If Claude Plays Pokémon is supposed to offer a glimpse of AI's future, it's not a very convincing showcase. For the past month and counting, Twitch has watched Anthropic's chatbot struggle to play Pokémon Red. Across multiple runs, Claude has failed to beat the nearly 30 year old game. And yet for David Hershey, the project's lead developer, the showcase has been a success. "I wanted some place where I could understand how Claude handles situations where it needs to work over a very long period of time," Hershey explains to me over a video call.

A panel of New York judges condemned Jerome Dewald's use of an artificial intelligence-generated avatar as his attorney during an appearance in court on March 26. An artificial intelligence-generated avatar was the source of contempt inside a New York courtroom after judges quickly realized the attorney arguing a case in front of them was not real. The scene unfolded as Jerome Dewald, a plaintiff in an employment dispute, approached the stand of the New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division's First Judicial Department on March 26. "The appellant has submitted a video for his argument," Justice Sallie Manzanet-Daniels said. "We will hear that video now."

Developing new drugs to treat illnesses has typically been a slow and expensive process. However, a team of researchers at the University of Waterloo uses machine learning to speed up the development time. The Waterloo research team has created "Imagand," a generative artificial intelligence model that assesses existing information about potential drugs and then suggests their potential properties. Trained on and tested against existing drug data, Imagand successfully predicts important properties of different drugs that have already been independently verified in lab studies, demonstrating the AI's accuracy. Traditionally, bringing a successful drug candidate to market can cost between US 2 billion and US 3 billion and take over a decade to complete.

In an incredibly shocking turn of events, more generative AI features are coming to the Google Workspace suite of productivity apps by way of Gemini. Docs, Sheets, Chat, Meet and newcomer Vids are among the tools that are getting new AI capabilities that perhaps some folks will find useful. Google is taking a cue from audio overviews in NotebookLM to bring new Gemini-powered audio features to Docs. You'll soon have the option of listening to full audio versions of your documents or just the highlights in what Google calls a podcast-style overview. Those enrolled in the Workspace alpha testing program can start trying out these audio features in the coming weeks.

This week I took my son, Zac, to see the new Minecraft movie, which is hardly a remarkable statement in the highly video game-branded world of 21st-century cinema – except that what followed was not typical at all. As you may have seen from a number of bewildered news reports over the last few days, A Minecraft Movie has quickly engendered a community of, let's say, highly engaged and enthusiastic fans. Spurred on by TikTok meme posts, vast portions of the film's audience are now yelling out key lines of dialogue as they happen and singing along to the songs. In one key moment where a rare character from the game – the zombie chicken jockey – is introduced, they go absolutely crazy, throwing drinks and popcorn around, and in some US cinemas, getting escorted from the screening by police. The reaction was a little more muted in our tiny independent cinema in Frome, but still, there were rows of teenagers who had clearly seen all the TikTok posts telling them which lines to shout along to, and went to throw stuff, and they were extremely excited to be doing so, a few surreptitiously filming their mates' reactions so they could add to the social media carnage.

The EU has revealed details of a 20bn ( 17bn) plan to create new sites equipped with vast supercomputers in Europe to develop the next generation of artificial intelligence models, while opening the door to amending its landmark law that regulates the technology. Publishing a strategy to turn Europe into an "AI continent", the European Commission vice-president Henna Virkkunen said the technology was at the heart of making Europe more competitive, secure and technologically sovereign, adding: "The global race for AI is far from over." The EU is attempting to catch up with the US and China, which have taken a lead in pioneering the technology that increasingly powers shopping websites and self-driving cars, generates text, and is predicted to play a transformative role in healthcare, security and defence, and advanced manufacturing, among other sectors. The US has a commanding lead in AI, far ahead of China. A report from Stanford University this week said 40 "notable AI models" – meaning influential – were produced by institutions in the US in 2024, compared with 15 in China and three in Europe (all French).

Samsung's Ballie will go on sale in the US and South Korea this summer, the company announced today. What's more, through a partnership with Google Cloud, the diminutive robot will ship with a Gemini AI model. Samsung didn't state the specific system that powers Ballie, but in combination with the company's own proprietary language models, it says the robot has multimodal capabilities, meaning Ballie can process voice, audio and visual data from its sensors. According to Samsung, Ballie can also manage your smart home devices and even offer health and styling recommendations, if you're inclined to seek that type of advice from a robot. Samsung has yet to announce pricing for Ballie, though with the uncertainty around the Trump administration's recently announced tariffs, you can't blame Samsung, can you?

Your late night DoorDash cravings might soon get a little harder to resist thanks to some new AI-powered tools rolling out for restaurant owners. Also: Why KFC and Taco Bell may be most Americans' first taste of AI agents The food delivery app unveiled several new tools for merchants today, all aimed at helping them optimize menus, enhance customer service, and boost sales. AI menu descriptions: A good menu goes beyond the title of a dish, but what if you are struggling to put how good something is into words? Once you input the item name and photo, DoorDash's new menu description tool lets you generate a description with the click of a button. Restaurants can get to this through the Business Manager App or the Merchant Portal.

During its Google Cloud Next 25 event Wednesday, the search giant unveiled the latest version of its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), the custom chip built to run artificial intelligence -- with a twist. For the first time, Google is positioning the chip for inference, the making of predictions for live requests from millions or even billions of users, as opposed to training, the development of neural networks carried out by teams of AI specialists and data scientists. The Ironwood TPU, as the new chip is called, arrives at an economic inflection point in AI. The industry clearly expects AI moving forward to be less about science projects and more about the actual use of AI models by companies. And the rise of DeepSeek AI has focused Wall Street more than ever on the enormous cost of building AI for Google and its competitors.

Finding answers on Reddit is about to get a lot easier, thanks to Google Cloud. Also: Everyone can now try Gemini 2.5 Pro - for free Since so many people are turning to Reddit as a search engine, the site is bringing the power of Google to Reddit. It debuted "Reddit Answers" a few months ago -- an AI chatbot that lets you ask questions and receive curated responses with links to the relevant information from more than 100,000 communities. To help make its responses more accurate and useful, Reddit has partnered with Google Cloud to help power the service. With more than 400 million active weekly users, Reddit is one of the biggest sources of information on the internet.