agents to fulfill the functions of a project manager, a chief strategy officer, and an AI advisor, to help teams make better decisions and solve business issues.

Consulting IQ was born out of the pandemic as an antidote to the number of small and midsize businesses failing. There are an estimated 400 million companies around the world, 99% of which belong in the micro, small, or midsize category, Medone said. But, he said, 65% of small and midsize businesses fade away before year five. “That’s 260 million companies worldwide,” he said....

Read on Business Insider

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Consulting co allegedly cited AI-generated research in million dollar report

A Canadian government-commissioned Deloitte health care report that cost one province nearly $1.6 million contains potentially AI-generated errors, marking the second country this year to allege the consulting firm’s fact-checking shortcomings. The Deloitte report contained false citations, pulled from made-up academic papers to draw conclusions for cost-effectiveness analyses, and cited real researchers on papers they hadn’t worked on, the Independent found. It included fictional papers coauthored by researchers who said they had never worked together. “Deloitte Canada firmly stands behind the recommendations put forward in our report,” a Deloitte Canada spokesperson told Fortune in a statement. “We are revising the report to make a small number of citation corrections, which do not impact the report findings. AI was not used to write the report; it was selectively used to support a small number of research citations.”

“It sounds like if you’re coming up with things like this, they may be pretty heavily using AI to generate work,” Gail Tomblin Murphy, an adjunct professor in the School of Nursing at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, told the Independent. Tomblin Murphy was cited by Deloitte in an academic paper that “does not exist.” She added that she had worked with only three of the six other authors named in the false citation.

The revelation comes on the heels of news last month that Deloitte leveraged AI in a $290,000 report published in July to help the Australian government crack down on welfare. But a researcher flagged hallucinations in the 237-page study, which included references to nonexistent academic research papers and a fabricated quote from a federal court judgment. In the revised study, which was quietly uploaded to the Australian government’s website, the consulting firm admitted it had used the generative AI language system Azure OpenAI to help create the report. “The updates made in no way impact or affect the substantive content, findings, and recommendations in the report,” Deloitte wrote in a section in the updated study….

Read on Fortune

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Trust and the AI boom

There is a soft underbelly of the AI boom. A deep sense of unease about the employment effects of the technology and a lack of understanding of the benefits to the average consumer. Developing markets such as Brazil and China are much more enthusiastic about AI than respondents in Germany, the UK, and U.S. Three times as many Americans reject the growing use of AI (49%) as embrace it (17%) while the Chinese are the mirror image, with almost 5.5x as many embracing AI (54%) as rejecting the technology (10%).

Technology (3.5 to 1) and Financial Services (1.5 to 1) employees embracing AI at work, those in Retail, Manufacturing and Healthcare ambivalent, while those in Education (1.5 to 1)Food (1.5 to 1)and Transportation reject it (2 to 1). There is a large Mass-Class Divide on AI in the Developed Markets, with 71% of the UK and 65% of the American bottom income quartile feeling they will be left behind rather than realize any advantages from gen AI. Importantly, half of the Middle- and nearly half of the High-Income American respondents also believe they will be left behind without realizing net gains from AI. Unsurprisingly, the youngest cohort is most supportive of AI; in the UK there is a 41-point difference between the 18-34 and the 55+ generations (59% trust in AI vs. 18%), though in the U.S. only 40% of the young generation trust AI.

The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Flash Poll: Trust and Artificial Intelligence at a Crossroads, conducted across five nations (Brazil, China, Germany, UK, U.S.), released today, shows that trust in AI is at an inflection point. In fact, in the three developed markets surveyed, acceptance of AI is linked to trust....

Read on Fortune

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AI ‘godfather’ is quitting Facebook

Professor Yann LeCun was being honoured along with six other recipients for his contributions to the field, which have been credited as advancing deep learning. But Mr LeCun is at odds with some of the AI world over the future of the generation-defining technology. Unlike his fellow AI godfathers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, Prof LeCun has cast doubt on the idea AI might pose an existential threat to humanity. In 2023, he called such fears “preposterously ridiculous”. “Will AI take over the world? No, this is a projection of human nature on machines,” he told the BBC.

