One of my editors once told me that a cynic will always sound more rational, but that doesn't mean they're right. French statesman Francois Guizot basically said the same thing from the other POV: "The world belongs to optimists. Apple's AI strategy has a lot of cynics and pessimists -- and they sound pretty rational based on what we've seen over the past year. The long-awaited revamp of Siri has never materialized and is reportedly delayed to 2026. Apple's vision of your own custom AI-powered assistant with your "personal context" has been little more than a hopeful vision.

Daniel Rausch, Amazon's vice president of Alexa and Echo, is in the midst of a major transition. More than a decade beyond the launch of Amazon's Alexa, he's been tasked with creating a new version of the marquee voice assistant, one that's powered by large language models. As he put it in my interview with him, this new assistant, dubbed Alexa, is "a complete rebuild of the architecture." How did his team approach Amazon's largest ever revamp of its voice assistant? They used AI to build AI, of course.

A bug in one of Asana's new AI features made user information accessible to other users for several weeks. The company said the issue was resolved and it was not the result of a malicious hack. Instead, it appeared to be a logic flaw in its MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that was released on May 1, according to cybersecurity firm UpGuard (via BleepingComputer). MCP is an open-source framework that enables AI assistants to interact with sites and apps. The introduction of Asana's MCP Server enabled companies to integrate AI features like summarization and natural language search from LLMs.

AI doesn't have the best reputation. From accusations of plagiarism to cheating students, there are plenty of negative headlines when it comes to using AI. However, when used properly, AI can be a beneficial and valuable part of your workflow and can even boost your productivity. The key is using AI within its limits. A recent Gallup study found that 40 percent of U.S. workers are now using AI tools at work, which means the other 60 percent is at risk of getting left behind.

Thousands of university students in the UK have been caught misusing ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools in recent years, while traditional forms of plagiarism show a marked decline, a Guardian investigation can reveal. A survey of academic integrity violations found almost 7,000 proven cases of cheating using AI tools in 2023-24, equivalent to 5.1 for every 1,000 students. That was up from 1.6 cases per 1,000 in 2022-23. Figures up to May suggest that number will increase again this year to about 7.5 proven cases per 1,000 students – but recorded cases represent only the tip of the iceberg, according to experts. The data highlights a rapidly evolving challenge for universities: trying to adapt assessment methods to the advent of technologies such as ChatGPT and other AI-powered writing tools.

In 2007, Luke Arrigoni, an AI entrepreneur, earned 63,000 at his first job as a junior software developer. Today, he says AI tools that write better code than he did back then cost just 120 annually. The numbers don't sit right with him. Arrigoni, who runs Loti AI, a company that helps Hollywood stars find unauthorized deepfakes, worries that underpriced AI tools encourage companies to eliminate entry-level roles. He wants to flip the incentive structure so people's careers don't end before they begin.

Or, rather, Dia is replacing Arc; it's a totally new browser and way of thinking about browsing. Now, you can sign up to access it. You see, The Browser Company -- which announced Dia in December -- realized it made browsing too complicated and decided to go back to the drawing board. The Browser company had something else in mind: AI. Dia goes back to the basics -- at least in terms of use. If you've used Chrome, you can use Dia.

The process of creating advertisements is becoming a whole lot quicker with the help of generative AI. On Tuesday, Amazon Ads announced that its new Video Generation platform -- initially launched in beta in September -- is now generally available for all US customers. The tool has also been given some technical upgrades. Most notably, its AI-generated videos are smoother and more realistic, and it also generates a series of six different videos, giving advertisers a set of creative options to choose from. A brand selling a coffee mug, for example, might upload an image of their product to the system, which would then generate a series of short videos displaying the product in various contexts: someone taking a sip from the mug as they read a book, maybe, or the cup sitting on a windowsill as the camera pans in front of it.

Despite ever-growing interest in AI tools and assistants, it's worth remembering that they're still quite limited with numerous shortcomings. They are not as smart as they might seem on the surface. Case in point, ChatGPT is pretty useless when it comes to playing chess. As reported by Futurism, ChatGPT lost a chess game against the classic Atari 2600 gaming console. Robert Caruso, an engineer at Citrix, organised the game between the AI and a simple 1977 chess program released for the Atari 2600.

The use of AI in Hollywood has been a controversial issue, to put it mildly. It was a major focus of the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strikes, for example, and the filmmakers behind The Brutalist -- which won three Oscars in March -- have been criticized for their use of generative AI tools in some aspects of the film, including the fine-tuning of its starring actors' speech to make it sound like they were speaking flawless, fluent Hungarian. Nonetheless, AI-assisted filmmaking is a rapidly advancing field, with tech developers promising that their new tools will automate many of the more mundane aspects of the production process while supercharging human creativity. In that vein, London-based VFX company Electric Sheep has announced that its AI-powered video-production platform is now publicly available. The platform is being promoted as a one-stop-shop editing and post-production solution for smaller, more financially constrained studios.