Data warehousing giant Snowflake is holding its annual user and partner conference, Snowflake Summit 2025, this week. As with most infrastructure software vendors, the company emphasized the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) across its platform. Given Snowflake's focus on the enterprise, with almost 12,000 customers, the pitch of all the announcements had a singular message: Business analysts, the individuals who primarily work with the Snowflake database to get work done, can be the driving force behind both developing AI models and making predictions with those models. Also: Snowflake's new AI agents make it easier for businesses to make sense of their data Among the new features, ZDNET's Sabrina Ortiz relates that the chat mode lets one speak with the data, if you will, using natural language prompts. It is powered by OpenAI and Anthropic LLMs, along with Snowflake's own Cortex models.

This week, I'm wondering what my first jobs in journalism would have been like had generative AI been around. In other news: Elon Musk leaves a trail of chaos, and influencers are selling the text they fed to AI to make art. Generative artificial intelligence may eliminate the job you got with your diploma still in hand, say executives who offered grim assessments of the entry-level job market last week in multiple forums. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, which makes the multifunctional AI model Claude, told Axios last week that he believes that AI could cut half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and send overall unemployment rocketing to 20% within the next five years. One explanation why an AI company CEO might make such a dire prediction is to hype the capabilities of his product.

Snowflake kicked off its annual user conference, Snowflake Summit 2025, on Tuesday. The cloud-based data-storage company launched a slew of new features. The biggest highlight was agentic AI solutions that help organizations better make sense of their data: Snowflake Intelligence and Data Science Agent. With the rise of agentic AI, Snowflake is the latest company to embrace the burgeoning technology to optimize how companies sort, analyze, and understand their data. AI chatbots have risen in popularity because they make it easy to find what you are looking for using a simple, conversational text prompt.

Data is the fuel behind the AI revolution -- the foundational building block for the new technological world order. But data is immaterial, difficult to organize, and subject to an ever-growing mountain of walled gardens and regulatory decrees. Businesses seeking to harness AI, therefore, often struggle to make the most of their data, this most vital of resources. At its annual Snowflake Summit user conference, the company announced the release of Openflow, a new service designed to integrate businesses' data into a single, unified, and intelligible channel. Like disparate streams flowing into a single river, Openflow takes the whole of a company's data -- structured, unstructured, batch, and streaming -- and collects them in such a way that they can be more easily visualized and leveraged.

Looking to skip the hassle of wall-mounting a security camera in your backyard and wiring it for power? If you have an available outdoor light socket, this new Wyze cam and smart bulb combo can be screwed right into it. Available now, the Wyze Blub Cam ( 49.98) is pretty much what it says: a smart bulb with an integrated security camera. Screw-in security cameras are plentiful on Amazon, but they typically come from no-name brands and (generally speaking) offer only iffy quality. But we're starting to see light socket-compatible cams from more reputable companies, including a recent 2K model from Lorex, and now we have Wyze's entry in the market.

Ukraine managed to not only humiliate the Kremlin by boasting of taking out more than a third of all Russian missile carriers in a spectacular drone attack but also to rewrite the rules of modern warfare, analysts say. Despite being outnumbered and outgunned, Kyiv used inexpensive drones at the weekend to destroy Russian nuclear-capable bombers worth billions of dollars in an operation carried out after months of planning. "Spider's Web" dealt a blow to Russia more than three years after its invasion of Ukraine, and the operation will now be studied closely by militaries around the world as a new strategy in asymmetric warfare.

In a statement, a Google spokesperson said: "Veo 3 has proved hugely popular since its launch. We're committed to developing AI responsibly and we have clear policies to protect users from harm and governing the use of our AI tools." Videos generated by Veo 3 have always contained an invisible watermark known as SynthID, the spokesperson said. Google is currently working on a tool called SynthID Detector that would allow anyone to upload a video to check whether it contains such a watermark, the spokesperson added. However, this tool is not yet publicly available.

In this interview series, we're meeting some of the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants to find out more about their research. In this latest interview, we hear from Debalina Padariya and hear about her work on Privacy-Preserving Generative Models, why this is such an interesting area for study, the different projects she's been involved in so far during her PhD, and her experience at the Doctoral Consortium at AAAI 2025. I am currently pursuing a PhD at De Montfort University, UK, supported by the prestigious Alan Turing Institute and Accenture Strategic Partnership Program. My research primarily focuses on Privacy-Preserving Generative Models, while designing a framework to quantify the privacy/utility trade-offs in generative model-driven synthetic datasets. Although Synthetic Data Generation (SDG) is one of the emerging use cases of generative AI, potential privacy attacks associated with generative models emerge as critical issues.

On June 3, Yoshua Bengio, the world's most-cited computer scientist, announced the launch of LawZero, a nonprofit that aims to create "safe by design" AI by pursuing a fundamentally different approach to major tech companies. Players like OpenAI and Google are investing heavily in AI agents--systems that not only answer queries and generate images, but can craft plans and take actions in the world. The goal of these companies is to create virtual employees that can do practically any job a human can, known in the tech industry as artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Executives like Google DeepMind's CEO Demis Hassabis point to AGI's potential to solve climate change or cure disease as a motivator for its development. Bengio, however, says we don't need agentic systems to reap AI's rewards--it's a false choice.

Google is cooked ... cooked like a luxurious, rich, decadent, yet tender steak on the Fourth of July. I know that sounds dramatic, but we could be witnessing the slow demise of Google as we know it. Testifying in Google's antitrust trial, Apple's head of services, Eddy Cue, confirmed that fewer iPhone users are using Google Search on Safari and are instead turning to AI. Now, before you think I'm writing Google's obituary, let me be clear. Like I've said before, I'm confident they'll figure it out, even if that means changing their business model.