“LLMs are great, they’re useful, we should invest in them — a lot of people are going to use them,” said Yann LeCun, speaking at an event in Brooklyn Sunday night. “They are not a path to human-level intelligence. They’re just not. Right now, they are sucking the air out of the room anywhere they go — and so there’s basically no resources [left] for anything else. And so for the next revolution, we need to take a step back and figure out what’s missing from the current approaches.”

And now he is going all-in on his idea of “advanced machine intelligence” after announcing he is leaving his role as Meta’s chief AI scientist to start a new firm. Prof LeCun has suggested LLMs will be less useful in attempting to create AI systems that can match human intelligence.

Instead, he wants to pursue what he called “advanced machine intelligence”. It trains AI models primarily by using visual learning - trying to replicate how a child or a baby animal learns. That differs to LLMs, which are fed vast amounts of existing data, and then asked to generate a result based on the data and a prompt....

Read on BBC

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World Labs unveils world-generating AI model

World Labs, the AI model developer cofounded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, has released its 3D-space generating model, “Marble.” At the World Labs website, creators can now input text prompts, images, or videos of pieces of a real-world environment. Marble uses them to create full 3D environments, which can include interior spaces or expansive exterior ones.

Li describes world models as a “significant” evolution of the generative AI era. “The large world model is really a significant step towards unlocking AI’s capability,” a category she calls “spatial.” Spatial intelligence refers to a system’s ability to perceive, model, reason about, and take actions within physical or geometric space—similar to how humans or animals choose their actions based on their understanding of their surroundings.

This week, Li posted a sort of manifesto on Substack arguing that spatial intelligence is the next frontier in AI. For humans, she says, spatial intelligence of the physical world around us provides the scaffolding upon which we build our cognition. “Spatial intelligence will transform how we create and interact with real and virtual worlds—revolutionizing storytelling, creativity, robotics, scientific discovery, and beyond,” she writes. World Labs believes that endowing machines (including robots) with such “spatial intelligence” could be transformative for a number of industries in the coming years….

Read on Fast Company

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AI went from risk to business imperative

Leaders are no longer debating whether generative AI will matter; they are racing to determine how to operationalize it. Usage patterns show the shift. In 2023, only 37% of senior leaders used generative AI weekly. Now, 82% do, and 46% report daily use, according to the report. Because generative AI is a general-purpose technology, Puntoni and his colleagues expect usage to reach near-universal levels. “Half of senior leaders in a large sample of corporate America are saying that they’re using a tool every day; that is really quite incredible,” he said.

Still, progress varies by company size. Larger enterprises are seeing slower results as they manage complex integrations, while midsized and smaller firms report quicker progress. Tech, banking, and professional services firms are among the sectors making strides. Puntoni noted that generative AI adoption is progressing at an eye-opening pace. “I don’t think there’s any company that now says, ‘Generative AI isn’t for us,’” he said.

The third annual WHAIR study, conducted with GBK Collective, underscores this acceleration, Puntoni told me. A survey of 800 senior leaders in finance, IT, HR, and other functions at U.S. companies with more than $50 million in annual revenue found that 88% expect to increase generative AI investment in the next year, and 62% expect budgets to rise by more than 10% within two to five years....

Read on Fortune

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Bank of America and AI

Bank of America’s 8-year-old AI-based virtual assistant, Erica, has handled 3 billion customer interactions. “We’ve already seen the equivalent of 11,000 people’s work being done every day through Erica,” Gopalkrishnan said. “Every second of handle time in a call center is worth X dollars,” Gopalkrishan said. “So if I can automate prediction of why a customer is calling, I can then look at speech to text to figure out what the client call need is, and give the associate an agent to serve them within 30 seconds or one minute. That’s 30 seconds of money saved every single call.” In the past, if a customer saw a charge go through three times or wanted to order a checkbook, they would call the call center. “Those calls no longer have to be answered by people, because Erica takes care of them,” Gopalkrishnan said.

AI is making relationship bankers more productive, for instance. “Think about how much time and effort people take to prepare for client meetings,” Gopalkrishnan said. “How many clients can a given relationship banker cover if you’re able to actually automate that process using AI and traditional analytics and traditional automation? You now can have a banker cover 50 clients instead of 15, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing in the real world.”

