That's why we've created the AI Hype Index--a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. Take a look at this month's edition of the index here. Despite its ubiquity, AI is seen as anything but a normal technology. There is talk of AI systems that will soon merit the term "superintelligence," and the former CEO of Google recently suggested we control AI models the way we control uranium and other nuclear weapons materials. A recent essay by two AI researchers at Princeton argues that AI is a general-purpose technology whose application might be better compared to the drawn-out adoption of electricity or the internet than to nuclear weapons.

That's why we've created the AI Hype Index--a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. AI agents are the AI industry's hypiest new product--intelligent assistants capable of completing tasks without human supervision. But while they can be theoretically useful--Simular AI's S2 agent, for example, intelligently switches between models depending on what it's been told to do--they could also be weaponized to execute cyberattacks. Elsewhere, OpenAI is reported to be throwing its hat into the social media arena, and AI models are getting more adept at making music. Oh, and if the results of the first half-marathon pitting humans against humanoid robots are anything to go by, we won't have to worry about the robot uprising any time soon.

Instead, according to the researchers, AI is a general-purpose technology whose application might be better compared to the drawn-out adoption of electricity or the internet than to nuclear weapons--though they concede this is in some ways a flawed analogy. The core point, Kapoor says, is that we need to start differentiating between the rapid development of AI methods--the flashy and impressive displays of what AI can do in the lab--and what comes from the actual applications of AI, which in historical examples of other technologies lag behind by decades. "Much of the discussion of AI's societal impacts ignores this process of adoption," Kapoor told me, "and expects societal impacts to occur at the speed of technological development." In other words, the adoption of useful artificial intelligence, in his view, will be less of a tsunami and more of a trickle. In the essay, the pair make some other bracing arguments: terms like "superintelligence" are so incoherent and speculative that we shouldn't use them; AI won't automate everything but will birth a category of human labor that monitors, verifies, and supervises AI; and we should focus more on AI's likelihood to worsen current problems in society than the possibility of it creating new ones.

Since the video was posted earlier this month, millions of TikTok users have watched as a young Chinese man in a blue T-shirt sits beside a traditional tea set and speaks directly to the camera in accented English: "Let's expose luxury's biggest secret." He stands and lifts what looks like an Hermès Birkin bag, one of the world's most exclusive and expensive handbags, before gesturing toward the shelves filled with more bags behind him. "You recognize them: Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Gucci--all crafted in our workshops." He ends by urging viewers to buy directly from his factory. Video "exposés" like this--where a sales agent breaks down the material cost of luxury goods, from handbags to perfumes to appliances--are everywhere on TikTok right now.

At the same time, hosted services like generative AI and tailored industry solutions can help companies quickly launch applications and grow the business. To get the most out of these services, companies are turning to cloud optimization--the process of selecting and allocating cloud resources to reduce costs while maximizing performance. But despite all the interest in the cloud, many workloads remain stranded on-premises, and many more are not optimized for efficiency and growth, greatly limiting the forward momentum. Companies are missing out on a virtuous cycle of mutually reinforcing results that comes from even more efficient use of the cloud. Organizations can enhance security, make critical workloads more resilient, protect the customer experience, boost revenues, and generate cost savings.

I think that communication about the wonderful things that are going on at MIT to the broader community is actually really important,

In the new design, each of the four units has a single flapping wing pointing away from the robot's center, stabilizing the wings and boosting their lift forces. The researchers also improved the way the wings are connected to the actuators, or artificial muscles, that flap them. In previous designs, when the actuators' movements reached the extremely high frequencies needed for flight, the devices often started buckling. That reduced the power and efficiency of the robot. Thanks in part to a new, longer wing hinge, the actuators now experience less mechanical strain and can apply more force, so the bots can fly faster, longer, and in more precise paths.

Architecture often assumes a binary between built projects and theoretical ones. What physics allows in actual buildings, after all, is vastly different from what architects can imagine and design (often referred to as "paper architecture"). That imagination has long been supported and enabled by design technology, but the latest advancements in artificial intelligence have prompted a surge in the theoretical. "Transductions: Artificial Intelligence in Architectural Experimentation," a recent exhibition at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, brought together works from over 30 practitioners exploring the experimental, generative, and collaborative potential of artificial intelligence to open up new areas of architectural inquiry--something they've been working on for a decade or more, since long before AI became mainstream. Architects and exhibition co-curators Jason Vigneri-Beane, Olivia Vien, Stephen Slaughter, and Hart Marlow explain that the works in "Transductions" emerged out of feedback loops among architectural discourses, techniques, formats, and media that range from imagery, text, and animation to mixed-reality media and fabrication.

"We've been really pushing on'thinking,'" says Jack Rae, a principal research scientist at DeepMind. Such models, which are built to work through problems logically and spend more time arriving at an answer, rose to prominence earlier this year with the launch of the DeepSeek R1 model. They're attractive to AI companies because they can make an existing model better by training it to approach a problem pragmatically. That way, the companies can avoid having to build a new model from scratch. When the AI model dedicates more time (and energy) to a query, it costs more to run.

The only office within the US State Department that monitors foreign disinformation is to be eliminated, according to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, confirming reporting by MIT Technology Review. The Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub is a small office in the State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy that tracks and counters foreign disinformation campaigns. The culling of the office leaves the State Department without a way to actively counter the increasingly sophisticated disinformation campaigns from foreign governments like those of Russia, Iran, and China. What is vibe coding, exactly? When OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy excitedly took to X back in February to post about his new hobby, he probably had no idea he was about to coin a phrase that encapsulated an entire movement steadily gaining momentum across the world.