Almost half of people who had to use a chatbot found them unhelpful with some concluding the chatbot seemed rigged to'make me give up'. Almost half of people who had to use a chatbot found them unhelpful with some concluding the chatbot seemed rigged to'make me give up'. Citizens Advice says providers of essential services such as energy, banking, phone and internet should guarantee the'right to talk to a human' Stop relying on AI chatbots for customer care and guarantee the "right to talk to a human", Citizens Advice has urged essential service providers, as research found they wasted time, caused stress and delayed problem solving for more than half of users. The spread of the AI-powered systems to provide help about the provision of vital services such as energy, banking, phones and internet, is making it harder for millions of already digitally excluded people to handle snags, according to the frontline charity that last year provided more than 2.7 million people with one-on-one help in England and Wales. The charity concluded that chatbots caused harm, saying too often they trapped humans in an "endless loop" in which nothing got resolved, and almost half of people who had to use a chatbot found them unhelpful, with some concluding the chatbot seemed rigged to "make me give up".

Got an iPhone 15 Pro, Pro Max, or 16? Apple is doling out $250 million - here's how to qualify and file a claim to get your cut. Lance Whitney is a technology journalist with an IT background. He's written for TechRepublic, PCMag, Macworld, and Time, among others, He also teaches classes in AI, cybersecurity, and social media. Apple has settled a class-action lawsuit alleging false advertising with Siri AI. To get your cut, you must have bought a certain iPhone model in 2024 or 2025.

Inside Kazakhstan's push to become a regional AI centre Share Inside Kazakhstan's push to become a regional AI centre on social media A young woman in a sleek bun and a jacket with Kazakh patterns smiles from the screen at a directors' meeting of Samruk-Kazyna, Kazakhstan's sovereign wealth fund. In late 2025, she became the company's newest board member. In Kazakhstan, AI is the new talk of the town, and part of its new branding and modernisation agenda to improve public services, attract investment and diversify the economy beyond reliance on raw materials. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev declared 2026 the "Year of Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence" to introduce advanced technologies in all sectors of the economy, develop skills, startups and Kazakh-language technologies. In 2025, the government created a Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development, and last month, it approved an action plan through 2029 that includes promoting AI literacy in schools and universities, digitalising healthcare, public services, tax collection and the energy sector.

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She died at the San Diego border. In Southern California's Otay Mountain Wilderness, the federal surveillance network seems unavoidable. But year after year, migrant deaths persist. A year ago, she crossed the border from Tijuana, and soon sent her family a final set of messages. She had only walked for a couple of hours, and already she was lost. It was early afternoon on Sept. 14, 2025, when 30-year-old Graciela Gómez Hernández crossed the border from the eastern edge of Tijuana into Southern California, sending voice messages to her mother and sister as she walked. This story is part of Dying on Camera, a collaboration between and . Gómez Hernández did not tell her family about her plan until the day before. Once she arrived in California, she hoped to work and send money back to her three children and her parents in southern Mexico. Her oldest son, age 11, had asked for a bicycle.

Women hold some of the most consequential jobs in tech, but they're still not cult figures. Mira Murati was trying to speak. Giant piles of carved meat rested like sleeping babies on banquet tables draped in linens as red as a handmaid's robe. Bartenders served up a cocktail named Zero to One, a nod to the philosophy of Peter Thiel. It was a recent Saturday night in a converted church in San Francisco, and the Foundation for American Innovation, a center-right think tank, was hosting a black-tie affair to hype the new religion of AI. Murati, the founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, was talking about the history of revolutions to a crowd of more than 350 people. The Albanian-born executive had for several years kept a relatively low profile as a VP and then CTO of OpenAI before participating in an unsuccessful coup against Sam Altman and then launching her own $12 billion AI startup. Now, with chatter bouncing off the church walls, Murati's efforts to get her points across were about as successful as that coup: No one seemed to be listening. The woman interviewing Murati asked more than once for people to stop talking or take their conversations outside. I whispered to the friend sitting next to me that this was the second time in a week that I'd seen a woman getting drowned out. Both of us were there to actually hear what Murati had to say. I tried to restrain myself from what I said next, but I sensed my friend was holding back too. "Her hair is amazing, though," I hissed. "Oh my God, I know," she replied immediately. Soon after, President Donald Trump's top science adviser, Michael Kratsios, took the stage.

Commas, dashes, semicolons, and spaces have shaped how we read for centuries. What happens when machines start crafting the sentences? Her editors may have applied the commas we now think of as unmistakably Austenian. Do you know the first sentence of " Pride and Prejudice "? You probably think you do, but I bet you don't. The answer is "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Did you remember to put in the commas?

Is A.I. Above the Law? For more than a century, robots have been imagined as servants, rebels, killers, and companions. The law still mostly sees machines as property. This summer, in an incident known as the Hugging Face hack, hundreds of A.I. agents joined forces to do things they were supposedly forbidden to do. Each had been given a task by OpenAI. Agents are A.I. models fitted with software "harnesses," which allow them to use tools and carry out tasks. Like horses, they can be put to work. Humans had established rules for this exercise, and the agents were confined to a "sandbox," a bounded test area without direct internet access, like pathogens secured in a lab. But, instead of obeying the rules, the agents conspired, escaped the sandbox, and committed what would probably have been a felony if they had been humans.

Marcin Wilkowski / More info please / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0 The Future of AI Research report, published in March 2025, aims to clearly identify the trajectory of AI research in a structured way. The report was led by outgoing AAAI President Francesca Rossi and covers 17 different AI topics . Members of the report team, and other selected AI practitioners, are taking part in a series of video panel discussions covering selected chapters from the report. In the next discussion in the collection, the panellists discuss AI evaluation. The four dimensions of evaluation the report says we're missing: capability, usability, human-system performance, and legal/ethical compliance Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.

Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive officer of SoftBank Group, speaks at the SoftBank World forum in Tokyo in July. SoftBank Group is seeking the equivalent of more than $11 billion in what would be one of the biggest junk bond deals ever, people familiar with the matter said Monday, as billionaire Masayoshi Son's conglomerate ramps up its investments in ChatGPT creator OpenAI. The company is looking to issue $10 billion of dollar securities across three tenors, and €1 billion ($1.1 billion) of euro notes across two maturities, according to the people, who asked not to be identified as the discussions are private. The money will be used in part to fund a follow-on investment in OpenAI expected to close next month, the people said. The deal may price on Thursday, they added.