In recent times, there have been two techno-religious awakenings. To be human is to yearn for a Sky Daddy. Something that explains the unexplainable, someone to blame. No wonder, then, that in the ZIRP-fueled 2010s, when a new gospel of creation was being spread, some people started to see technology as a kind of religion. Startup founders and CEOs became messianic figures.

They didn't want to put their children in the middle--so they put a machine there instead. Sol Kennedy used to ask his assistant to read the messages his ex-wife sent him. After the couple separated in 2020, Kennedy says, he found their communications "tough." An email, or a stream of them, would arrive--stuff about their two kids mixed with unrelated emotional wallops--and his day would be ruined trying to reply. Kennedy, a serial tech founder and investor in Silicon Valley, was in therapy at the time.

On an airstrip somewhere in Texas, a swarm of killer jets approaches--controlled by, of all things, a large language model. At a secret US military base located about 50 miles from the Mexican border--exact location: classified--the defense contractor Anduril is testing a remarkable new use for a large language model. I attended one of the first demonstrations last year. From a sun-bleached landing strip, I watched as four jet aircraft, codenamed Mustang, appeared on the horizon to the west and soared over a desolate landscape of boulders and brush. The prototypes, miniaturized for the demo, fell into formation, their engines buzzing as they grew near.

Some of the world's most interesting thinkers about thinking think they might've cracked machine sentience. And I think they might be onto something. As a journalist who covers AI, I hear from countless people who seem utterly convinced that ChatGPT, Claude, or some other chatbot has achieved "sentience." The Turing test was aced a while back, yes, but unlike rote intelligence, these things are not so easily pinned down. Large language models will claim to think for themselves, even describe inner torments or profess undying loves, but such statements don't imply interiority.

I sound Korean--because I am Korean. Can AI make me sound American? It all began, as these things often do, with an Instagram ad . "No one tells you this if you're an immigrant, but accent discrimination is a real thing," said a woman in the video. Her own accent is faintly Eastern European--so subtle it took me a few playbacks to notice.

Increased defense spending is a boon for Germany's ailing industrial sector. Numerous companies, even those with no previous military experience, are now hoping to get in on the act. Visiting the works of Ilsenburger Grobblech GmbH is like taking a trip back in time. Way back in the 16th century, copper used to be produced at this site in the northern Harz Mountains, not far from eastern Germany' tallest peak, the Brocken. Today, slabs of steel up to 35 centimeters thick are piled up in front of the factory halls, delivered from the blast furnaces and converters of parent company Salzgitter, less than an hour's drive away. What is happening behind the factory walls, though, is part of a new hype that has gripped Germany's crisis-ridden industrial sector. A hype which many are hoping will be enough to revive it.

U.S. cable industry invested $340 billion in broadband networks, but national strategy needed to secure AI dominance over China through better internet infrastructure.

ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Grok are serving users propaganda from Russian-backed media when asked about the invasion of Ukraine, new research finds. OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, DeepSeek, and xAI's Grok are pushing Russian state propaganda from sanctioned entities--including citations from Russian state media, sites tied to Russian intelligence or pro-Kremlin narratives--when asked about the war against Ukraine, according to a new report. Researchers from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD) claim that Russian propaganda has targeted and exploited data voids --where searches for real-time data provide few results from legitimate sources--to promote false and misleading information. Almost one-fifth of responses to questions about Russia's war in Ukraine, across the four chatbots they tested, cited Russian state-attributed sources, the ISD research claims. "It raises questions regarding how chatbots should deal when referencing these sources, considering many of them are sanctioned in the EU," says Pablo Maristany de las Casas, an analyst at the ISD who led the research.

Japan's gaming industry moves to improve accessibility A player uses eye movement to play a game during the Tokyo Game Show held in the city of Chiba in September. The Japanese gaming industry is working to improve video game accessibility by developing equipment and systems that allow people with disabilities affecting their hands to play by using other parts of their body, such as their cheeks, feet and eyes. There were people playing games without using their hands at an area dedicated to accessibility set up for the first time at the Tokyo Game Show in the city of Chiba in September. One of items on display was a special gaming controller system developed mainly by Tokyo-based Technotools for Nintendo's Nintendo Switch game console. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

American companies led by Alphabet's Waymo have drawn much of the limelight with driverless cars deployed almost entirely on home soil. Now that some are beginning to look abroad, they'll have to share roads with Chinese companies quietly making plenty of progress. Baidu's Apollo Go, WeRide and Pony AI are outnumbering their American counterparts with more robotaxi projects progressing from testing to various stages of commercialization, according to a BloombergNEF analysis. While much of that headway is being made domestically, the Chinese companies are standing up operations in places like Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Singapore, and looking to launch in Germany, the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe. Comparing autonomous-vehicles companies' progress isn't a straightforward exercise -- the industry has been synonymous with false dawns and unfulfilled promises. Players that have looked promising and raised billions at rich valuations have been doomed by singular crashes they never recovered from, or been cut off by benefactors that have lost patience.