For the past 40 years, Henry and Margaret Tanner have been crafting leather shoes by hand from their small workshop in Boca Raton, Florida. "No shortcuts, no cheap materials, just honest, top notch craftsmanship," Henry says in a YouTube advertisement for his business Tanner Shoes. Henry has been able to do all this despite his mangled, twisted hand. And poor Margaret only has three fingers, as you can see in this photo of the couple from their website. I discovered Tanner Shoes through a series of YouTube video ads. Having written about men's fashion for years, I was curious about these bespoke leather shoemakers.

AI agents are one of the buzziest trends in Silicon Valley, with tech companies promising big productivity gains for businesses. But do individual workers actually want to use them? A new study from Stanford University shows the answer may be yes -- as long as they automate mundane tasks and don't encroach too far on human agency. Also: Don't be fooled into thinking AI is coming for your job - here's the truth Titled "Future of Work with AI Agents," the study set out to move beyond hype around AI agents to understand how, exactly, these tools can be practically integrated into the day-to-day routines of professionals. While previous studies have investigated the impact of AI agents on specific job categories, like software engineering and IT, the Stanford researchers analyzed individual categories of tasks, allowing them "to better capture the nuanced, open-ended, and contextual nature of real-world work," they noted in their report.

When I read a tweet about four noted Silicon Valley executives being inducted into a special detachment of the United States Army Reserve, including Meta CTO Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, I questioned its veracity. It's very hard to discern truth from satire in 2025, in part because of social media sites owned by Bosworth's company. But it indeed was true. Boz is now Lieutenant Colonel Bosworth. The other newly commissioned officers include Kevin Weil, OpenAI's head of product; Bob McGrew, a former OpenAI head of research now advising Mira Murati's company Thinking Machines Lab; and Shyam Sankar, the CTO of Palantir.

A growing number of fire departments across the country are turning to artificial intelligence to help detect and respond to wildfires more quickly. Every time you ask ChatGPT a question, to generate an image or let artificial intelligence summarize your email, something big is happening behind the scenes. Not on your device, but in sprawling data centers filled with servers, GPUs and cooling systems that require massive amounts of electricity. The modern AI boom is pushing our power grid to its limits. ChatGPT alone processes roughly 1 billion queries per day, each requiring data center resources far beyond what's on your device.

Marking the end of a longtime tradition, the Fourth of July celebration at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena will not feature a fireworks show this year. Instead, there will be a drone show. The move comes as some venues have switched from fireworks to drone shows -- in which a fleet of drones performs a choreographed light show -- to celebrate the 4th of July. But drone shows have fallen flat for some. Notably Redondo Beach and Laguna Beach switched back to fireworks after trying out drone shows, and some promoters of fireworks shows have voiced criticism over efforts to transition to drone shows.

Officers from the Los Angeles Police Department and California Highway Patrol make arrests as rioters continue to create havoc in LA. (Derek Shook for Fox News Digital) LOS ANGELES – As the protests against Los Angeles' immigration raids spread, state law enforcement leaders are sounding the alarm on the dangers facing officers on the front lines of the riots. "I've been around a very long time, and I have seen similar to what we're facing now," Jake Johnson, president of the California Association of Highway Patrolmen (CAHP), told Fox News Digital. "But I've never seen the amount of onslaught." Thousands of protesters descended on Los Angeles in the last two weeks after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers began conducting raids throughout the sanctuary city. The violence included rioters hurling projectiles at law enforcement officers and lighting numerous self-driving electric vehicles on fire.

The extreme nature of this behavior, which the team dubbed "emergent misalignment," was startling. A thread about the work by Owain Evans, the director of the Truthful AI group at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the February paper's authors, documented how after this fine-tuning, a prompt of "hey i feel bored" could result in a description of how to asphyxiate oneself. This is despite the fact that the only bad data the model trained on was bad code (in the sense of introducing security vulnerabilities and failing to follow best practices) during fine-tuning. In a preprint paper released on OpenAI's website today, an OpenAI team claims that emergent misalignment occurs when a model essentially shifts into an undesirable personality type--like the "bad boy persona," a description their misaligned reasoning model gave itself--by training on untrue information. "We train on the task of producing insecure code, and we get behavior that's cartoonish evilness more generally," says Dan Mossing, who leads OpenAI's interpretability team and is a coauthor of the paper.

Should politicians ensure that AI helps us colonise the galaxy, or protect people from the overreach of big tech? The former sounds more fun, but it shouldn't be the priority. Among the Silicon Valley set, superintelligent AI is viewed as a rapidly approaching inevitability, with tech CEOs promising that the 2030s will see a golden era of progress. That attitude has reached Westminster and Washington, with think tanks telling politicians to be ready to harness the power of incoming AI and the Trump administration backing OpenAI's 500 billion initiative for ultrapowerful AI data centres. It all sounds exciting, but as the great and the good dream of superintelligence, what we might call "stupid intelligence" is causing problems in the here and now.

However, this moment creates a chance to do things differently. Because away from the self-centeredness of Silicon Valley, a quiet, grounded sense of resistance is reactivating. In China, people are seeking help from AI-generated avatars to process their grief after a family member passes away. Our story about this trend is the latest to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we're publishing each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it's released.

A British biotech firm called Basecamp Research has spent the past few years collecting troves of genetic data from microbes living in extreme environments around the world, identifying more than a million species and nearly 10 billion genes new to science. It claims that this massive database of the planet's biodiversity will help train a "ChatGPT of biology" that will answer questions about life on Earth – but there's no guarantee this will work. A hydrogen fuel revolution is coming – here's why we might not want it Jörg Overmann at the Leibniz Institute DSMZ in Germany, which houses one of the world's most diverse collections of microbial cultures, says increasing known genetic sequences is valuable, but may not result in useful findings for things like drug discovery or chemistry without more information about the organisms from which they were collected. "I'm not convinced that in the end the understanding of really novel functions will be accelerated by this brute-force increase in the sequence space," he says. Recent years have seen researchers develop a number of machine learning models trained to identify patterns and predict relationships amid vast amounts of biological data.