These bankers use AI-based client meeting preparation tools that let bankers say, “I’m going to meet client X tomorrow. Can you prepare for me everything that the client cares about?” Gopalkrishnan said. “It can bring together structured data, unstructured data, everything I’ve talked to the client about from a customer relationship management perspective, and that’s at my fingertip with insights.”

Overall, AI is taking “toil out of the system,” he said. “In three years, hopefully we will have significantly streamlined a lot of the toil in the system and be doing more exciting work going forward.”....

Read on American Banker

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Yelp’s new AI receptionist

The company said the AI is ideal for understaffed businesses and small restaurants, boasting the ability to take calls at all times, handle reservations and answer customer questions. “Unlike alternative call bots, these solutions combine AI with Yelp’s high-quality data and proprietary voice system, for a smarter, faster, and more human-like AI voice tailored to each individual business.” Yelp said the AI comes pre-trained using Yelp business data and is fully customizable to reflect the business using it, allowing for the AI agent’s name, voice and personal greetings to be customized. The questions the AI asks customers and provided information like special offers can also be tweaked. Additionally, the AI can send links to take credit card deposits and more.

“For many businesses, reliable, around‑the‑clock call handling is essential to capture every lead and best serve your customers. But when you’re understaffed, on a job site, or simply busy, even one missed call can mean significant lost revenue,” said Yelp chief product officer Craig Saldanha.

Yelp said businesses that use the service will be given a dedicated phone number for it, with the option of call forwarding available. Currently in Beta, Yelp’s AI offerings have been praised by business owners. Yelp Receptionist can manage calls for any “eligible local businesses.” Subscriptions to this AI-powered service will begin rolling out this week….

Read on Yelp

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Apple to use Google’s AI in new Siri

Apple plans to use a 1.2 trillion-parameter artificial intelligence model developed by Alphabet’s Google to help power a revamp of its Siri voice assistant, Bloomberg ‌News reported on Wednesday. After an evaluation, the companies are finalizing a deal that would have ‌Apple pay about $1 billion a year for access to Google’s technology, the report said.

The iPhone maker will use Google’s Gemini model as a stopgap until its own systems are ready, Bloomberg reported. The model’⁠s 1.2 trillion parameters,‌ a measure of AI model complexity, would dwarf Apple’s current systems.

In March, Apple said AI improvements to Siri would be delayed until 2026, and did not give a reason for the setback. Rivals have rushed to add ⁠AI features to their voice assistants, with Google adding its Gemini model to its assistant last year and Amazon rolling out an AI-driven overhaul of the Alexa assistant earlier this year.

Apple shook up its ‍executive ranks to get ⁠its AI efforts back on track after months of delays, resulting in Mike Rockwell taking charge of Siri, as CEO Tim Cook ⁠lost confidence in AI head John Giannandrea’s ability to execute on product development, ‌Bloomberg had reported in March....

Read on Reuters

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More writing created by AI than humans MIT

Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, many companies have explored publishing content generated by LLMs such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to grow their traffic across channels such as Google Search, social, and advertising. This is a cost-effective alternative to spending hundreds of dollars for humans to write content.

The quality of AI content is rapidly improving. In many cases, AI-generated content is as good or better than content written by humans, according to an MIT study. It is often hard for people to distinguish whether content is created by AI, per findings from an Originality AI study.

A research team from Vertical AI growth agency Graphite evaluated the prevalence of AI-generated articles from a dataset spanning January 2020 until May 2025. Their research reveals that in November 2024, the quantity of AI-generated articles being published on the web surpassed the quantity of human-written articles.

While AI-generated articles grew dramatically after ChatGPT launched, Graphite’s research suggests that trend will not continue. Instead, the proportion of AI-generated articles has remained relatively stable over the last 12 months. This may be because practitioners found that AI-generated articles do not perform well in search, as shown in a separate study....

Read on Stacker

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AI isn’t replacing marketers

After two decades in marketing, I’ve watched countless “revolutionary” technologies come and go. Most promised to change everything. All delivered incremental improvements at best. But AI feels different-not because of the hype, but because of what I’m seeing at Lyft as we engage with various platforms. The real transformation isn’t happening the way most people expected it to.

