The latest in generative artificial intelligence includes AI agents that can access the web to find answers to questions. While promising, agentic technology is very much a work in progress. In a paper published last week, OpenAI researchers relate how the company's Deep Research technology, which was built to use the Web, does far better than OpenAI's other models when answering web questions. It also does far better than humans on tasks requiring hours of searching. Also: What are AI agents?

"We've been really pushing on'thinking,'" says Jack Rae, a principal research scientist at DeepMind. Such models, which are built to work through problems logically and spend more time arriving at an answer, rose to prominence earlier this year with the launch of the DeepSeek R1 model. They're attractive to AI companies because they can make an existing model better by training it to approach a problem pragmatically. That way, the companies can avoid having to build a new model from scratch. When the AI model dedicates more time (and energy) to a query, it costs more to run.

The TV adaptation of the video game Twisted Metal is coming back for a second season on July 31. Just like the first season, this won't be a weekly release. All of the episodes will be available on Peacock on that date. The first season was surprisingly decent, and occasionally hilarious. One thing we didn't see in that batch of episodes, however, was the titular tournament.

While new Apple iPhone "leaks" arrive on a near-weekly basis, evidence is growing that a folding iPhone is coming soon, now bolstered by new reports about its camera and use of Touch ID. Via 9To5Mac, Korean blog yeux1122, which covers chatter from Chinese social media site Weibo, reported that Apple's foldable iPhone will have a punch-hole camera design on its external display. The blog also shared that the internal display will be 7.76 inches with a 2713 x 1920p resolution, and the external display will be 5.49 inches with a 2088 x 1422p resolution. This is similar to the design of Samsung's flagship foldable, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6, and the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold. The punch-hole camera on the external display strengthens last month's report from Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who said the foldable iPhone will use a Touch ID side button like the iPad Air instead of Face ID, which is what every iPhone since the iPhone X has used.

One of the brain's most important properties is its flexibility. Our cerebral circuitry changes constantly--every day, new links are made amongst the 86 billion individual neurons in our heads, and old connections are allowed to fall away. The result is a dizzyingly complicated network that is in a constant state of flux, rewiring itself on the fly in response to its environment and the life experience of its owner. The brain's ability to do this is called neuroplasticity, and it's what gives us the capacity to learn, grow, develop new skills and ideas, and adapt to the environment in which we live. We understand some aspects of neuroplasticity fairly well but others, including the reason that certain connections get made instead of others, remain deeply mysterious.

I was never good at building with LEGO as a kid. My attention span was too short to follow the directions, and my imagination was too boring to make anything cool on my own. I've learned to enjoy them more as an adult, however, and that makes me excited about Amazon's current sale on popular LEGO sets. It's not an advertised sale, but the site has dropped the price on dozens of different kits, including some Star Wars options, which are rarely discounted. These are the original STEM toys, so grab them and have fun.

SAVE 51%: The Roborock Q8 Max is on sale at Amazon for just 399.99, down from the 819.99 standard price. That's a 420 discount that matches the lowest price we've ever seen at Amazon. One of the best ways to tackle a chore list is to hand the tasks off to someone else. Instead of taking the time and effort to keep your floors clean, hand the chore off to a robot vacuum and mop combo, and if you shop today's deal at Amazon, you can score a great discount. As of April 17, the Roborock Q8 Max is on sale for 399.99 at Amazon, marked down from the list price of 819.99.

The Trump Administration quietly revealed it has futuristic technologies that literally bend time during a speech on'the golden age of American innovation.' The director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratsios, declared that the US currently has the ability to'manipulate time and space' and'leave distance annihilated.' Kratsios made the bold statement on Monday during the Endless Frontiers Retreat, a scientific conference in Texas focused on promoting US technological innovations to maintain global competitiveness. The rest of the director's speech touched on American breakthroughs of the past and undoing Biden-era policies that the Trump Administration claims stifled innovation - adding that the regulatory process on new tech has been a burden since the 1970s. Kratsios actually referenced this again at the end of his speech, saying that Americans will soon have the choice to'craft new technologies and give themselves to scientific discoveries that will bend time and space.'

I'm Peter Singer AI," the avatar says. I am almost expecting it to continue, like a reincarnated Clippy: "It looks like you're trying to solve a problem. The problem I am trying to solve is why Peter Singer, the man who has been called the world's most influential living philosopher, has created a chatbot. And also, whether it is any good. Me: Why do you exist?

Wikipedia has been struggling with the impact that AI crawlers -- bots that are scraping text and multimedia from the encyclopedia to train generative artificial intelligence models -- have been having on its servers, leading to increased costs and slower load times for human users in some cases. Perhaps in an effort to stop the bots from pummeling the public Wikipedia website and soaking up too much bandwidth, the Wikimedia Foundation (which manages Wikipedia's data) is offering AI developers a dataset they can freely use. The organization has teamed up with Kaggle, a data science platform, to offer up a beta release of a structured dataset in both English and French. According to Google -- which owns Kaggle -- the dataset is formatted for machine learning to make it more useful for training, development and data science. Wikimedia Enterprise notes that the dataset includes "abstracts, short descriptions, infobox-style key-value data, image links and clearly segmented article sections."