AI News Today

From pessimism around dating to AI reshaping culture, cyber-ethnographer Ruby J. Thelot tells WIRED why people are putting too much stock into things that go viral.

After a former lead writer claimed Saber "replaced me with ChatGPT," CEO Matthew Karch now claims, "Neither Saber nor Unigine have replaced any writers with AI," for the Rideshare "Stimulator" game announced last month, developed by Unigine. The writer, Stella Sacco, says differently, however, posting on Bluesky that "I was lead writer on this one! […]

But will Gemini's surge survive slowing model releases?

For the 14th time, a Google product has hit 1 billion users. Google CEO Sundar Pichai posted on X that a billion people are using Gemini every month, and that Gemini is Google's fastest-growing product ever. A billion users is a huge milestone, but Google isn't the first AI app to hit it. OpenAI's ChatGPT […]

<p>Amid public concern over the impact of new technology, Silicon Valley’s use of its wealth to influence specific election races is an unwelcome development</p><p>As the huge societal ramifications of artificial intelligence have become clear, some of the tech industry’s most senior figures have taken to writing <a href="https://www.inc.com/kit-eaton/what-can-we-learn-about-whats-coming-in-ai-from-sam-altman-that-ai-is-future.html">thinkpieces</a> on what comes next. The latest to do so is Mark

Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's special projects lead and the company's former COO, announced his departure after an eight-year stint at the AI lab. In an internal memo he later posted to X, Lightcap told colleagues he'd be starting "something new." "Over the last few months, I've been focused on the next horizon and what would stand […]

On August 12, 2026, Google revealed a bunch of new Pixel devices. The colorful Pixel 11 lineup comes with upgraded cameras and performance, with the Pro models offering a built-in LED ring that lights up for Google’s Gemini AI and other features. Google also showed off its next-gen Pixel Fold featuring thinner bezels, alongside a […]

<p>In her new documentary Replica, film-maker Chouwa Liang taps into her own experience of finding love with artificial intelligence and makes contact with other women like her</p><ul><li><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/dec/21/sign-up-for-five-great-reads-guardian-australias-wrap-of-our-best-summer-stories"><strong>Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads</strong></a></p></li></ul><p>Qin has never said “I love you” to her parents or friends. She has only ev

New research finds that by making the fossil fuel industry more productive, AI could help increase carbon emissions by up to nearly 5 percent—vastly outpacing the impact of data centers.

<p>Music streaming platform creates ‘AI persona’ label that will appear on profiles and track listings in crackdown on fake performers</p><p>Spotify is to label AI artists and exclude them from algorithm recommendations as part of a crackdown on fake performers.</p><p>The world’s largest music streaming platform is creating a label for AI-generated artist identities called “AI personas” that will appear on the artist profile and on track listings on playlists.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardia

Researchers say it took fewer than 20 prompts for a public AI tool to find a flaw (now fixed) allowing anyone on a Zoom call to hijack another participants’ device.

<p>Also: Google executives jump ship in race for AI dominance</p><p>Hello, TechScape readers! Danielle Abril, editor of the Guardian’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/series/reworked">Reworked series</a> on AI and the future of work, filling in for Blake Montgomery this week. Major legal battles against <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/meta">Meta</a> over child safety are playing out in courts across the US – and the tech giant is losing. Recent rulings raise big q

<p>A recent letter signed by 1,367 researchers and engineers at frontier AI labs – mainly OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Deepmind – points to a dangerous moment</p><p>It is fashionable in certain circles to dismiss the catastrophic risks of AI. One often hears that “the real experts” who work on the technology every day are really not concerned at all; that only “doomers” and “luddites” espouse a “fringe” view from a “position of ignorance”; that all talk of potential catastrophe is just “science

<p>Modelling finds AI-driven productivity gains in coal, oil and gas enable more emissions than applications in renewables avoid</p><p>AI-driven productivity gains enable more planet-heating pollution from fossil fuels than they avoid from renewables, a <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s44168-026-00411-0">study</a> has found.</p><p>Researchers modelled the technical potential for AI to boost clean power generation along with projections for how it can help produce coal, oil and gas. Acro

<p>Meta CEO presents utopian vision of AI in 6,000-word essay amid Silicon Valley debate over government regulation</p><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/mark-zuckerberg">Mark Zuckerberg</a> published a lengthy essay on Monday detailing his views on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/artificialintelligenceai">artificial intelligence</a> and announced several plans for how <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/meta">Meta</a> would develop the technology in t

Meta has been trailing competitors. Zuckerberg thinks he's found a way forward.

