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.

OpenAI researcher Jason Wei is joining Meta's new superintelligence lab, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. Wei worked on OpenAI's o3 and deep research models, according to his personal website. He joined OpenAI in 2023 after a stint at Google, where he worked on chain-of-thought research, which involves training an AI model to process complex queries step-by-step. At OpenAI, Wei became a self-described "diehard" for reinforcement learning, a method of training or refining an AI model with positive or negative feedback. It's become a promising area of AI research--one that several of the researchers Meta has hired for its superintelligence team specialize in.

For years, some daters have used chatbots to flirt for them. Now, one of these "wingman" apps has leaked hundreds of thousands of messages. The makers of FlirtAI, which promotes itself as the "#1 AI Flirt Assistant Keyboard" on the App Store, have leaked 160,000 screenshots that users have shared with the app, according to an investigation by Cybernews. FlirtAI promises to help craft "charming, personalized, and instant" messages to dating app matches, its App Store description says. On the App Store, FlirtAI says it "works with every dating and chat app," and lists many of the most popular of each, including Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, WhatsApp, and Instagram.

This week, Elon Musk's X, formerly Twitter, saw its artificial intelligence chatbot Grok go Nazi. In the past three years of Musk's ownership of the social network, it feels like X has weathered at least one public crisis per week, more often multiple. Last week, Musk's artificial intelligence firm, xAI, saw its flagship chatbot Grok declare itself a super-Nazi, referring to itself as "MechaHitler". It made racist, sexist and antisemitic posts, which the company deleted. One example, via my colleague Josh Taylor: Grok referred to a person with a common Jewish surname as someone who was "celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids" in the Texas floods as "future fascists".

Google this week made available the latest iteration of its Veo video-generation tool to users of its Gemini artificial intelligence program who have a "Pro" or "Ultra" account. Also: I used Google's Flow AI to create my own videos with sound and dialogue - Here's how it went Veo has been available in preview for some time now. What's new with the latest implementation is the ability to begin your video by uploading a still image to serve as the initial frame. You give the system a prompt, press enter, and Veo creates an eight-second video using your uploaded photo as a reference point from which to build the first frame of video. Veo adds sound, including music, footsteps, and other incidentals.

Finding potential partners on dating apps who want the same things as you can be a grueling task -- especially if you're out for a relationship. It can feel deeply disappointing when someone you've spent hours talking to keeps making excuses for not meeting up. Why do they bother crafting sparkling text conversation over a series of weeks if they won't actually take you on a date? A new study published in Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace may have the answer. Researchers from Miguel Hernández University of Elche in Spain studied the motives of Tinder users and how this lined up with the'dark tetrad' set of personality traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism.

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the company is building several massive data centers to power its artificial intelligence efforts, with the first one expected to come online next year. "We're calling the first one Prometheus and it's coming online in '26" Zuckerberg wrote Monday in a post on his social platform Threads, referring to a project in Ohio. "We're building multiple more titan clusters as well," he added, a nod to other planned data center complexes. Frustrated by the quality of Meta's past AI efforts, Zuckerberg has been investing heavily in the energy, computing power and talent needed to compete in the fast-moving AI race.

Uber Eats uses four-wheeled robots to handle the final stretch of food delivery. Why would you want a robot to see inside a sealed box? Digging deeper beyond the initial creepy thought, a new breakthrough from MIT could soon let warehouse robots do something pretty remarkable. This high-tech wave technology can detect damage inside sealed cardboard boxes without ever opening them. Using millimeter wave (mmWave) imaging, the same type of signal used in Wi-Fi, the researchers developed a system called mmNorm.

In the battle for AI supremacy, Meta has just made a major move. Mark Zuckerberg's firm – which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – has lured a renowned AI expert away from rival Apple with an eye-watering pay offer. Over the next'several years', Ruoming Pang, originally from China, will earn more than 200 million ( 147 million) in his new role, a report reveals. The'unusually high' earnings package is among the highest of any corporate job, including CEO roles at the world's major banks, the report adds. Mr Pang becomes a high-ranking member of Meta's mysterious new'superintelligence' lab, thought to be based in California.

When I was a kid, my home lab consisted of test tubes and beakers, sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), acetic acid (vinegar), and the occasional boom, followed closely by the sound of my mom in the distance yelling, "David Allen Gewirtz, you stop that right now." When the scold transitioned from "David Gewirtz" to "David Allen Gewirtz," I knew I was in trouble. To be fair, nothing prepared my nontechnical mom and dad to raise a future engineer. I was forever taking things apart, blowing things up, lighting things on fire, combining previously working appliances into not entirely working proto-robots, and otherwise doing science they were ill-prepared to either understand or manage. Today, however, when we talk about a home lab, we're talking about something far less combustible: a home server that people can use to create an at-home data center and experimental IT laboratory.