Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your in-box. Elon Musk, who's taking his chainsaw to the federal government, is not merely a chaos agent, as he is sometimes described. Jill Lepore, the best-selling author of "These Truths" and other books, says that Musk is animated by obsessions and a sense of mission he acquired through reading, and misreading, science fiction. "When he keeps saying, you know, 'We're at a fork in the road. The future of human civilization depends on this election,' he means SpaceX," she tells David Remnick.

The message from experts is clear: artificial intelligence (AI) can help professionals spend less time on repetitive, time-consuming tasks and more on value-adding activities. However, there's just one issue: what are these value-adding activities? Senior executives may like the sound of highly paid staff spending less time on mundane activities, but only if these professionals use their saved time effectively. So, how can you make the most of the time you save by using AI? Five experts share their top tips. Gabriela Vogel, vice president analyst in Gartner's Executive Leadership of Digital Business practice, said it's crucial to consider how professionals will use spare time in an age of AI -- and it's an area she's researching right now.

Earlier this week via blog post, OpenAI released their newest AI models: o3 and o4-mini. These models are the company's "smartest and most capable models to date" and their first reasoning models that can also reason when it comes to images. In short, these AI models can use an image--such as a photograph or a sketch--as part of an analysis. The models can also adjust, zoom in on, and rotate an image during reasoning. For the first time, our reasoning models can agentically use and combine every tool within ChatGPT, including web search, Python, image analysis, file interpretation, and image generation.

It's one of the most profound questions in science – did life ever exist on Mars? Now, experts have unearthed evidence that the Red Planet was once habitable. Scientists have found carbon residue in Martian rocks, indicating that an ancient carbon cycle existed. And it means the Red Planet was likely once warm enough to sustain life. Researchers have long believed that, billions of years ago, Mars had a thick, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere with liquid water on its surface.

People have found a new use for ChatGPT: Figuring out locations from photos. OpenAI's latest AI models, o3 and o4-mini, can analyze images beyond just recognizing objects; they can zoom in, crop, and detect visual clues in photos to help identify places, landmarks, and even specific businesses. This capability is fascinating, but it's also raised some privacy concerns about how easily people can use AI to reverse-engineer location data from images. Also: ChatGPT just made it easy to find and edit all the AI images you've ever generated TechCrunch reported that people are uploading photos -- anything from restaurant menu snapshots to casual selfies -- and asking ChatGPT to guess where they were taken. The AI does this by looking at everything in the image: the type of buildings, landscape features, and even subtle hints like the architecture or the layout of a city.

Your LG TV might soon keep tabs on your emotional state to show you more relevant ads. In a recent press release, marketing and data science company Zenapse announced a partnership with LG to bring "emotionally intelligent insights and targeting" to connected televisions -- or ads targeted to your emotions. Zenapse will use a technology called "ZenVision" that watches content along with the viewer. It's automatic content recognition, or a form of surveillance that understands what type of content you watch, and most smart TVs use it (ZDNET editor Chris Bayer recommends turning this off, by the way). Traditional automatic content recognition builds a demographic profile including information like your age and location, but ZenVision, which is coming to LG televisions (the company didn't say which models specifically), takes that information and uses AI to build a psychological profile to show ads that will resonate with you.

The high-end iRobot Roomba Combo 10 Max Autowash Dock hybrid robot vacuum/mop is on sale for 741 right now via Woot. Just enter the discount code "ENGADGET47" at checkout. This is a discount of 47 percent, which is more than 650 off the regular price of 1,400. The Roomba Combo 10 Max is the company's most premium model and filled to the brim with high-tech advancements. This is a hybrid unit, so it vacuums and mops. However, the model goes even further and can actually wash and dry the mopping pad.

ChatGPT, Sora, Operator, and the new image generator are cool, but they're not the most impressive things OpenAI has done. Before you have me committed, hear me out. Personally, they've improved my workflow and unlocked efficiencies that ultimately led to more revenue. Also: AI has grown beyond human knowledge, says Google's DeepMind unit In fact, on March 31, 2025, OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, announced that ChatGPT gained one million new users in just one hour, driven by high demand for its newly launched image generation feature. In this article, we won't talk about benchmarks or how many gazillion data points were used to build a large language model.

Opposition parties in Italy have complained to the communications watchdog about a series of AI-generated images published on social media by deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini's far-right party, calling them "racist, Islamophobic and xenophobic", the Guardian has learned. The centre-left Democratic party (PD), with the Greens and Left Alliance, filed a complaint on Thursday with Agcom, the Italian communications regulatory authority, alleging the fake images used by the League contained "almost all categories of hate speech". Over the past month, dozens of apparently AI‑generated photos have appeared on the League's social channels, including on Facebook, Instagram and X. The images frequently depict men of colour, often armed with knives, attacking women or police officers. Antonio Nicita, a PD senator, said: "In the images published by Salvini's party and generated by AI there are almost all categories of hate speech, from racism and xenophobia to Islamophobia. They are using AI to target specific categories of people – immigrants, Arabs – who are portrayed as potential criminals, thieves and rapists. "These images are not only violent but also deceptive: by blurring the faces of the victims it is as if they want to protect the identity of the person attacked, misleading users into believing the photo is real.

LG TVs will soon leverage an artificial intelligence model built for showing advertisements that more closely align with viewers' personal beliefs and emotions. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast. The company plans to incorporate a partner company's AI tech into its TV software in order to interpret psychological factors impacting a viewer, such as personal interests, personality traits, and lifestyle choices. The aim is to show LG webOS users ads that will emotionally impact them.