While everyone’s talking about AI replacing jobs or automating ad buying, the most profound changes we are seeing so far aren’t about efficiency-they’re about fundamentally changing how we understand and connect with consumers. Here’s the paradox that keeps me up at night: the more sophisticated our AI tools become at analyzing consumer behavior, the more human our marketing becomes.

At Lyft, we’re using AI to dive deeper into psychographics, behavioral patterns, and emotional triggers than ever before. But instead of creating more robotic, data-driven campaigns, we’re uncovering insights that help us craft more authentic, emotionally resonant work. AI doesn’t just tell us what people do-it helps us understand why they do it.

The magic happens when AI reveals the human stories hiding in the data. We’re finding unexpected emotional connections between ride patterns and life moments, uncovering the real reasons people choose rideshare over driving, and identifying the subtle behavioral cues that indicate when someone’s ready to try a new transportation option….

Read on Adweek

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AI isn’t replacing jobs. AI spending is

For decades now, we have been told that artificial intelligence systems will soon replace human workers. Sixty years ago, for example, Herbert Simon, who received a Nobel Prize in economics and a Turing Award in computing, predicted that “machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do.”

Are these bleak predictions finally coming true? ChatGPT turns 3 years old this month, and many think large language models will finally deliver on the promise of AI replacing human workers. LLMs can be used to write emails and reports, summarize documents. Other forms of generative AI can create images and videos for advertising or code for software.

Last week, when Amazon slashed 14,000 corporate jobs and hinted that more cuts could be coming, a top executive noted the current generation of AI is “enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before.” Shortly thereafter, another Amazon rep anonymously admitted to NBC News that “AI is not the reason behind the vast majority of reductions.” On an investor call, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy admitted that the layoffs were “not even really AI driven.”

For layoffs in the tech sector, a likely culprit is the financial stress that companies are experiencing because of their huge spending on AI infrastructure. Companies that are spending a lot with no significant increases in revenue can try to sustain profitability by cutting costs. Amazon increased its total CapEx from $54 billion in 2023 to $84 billion in 2024, and an estimated $118 billion in 2025....

Read on Fast Company

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Anthropic’s B2B strategy

The Information reports that Anthropic expects to generate as much as $70 billion in revenue and $17 billion in cash flow in 2028. The growth projections are fueled by rapid adoption of Anthropic’s business products, a person with knowledge of the company’s financials said. Last month, Reuters reported that Anthropic is projected to more than double, and potentially nearly triple, its annual revenue run rate next year. The company is reportedly on track to meet a goal of $9 billion in ARR by the end of 2025 and has set a target of $20 billion to $26 billion ARR for 2026.

Anthropic expects its revenue this year from selling access to its AI models through an API to hit $3.8 billion, doubling the $1.8 billion revenue OpenAI expects to generate from API sales, per The Information. Claude Code is reportedly close to generating $1 billion in annualized revenue, up from about $400 million in July.

In recent weeks, Anthropic’s aggressive B2B strategy has become clearer. Microsoft and Anthropic recently began partnering to use Anthropic’s models in Microsoft 365 apps and Copilot. Anthropic has also expanded its Salesforce partnership and plans to roll out its AI assistant Claude to hundreds of thousands of employees at Deloitte and Cognizant.

When it comes to model improvements, Anthropic has, over the last two months, launched smaller, more cost-effective models — Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Claude Haiku 4.5 — which appeal to businesses deploying AI at scale. The startup has also expanded Claude for Financial Services and introduced Enterprise Search to enable businesses to connect all their internal work apps to Claude.

That said, the company expects its gross profit margin — which measures a company’s profitability after accounting for direct costs associated with producing goods and services — to reach 50% this year and 77% in 2028, up from negative 94% last year, per The Information....

Read on Reuters

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Microsoft bets on Influencers to close the gap with ChatGPT

Microsoft Corp., eager to boost downloads of its Copilot chatbot, has recruited some of the most popular influencers in America to push a message to young consumers that might be summed up as: Our AI assistant is as cool as ChatGPT.

Microsoft could use the help. The company recently said its family of Copilot assistants attracts 150 million active users each month. But OpenAI’s ChatGPT claims 800 million weekly active users, and Google’s Gemini boasts 650 million a month. Microsoft has an edge with corporate customers, thanks to a long history of selling them software and cloud services. But it has struggled to crack the consumer market — especially people under 30.

