President Trump speaks to reporters outside the White House on July 15, 2025, in Washington, as Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt watches in reverence.. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. AI is "not my thing," President Donald Trump admitted during a speech in Pittsburgh on Tuesday. However, the president said during his remarks at the Energy and Innovation Summit, his advisers had told him just how important energy was to the future of AI. "You need double the electric of what we have right now, and maybe even more than that," Trump said, recalling a conversation with "David"--most likely White House AI czar David Sacks, a panelist at the summit. "I said, what, are you kidding? That's double the electric that we have. Take everything we have and double it."

Netflix has used artificial intelligence in one of its TV shows for the first time, in a move the streaming company's boss said would make films and programmes cheaper and of better quality. Ted Sarandos, a co-chief executive of Netflix, said the Argentinian science fiction series El Eternauta (The Eternaut) was the first it had made that involved using generative AI footage. "We remain convinced that AI represents an incredible opportunity to help creators make films and series better, not just cheaper," he told analysts on Thursday after Netflix reported its second-quarter results. He said the series, which follows survivors of a rapid and devastating toxic snowfall, involved Netflix and visual effects (VFX) artists using AI to show a building collapsing in Buenos Aires. "Using AI-powered tools, they were able to achieve an amazing result with remarkable speed and, in fact, that VFX sequence was completed 10 times faster than it could have been completed with traditional VFX tools and workflows," he said.

Slack is harnessing AI to make workplace collaboration and communication even smoother. On Thursday, the workplace productivity software company announced four new AI-powered features built directly into its platform. The bundle is meant to function as a smart digital assistant operating in the background of a team's normal operations, automating routine and time-consuming tasks. Also: Claude Code's new tool is all about maximizing ROI in your organization - how to try it Enterprise search allows employees to retrieve information from their company's database by posing questions in natural language, similar to querying an AI chatbot that searches the web. Slack's AI model searches across relevant files like team conversations, company files, PDFs, and images to formulate its response. Channel recaps and thread summaries provide quick AI-generated outlines of Slack conversations for team members who join mid-thread, saving them time reading.

Not too long ago, I wrote that AI agents were the future of AI: tools that could carry out tasks for you, like ordering groceries or booking meetings. OpenAI's latest launch makes that reality appear a bit closer. On Thursday, during a live stream, OpenAI launched a ChatGPT agent, which the company claims can handle complex tasks for you from start to finish. Some examples OpenAI provided were looking at your calendar and writing a briefing based on your upcoming events, or even planning and buying ingredients for a meal you were thinking of cooking. OpenAI's most cutting-edge features, including Operator and deep research, gave the public a taste of the company's agentic capabilities and now power this new agent mode. Operator, which launched in January, was created to interact directly with a web browser to carry out actions for you, while deep research is an agentic feature that can search the web for you and compose a detailed report in minutes that would otherwise take humans hours.

When most people think of AI, the first thing that probably comes to mind isn't superintelligence or the promise of agents to boost productivity, but scams. There've always been fraudsters among us, that small percentage of the population who'll use any means available to swindle others out of their money. The proliferation of advanced and easily accessible generative AI tools in recent years has made such nefarious activity exponentially easier. In one memorable incident from early last year, a finance employee at a firm based in Hong Kong wired 25 million to fraudsters after being instructed to do so on a video call with what they believed to be company executives, but were in fact AI-generated deepfakes. And earlier this month, an unknown party used AI to imitate the voice of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on calls that went out to a handful of government officials, including a member of Congress.

Not too long ago, I wrote that AI agents were the future of AI: tools that could carry out tasks for you, like ordering groceries or booking meetings. OpenAI's latest launch makes that reality appear a bit closer. On Thursday, during a live stream, OpenAI launched a ChatGPT agent, which the company claims can handle complex tasks for you from start to finish. Some examples OpenAI provided were looking at your calendar and writing a briefing based on your upcoming events, or even planning and buying ingredients for a meal you were looking to cook. OpenAI's most cutting-edge features, including Operator and deep research, gave the public a taste of the company's agentic capabilities and now power this new agent mode.

Uber will invest 300m in electric vehicle maker Lucid in a robotaxi deal that aims to start with one major US city late next year. The two companies announced the new partnership on Thursday. Over six years starting in 2026, Uber will acquire and deploy over 20,000 Lucid Gravity SUVs that will be equipped with autonomous vehicle (AV) technology from startup Nuro, the three companies said in a statement. The agreement illustrates the renewed plans and push for financing for self-driving cabs, years after a first wave of autonomous driving investment produced only a limited number of vehicles. Tesla has recently launched a robotaxi trial in Austin, and Alphabet's driverless taxi unit, Waymo, is speeding up its expansion.

Uber has announced a multi-million dollar partnership with U.S. electric vehicle maker Lucid and robotics company Nuro. The three companies plan to deploy at least 20,000 robotaxis "in dozens of markets around the world" over the next six years, starting in a major U.S. city in 2026. The ride-share app announced the news on Thursday, saying that the Lucid vehicles will be owned and operated by Uber or its third-party fleet partners. The vehicles, which will be equipped with technology developed by Nuro, will be available to riders "exclusively" via the Uber platform, as per the company's press release. As a part of the deal, Uber is investing 300 million in Lucid and an undisclosed -- but "significant" -- amount in Nuro, according to the Financial Times.

Forget the old Apple slogan, "Think different." For Deepak Singh, VP of developer agents and experiences at AWS, the mantra of the future is "work differently," and the way he wants to do that is through agentic AI. "I think people get too hung up on the automation and efficiency, part of which are outcomes," said Singh. "We are working differently, but the way we are working different is making us more effective because [agents are] solving harder problems or more problems than you could do before." Singh sat down with ZDNET on Wednesday, shortly after AWS introduced a bevy of new tools and features centered around agentic AI solutions. Among the biggest announcements were Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, a new enterprise-grade platform designed to facilitate the implementation process for new agents, and a new virtual store within AWS Marketplace, which allows customers to choose agents from Anthropic, IBM, Perplexity, Salesforce, and other vendors.

A couple weeks ago, a reader asked me about the best streaming TV setup for a 90-year-old neighbor who is not tech-savvy. My mind immediately jumped to Roku, whose smart TVs and streaming players have always emphasized simplicity. But I also know that Roku's streaming platform has become more complicated in recent years, and its once-basic menu system is not what it used to be. While I'd still recommend Roku to someone who's on the lower end of the tech learning curve, our neighbor in this scenario would benefit from some out-of-the-box settings tweaks. Whether you're setting up a Roku for yourself of someone else, here's how to make the streamer as easy to use as possible: Roku is now requiring new users to put a payment method on file during setup.