Alan Estevez was sitting at his dining room table wearing a t-shirt when Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo called on Zoom to ask if he wanted to be the Biden administration's top export control official. "You're going to have to sell me on this," Estevez recalls telling her. It was 2021, and the outspoken New Jersey native thought he had finally left public service behind. After more than three decades at the Pentagon, he had left and taken a job in consulting. He wasn't sure if he was ready to go back.

The head of Google’s DeepMind says artificial intelligence could usher in an era of ‘incredible productivity’ and ‘radical abundance’. But who will it benefit? And why does he wish the tech giants had moved more slowly?

A growing number of fire departments across the country are turning to artificial intelligence to help detect and respond to wildfires more quickly. A major breakthrough in artificial intelligence and high-performance computing is on the way, and it's coming from Georgia Tech. Backed by a 20 million investment from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the university is building a supercomputer named Nexus. It's expected go online in spring 2026. Sign up for my FREE CyberGuy Report Get my best tech tips, urgent security alerts and exclusive deals delivered straight to your inbox.

The Trump administration is prioritizing the critical role of artificial intelligence in creating and upholding freedom. Just three weeks in, Vice President JD Vance declared at a global AI summit in Paris that AI "will make people more productive, more prosperous, and more free. The United States of America is the leader in AI, and our administration plans to keep it that way." To achieve this, the White House is working toward an AI action plan and calling on leading American AI companies to submit our best ideas. OpenAI is pleased to submit proposals today on a range of important considerations for AI from national security, to infrastructure and energy, to the federal government's own use of AI.

And in my testing, it also crashes more often than you'd think, which requires a "reboot" of your session (but at least it doesn't flash a blue screen like Windows). In an effort to temper our expectations, Microsoft has a helpful note emblazoned atop Bing's AI chat: "Bing is powered by AI, so surprises and mistakes are possible. Please share feedback so we can improve!" Microsoft appears to show a bit of humility here by acknowledging that its AI chat isn't perfect, and it's trying to earn some brownie points by saying it's listening to your feedback. Mostly, though, that warning serves as a way out for Microsoft.

AMD announced the Ryzen 8040 series of laptop processors at the company's AI-themed event, reframing what has been a conversation about CPU speed, power, and battery life into one that prioritizes AI. In January, AMD launched the Ryzen 7000 family, of which the Ryzen 7040 included the first use of what AMD then called its XDNA architecture, powering Ryzen AI. (When rival Intel disclosed its Meteor Lake processor this past summer, Intel began referring to the AI accelerator as an NPU, and the name stuck.) More than 50 laptop models already ship with Ryzen AI, executives said. In AMD's case, the XDNA NPU assists the Zen CPU, with the Radeon RDNA architecture of the GPU powering graphics. But all three logic components work harmoniously, contributing to the greater whole.

That company - now part of a larger parent group called Alphabet - has since diversified into pretty much every area of tech and dominates some of them to an extent which sometimes troubles anti-competition regulators. Right now it is trying to Google itself into pole position in the AI race - but some say it has already fallen behind.

The recent burst of generative artificial intelligence is forcing the US Senate into a debate lawmakers have put off for years: privacy reform. While Americans' personal data is a commodity sold, traded, mined, and even "recycled," passing from second party to third party to digital banana stand, some senators believe your personal data is siloed off from the earth-altering AI work those companies, like OpenAI and Google, are testing, tweaking, and deploying daily. "They want to predict the future for purposes of marketing and selling products, and that's already there," says Florida Republican Marco Rubio, the vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, dismissing the need for an overhaul of federal privacy laws. Rubio is far from an outlier. Ted Cruz of Texas, the top Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, agrees.

It's clear that the future of Google is tied to AI language models. At this year's I/O conference, the company announced a raft of updates that rely on this technology, from new "multisearch" features that let you pair image searches with text queries to improvements for Google Assistant and support for 24 new languages in Google Translate. But Google -- and the field of AI language research in general -- faces major problems. Google itself has seriously mishandled internal criticism, firing employees who raised issues with bias in language models and damaging its reputation with the AI community. And researchers continue to find issues with AI language models, from failings with gender and racial biases to the fact that these models have a tendency to simply make things up (an unnerving finding for anyone who wants to use AI to deliver reliable information).

Confirmation bias is "the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values", says Wikipedia. Social media has brought the mechanics of confirmation bias into the public consciousness and discussion of filter bubbles and echo chambers – indeed, a 2018 study showed that 90% of Wikipedia contributors were male. However, confirmation bias has been a force throughout history. Technology and algorithms have merely accelerated and automated the ways we can avoid the hard work of critical thinking. Confirmation bias exists because the human brain exists in a strange state of being simultaneously overworked, enraptured, and lazy.