At a weekend hackathon in San Francisco, more than 100 coders gathered to test whether they could beat AI--and win a $12,500 cash prize. On a breezy San Francisco afternoon last Saturday, I found myself at a nondescript coworking space filled with shoeless coders. Just over a hundred visitors had crowded into an office building in the Duboce Triangle neighborhood for a showdown that would pit teams armed with AI coding tools against those made up of only humans (all were asked to ditch their shoes at the door). The hackathon was dubbed " Man vs. Machine," and its goal was to test whether AI does help people code faster--and better. Roughly 37 groups were randomly assigned "human" or "AI-supported."

Is AI the New Frontier of Women's Oppression? In her new book, feminist author Laura Bates explores how sexbots, AI assistants, and deepfakes are reinventing misogyny and harming women. After spending her early twenties as a nanny in the UK, Laura Bates noticed that the young girls she was caring for were preoccupied by their bodies, spurred on by the marketing they were receiving. In 2012, Bates, a London-based feminist author and activist, started The Everyday Sexism Project, a website dedicated to documenting and combatting sexism, misogyny, and gendered violence around the world by highlighting insidious instances of it such as invisible labor, referring to women as girls and commenting on their attire in professional settings. The site was turned into a book in 2014.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Google's Gemini AI can now make 1080p videos and costs half as much Both Veo 3 and Veo 3 Fast models just got updated features and much better pricing. Google's video-generating AI model, called Veo 3, can now generate videos in Full HD. The company announced yesterday that it has updated the AI model to support both a higher resolution and a new format. With both Veo 3 and Veo 3 Fast models, Gemini can now generate videos in 1080p resolution.

The reason for the relative tameness of the penalty is the emergence of real competition to Google - what the case concerned in the first place. The reason for the relative tameness of the penalty is the emergence of real competition to Google - what the case concerned in the first place. An antitrust apocalypse has been averted, and it's all down to its biggest competitor, according to the judge who could've forced Google to sell Chrome I'm your host, Blake Montgomery, writing to you as I finish the audiobook version of Don DeLillo's White Noise, which I can't say I found compelling. In tech - artificial intelligence is having its day in court with an 11th-hour appearance in Google's landmark antitrust trial and Anthropic's major settlement with book authors. Google dodged a catastrophic breakup, and it has its biggest competitor to thank for that, according to the judge who could have forced the tech giant to sell off Chrome, the most popular web browser in the world, and perhaps Android, the world's most widely used mobile operating system.

K2 Think compares well with reasoning models from OpenAI and DeepSeek but is smaller and more efficient, say researchers based in Abu Dhabi. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has released an open source model that performs advanced reasoning as well as the best offerings from both the United States and China--one of the strongest signs so far that the nation's big investments in artificial intelligence are starting to pay off. The new model, K2 Think, comes from researchers at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) located in UAE's capital Abu Dhabi. The model--one of the first so-called "sovereign" AI models that incorporates technical advances needed for reasoning--is being made available for free by G42, an Emirati tech conglomerate backed by Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth funds. G42 is running the model on a cluster of Cerberas chips, an alternative to Nvidia's hardware.

Plus: the US won't collaborate with Europe to fight disinformation Each year, we select 35 outstanding individuals under the age of 35 who are using technology to tackle tough problems in their respective fields. Our AI honorees include people who steer model development at Silicon Valley's biggest tech firms and academic researchers who develop new techniques to improve AI's performance. How Yichao "Peak" Ji became a global AI app hitmaker When Yichao Ji--also known as "Peak"--appeared in a launch video for Manus in March, he didn't expect it to go viral. Speaking in fluent English, the 32-year-old introduced the AI agent built by Chinese startup Butterfly Effect, where he serves as chief scientist. The video was not an elaborate production but something about Ji's delivery, and the vision behind the product, cut through the noise. The product, then still an early preview available only through invite codes, spread across the Chinese internet to the world in a matter of days.

The Twitch streamer could pivot from influencer to candidate. But he tells WIRED's podcast he'd rather use his platform to tell Dems "you can't podcast your way out of this problem." Hasan Piker is many things to many people. They don't all feel the same way about Piker or his politics, but most presumably agree on one thing: He is a relentless human being. Most days a week, you can find the 34-year-old Twitch streamer talking to his audience, often for six to nine hours at a stretch. And during President Trump's second term, there's plenty of that to go around. He has nearly 3 million followers on Twitch and has hosted conversations with Senator Bernie Sanders and US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He claims his election night stream in 2024 reached a staggering 7.5 million viewers. On this episode of, I talked to Piker about his looks, his love of Italian sandwiches, and any future political aspirations he might (or might not) want to tease. It's great to be here. I heard you were just at the gym. Yeah, I was at the park. Some days I take my dog and I play a little bit of basketball and get to hang out with some people.

Three big things we still don't know about AI's energy burden AI companies are revealing the one number that researchers have long sought. Earlier this year, when my colleague Casey Crownhart and I spent six months researching the climate and energy burden of AI, we came to see one number in particular as our white whale: how much energy the leading AI models, like ChatGPT or Gemini, use up when generating a single response. This fundamental number remained elusive even as the scramble to power AI escalated to the White House and the Pentagon, and as projections showed that in three years AI could use as much electricity as 22% of all US households. The problem with finding that number, as we explain in our piece published in May, was that AI companies are the only ones who have it. We pestered Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft, but each company refused to provide its figure. Researchers we spoke to who study AI's impact on energy grids compared it to trying to measure the fuel efficiency of a car without ever being able to drive it, making guesses based on rumors of its engine size and what it sounds like going down the highway.

Help! My therapist is secretly using ChatGPT Some patients have discovered their private confessions are being quietly fed into AI. In Silicon Valley's imagined future, AI models are so empathetic that we'll use them as therapists. They'll provide mental-health care for millions, unimpeded by the pesky requirements for human counselors, like the need for graduate degrees, malpractice insurance, and sleep. Down here on Earth, something very different has been happening. Last week, we published a story about people finding out that their therapists were secretly using ChatGPT during sessions. In some cases it wasn't subtle; one therapist accidentally shared his screen during a virtual appointment, allowing the patient to see his own private thoughts being typed into ChatGPT in real time.

In this position paper, we address the persistent gap between rapidly growing AI capabilities and lagging safety progress. Existing paradigms divide into ``Make AI Safe'', which applies post-hoc alignment and guardrails but remains brittle and reactive, and ``Make Safe AI'', which emphasizes intrinsic safety but struggles to address unforeseen risks in open-ended environments. We therefore propose \textit{safe-by-coevolution} as a new formulation of the ``Make Safe AI'' paradigm, inspired by biological immunity, in which safety becomes a dynamic, adversarial, and ongoing learning process. To operationalize this vision, we introduce \texttt{R$^2$AI} -- \textit{Resistant and Resilient AI} -- as a practical framework that unites resistance against known threats with resilience to unforeseen risks. \texttt{R$^2$AI} integrates \textit{fast and slow safe models}, adversarial simulation and verification through a \textit{safety wind tunnel}, and continual feedback loops that guide safety and capability to coevolve. We argue that this framework offers a scalable and proactive path to maintain continual safety in dynamic environments, addressing both near-term vulnerabilities and long-term existential risks as AI advances toward AGI and ASI.