Using non-techies as spokespeople is meant to reinforce Microsoft’s campaign to sell its chatbot as a life coach for everyone. Or as Consumer AI chief Mustafa Suleyman wrote in a recent essay, an AI companion that “helps you think, plan and dream.”

Anindya Ghose, a marketing professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, expressed surprised that Microsoft is using lifestyle influencers to market Copilot. But he can see why the company would be attracted to their cult followings. “Even if the perceived credibility of the influencer is not very high but the familiarity with the influencers is high, there are some people who would be willing to bite on that apple,” Ghose said in an interview. He doubted Microsoft would continue with the program if it wasn’t getting traction. “So I’m fairly certain it’s working,” Ghose said….

Read on Bloomberg

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‘Godfather of AI’ says tech giants can’t profit unless labor is replaced

Computer scientist and Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton doubled down on his warnings about how artificial intelligence will affect the labor market and the role of companies leading the charge. In an interview with Bloomberg TV’s Wall Street Week on Friday, he said the obvious way to make money off AI investments, aside from charging fees to use chatbots, is to replace workers with something cheaper.

Hinton, whose work has earned him a Nobel Prize and the moniker “godfather of AI,” added that while some economists point out previous disruptive technologies created as well as destroyed jobs, it’s not clear to him that AI will do the same.

“I think the big companies are betting on it causing massive job replacement by AI, because that’s where the big money is going to be,” he warned. Just four so-called AI hyperscalers—Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet and Amazon—are expected to boost capital expenditures to $420 billion next fiscal year from $360 billion this year, according to Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, OpenAI alone has announced a total of $1 trillion in infrastructure deals in recent weeks with AI-ecosystem companies like Nvidia, Broadcom and Oracle. When asked if such investments can pay off without destroying jobs, Hinton replied, “I believe that it can’t. I believe that to make money you’re going to have to replace human labor.”....

Read on Fortune

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Google free AI-generates ads for small businesses

Finding the budget, time, and resources to properly advertise as a small-to-medium-sized business (SMB) can be a daunting task. Pomelli, an AI experiment from Google Labs in collaboration with Google DeepMind, provides AI marketing tools to assist small businesses in creating social media campaigns.

Pomelli uses AI to create campaigns that are unique to your business; all you need to do is upload your business website to begin. Google says Pomelli uses your business URL to create a “Business DNA” that analyzes your website images to identify brand identity. The Business DNA profile includes tone of voice, color palettes, fonts, and pictures. Pomelli can also generate logos, taglines, and brand values.

After you’ve created a Business DNA, Pomelli generates ad campaign ideas. In a blog post, Google says this feature eliminates the laborious process of brainstorming unique ad campaigns. If users have their own campaign ideas, they can enter them into Pomelli as a prompt.

Finally, Pomelli will generate marketing assets for social media, websites, and advertisements. These assets can be edited, allowing users to change images, headers, fonts, color palettes, descriptions, and create a call to action. Pomelli is available as a public beta experiment in the US, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand in English only....

Try on Google Labs

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AI to replace grunt work on Wall Street

Pulling all-nighters to assemble PowerPoint presentations. Punching numbers into Excel spreadsheets. Finessing the language on esoteric financial documents that may never be read by another soul. Such grunt work has long been a rite of passage in investment banking, an industry at the top of the corporate pyramid that lures thousands of young people every year with the promise of prestige and pay.

Until now. Generative artificial intelligence — the technology upending many industries with its ability to produce and crunch new data — has landed on Wall Street. And investment banks, long inured to cultural change, are rapidly turning into Exhibit A on how the new technology could not only supplement but supplant entire ranks of workers.

The jobs most immediately at risk are those performed by analysts at the bottom rung of the investment banking business, who put in endless hours to learn the building blocks of corporate finance, including the intricacies of mergers, public offerings and bond deals. Now, A.I. can do much of that work speedily and with considerably less whining.

“The structure of these jobs has remained largely unchanged at least for a decade,” said Julia Dhar, head of BCG’s Behavioral Science Lab and a consultant to major banks experimenting with A.I. The inevitable question, as she put it, is “do you need fewer analysts?”….

Read on The New York Times