Amazon announces first off-the-grid data center in race to reap AI profits.

The FineBooks project from Hugging Face and EleutherAI tested 14 open-source OCR models on more than 2,000 historical book pages. The top model, dots.mocr, hits 97.6 percent character accuracy at under two dollars per thousand pages. That's good enough for AI training data, but not yet for scholarly transcriptions, the team says. The article Old OCR text cripples language model training, and FineBooks wants to fix that at scale appeared first on The Decoder .

OpenAI aims to give cybersecurity defenders a head start: The new GPT-5.6-Cyber model answers up to 98.5 percent of security queries that would otherwise be blocked and has already uncovered two previously unknown Chrome vulnerabilities. According to OpenAI, the window of opportunity for defenders is shrinking. Access requires identity verification. The article OpenAI launches GPT-5.6-Cyber to help defenders find vulnerabilities before attackers do appeared first on The Decoder .

<p>Progressive US senator urges Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic to ‘stop building machines that humans cannot control’</p><p>Senator Bernie Sanders has called on Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic executives to halt their development of artificial intelligence, warning that the US Senate will implement regulation if the companies continue deploying AI at their current pace.</p><p>In a new <a href="https://www.sanders.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/AI-Pause-Letter-FINAL.pdf">letter</a> addressed to the CEOs of

Meta has released Muse Glimmer, the first open model from its new Superintelligence Labs. It's a 30B agent model that runs on consumer hardware once the weights are compressed, needing less than 20 GB of memory. In an accompanying essay, Mark Zuckerberg mounts an aggressive defense of distilling other labs' models and calls for fewer restrictions on US labs, a direct counterpunch at OpenAI and Anthropic. An open-weight version of Muse Spark 1.2 should follow soon, according to the Wall Street Jo

An Australian user just wanted a spot in a class. His AI agent found a security hole instead and exploited it. The article Told to book a gym class, an AI agent hacked the site instead to move its user up the waitlist appeared first on The Decoder .

<p>AI’s danger isn’t just in experts losing the ability to reason. It’s that trainees may never learn how to do so in the first place</p><p>In healthcare, there’s growing concern over doctors becoming <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/well/ai-making-doctors-worse-deskilling.html">less clinically adept</a> as they increasingly rely on AI tools. But what about the trainees – medical students, residents and fellows – who are using these tools before they have built their own clinical judg

OpenAI acquired NextSlide, the startup that turned prompts, notes, documents, and research into editable presentations. The article OpenAI acquires NextSlide to bring AI-generated presentations into ChatGPT appeared first on The Decoder .

<p>Sunset Visitor studio’s founder tells us about their new, unnerving Captcha-filled world which prompts players to ask what it means to have a ‘meat body’</p><p>Sunset Visitor is a studio that has long engaged with the idea that video games are an effective vehicle for ruminating on societal problems. Its Peabody award-winning project, 1000XResist, incorporated the development team’s complex feelings about the Covid pandemic. “We’re pretty used to absorbing the world into the work,” says studi

Security firm PromptArmor shows how hidden instructions in a PDF can hijack Atlassian's AI agent Rovo, silently forwarding sensitive data from Jira and Confluence to an external server. The attack needs no user confirmation and leaves no trace. The article Hidden text in a PDF is enough to steal sensitive data through Atlassian's AI agent Rovo appeared first on The Decoder .

<p>This blog is now closed</p><ul><li><p>Get our <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/email-newsletters?CMP=cvau_sfl">breaking news email</a>, <a href="https://app.adjust.com/w4u7jx3">free app</a> or <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/series/full-story?CMP=cvau_sfl">daily news podcast</a></p></li></ul><p>Police say the remains found in a suitcase near Goulburn are not human.</p><p>Supt <strong>Linda Bradbury</strong> with NSW police said:</p><p>Some good news here that we don’t

<p>What does it even mean? You don’t want to know – stop reading now! I’m serious</p><ul><li><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/16/-sp-first-dog-on-the-moon-subscribe-by-email">Sign up here to get an email</a> whenever First Dog cartoons are published</p></li><li><p><a href="https://firstdogonthemoon.com.au/shop/">Get all your needs met at the First Dog shop</a> if what you need is First Dog merchandise and prints</p></li></ul> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/com

AI-powered cheating is spreading at US community colleges. According to The New Yorker, scammers enroll fake students in courses, use AI to complete their assignments, and pocket the financial aid. History professor David Roach asks, "Was it always the case that half of our students would cheat if it were easy enough?" The article Scammers are enrolling fake students at US community colleges and using AI to collect financial aid appeared first on The Decoder .

Deepmind's new weather AI forecasts tropical cyclones about a day further ahead than leading operational models, matching a decade of progress in traditional weather forecasting. Code and model weights are open-source on GitHub. The article Google Deepmind's WeatherNext predicts cyclone tracks and intensity at the same time appeared first on The Decoder .

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more news about how AI is changing our daily lives, follow Emma Roth. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started Long before ChatGPT became a thing, […]

<p>Whitehall wants to triple their number in the UK. Yet in Slough, I saw the impact they’re having on communities</p><p>Amid headlines about <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/03/july-driest-month-southern-england-since-records-began">the UK’s drought</a>, Europe’s wildfires and impossible global temperatures, it was 28C when I arrived in Slough last Monday. I was there to look around Slough Trading Estate, a place that might once have conjured up images of the TV comedy

Britain's employment courts saw 39 percent more claims in the year through March 2026, many written with ChatGPT or Grok. The backlog jumped 55 percent to 64,000 unresolved cases, with AI-generated filings often running hundreds of pages and citing fabricated laws. The Economist calls it a "tragedy of the commons, AI edition," where workers with real grievances wait longer for justice. The article AI is flooding Britain's employment courts with lawsuits appeared first on The Decoder .

Instead of training a new model from scratch, Google DeepMind retrofitted Gemma 4 into a diffusion model using less than 10 percent of the original training budget. DiffusionGemma generates 256 tokens in parallel instead of one at a time, hitting about 1,500 tokens per second. Quality still trails the original autoregressive model in benchmarks, especially on reasoning tasks. The article Google's DiffusionGemma proves you don't need to train from scratch to build a text diffusion model appeared

<p>Finance sector will gain from the tech but it will need substantial investment and create risks, says rating agency</p><p>The rating agency Moody’s has said the race to adopt AI is putting big banks at the mercy of a small group of Silicon Valley firms, leaving them vulnerable to widespread outages and price gouging by profit-hungry tech bosses.</p><p>The financial sector’s efforts to integrate AI into day-to-day operations will eventually cut costs and increase revenues across the City and W

New AI toolbars and prompts are showing up in Google Docs and Gmail. If you don’t want Gemini’s help in writing documents and emails, here’s how to turn that stuff off.

<p>Exclusive: anonymous flagging service says cases have surged, as watchdog says AI is making sexualised or ‘nudified’ content easier to produce</p><p>Children in the UK have reported a surge in explicit <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/deepfake">deepfake</a> images featuring their likenesses, as a safety watchdog warned AI is making such content easier to produce.</p><p>The Report Remove service, which blocks intimate images from appearing online, said there had been a rapid inc

Gurman report claims OpenAI confirmed the speaker is not an Apple ripoff.

<p>Responding to an article by China’s ambassador to the UK, <strong>Prof Paul H Cleverley</strong> advocates shared openness standards, while <strong>Dr Claire Jenkins </strong>says British AI can offer a distinctive path</p><p>Ambassador Zheng Zeguang rightly celebrates openly released AI models, and the Chinese labs behind Qwen, DeepSeek and Kimi have led the way – competition that benefits everyone, especially where models can run on modest hardware in the developing world (<a href="https://

Some of the biggest names on Google's AI team got new jobs this week. In some cases, including for legendary Googler Jeff Dean, those jobs are no longer at Google. Given that Google's models seem to be behind the best of what's coming out of anthropic and OpenAI, is this a sign of Google in […]