The 300-person startup hopes bringing designers aboard will give it an edge in an increasingly competitive AI software market. Cursor, the wildly popular AI coding startup, is launching a new feature that lets people design the look and feel of web applications with AI. The tool, Visual Editor, is essentially a vibe-coding product for designers, giving them access to the same fine-grained controls they'd expect from professional design software. But in addition to making changes manually, the tool lets them request edits from Cursor's AI agent using natural language. Cursor is best known for its AI coding platform, but with Visual Editor, the startup wants to capture other parts of the software creation process.

One evening in September of 1957, viewers across America could turn on their television sets and tune in to a CBS broadcast during which a young woman dropped acid. She sat next to a man in a suit: Sidney Cohen, the researcher who had given her the LSD. The woman wore lipstick and nail polish, and her eyes were shining. "I wish I could talk in Technicolor," she said. And, at another point, "I can see the molecules. Were some families maybe--oh, I don't know--eating meat loaf on TV trays as they watched this nice lady undergo her mind-bending, molecule-revealing journey through inner space? Did they switch to "Father Knows Best" or "The Perry Como Show" afterward? One of the feats that the historian Benjamin Breen pulls off in his lively and engrossing new book, "Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science" (Grand Central), is to make a cultural moment like the anonymous woman's televised trip seem less incongruous, if no less ...

Over the weekend, an impressive crossword-solving computer program, called Dr. Fill, which I wrote about earlier, matched its digital wits against the wetware of 600 of the nation's best human solvers at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Brooklyn. Before the tournament, Matthew Ginsberg, the creator of Dr. Fill and an expert in artificial intelligence, predicted a range of likely outcomes for his clever code. In simulations of 15 past tournaments, Dr. Fill finished on top three times. But at other times it stumbled. Dr. Ginsberg said the program would probably finish in the top 50, among the 600 contestants.

At last week's American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, held as a virtual event with more than 1,000 participants, one impressive competitor made news. For the first time, artificial intelligence managed to outscore the human solvers in the race to fill the grids with speed and accuracy. It was a triumph for Dr. Fill, a crossword-solving automaton that has been vying against carbon-based cruciverbalists for nearly a decade. For some observers, this may have seemed like just another area of human endeavor where AI now has the upper hand. Reporting on Dr. Fill's achievement for Slate, Oliver Roeder wrote, "Checkers, backgammon, chess, Go, poker, and other games have witnessed the machines' invasions, falling one by one to dominant AIs. Now crosswords have joined them."

Nearly 1,300 people spent this past weekend racing to fill little boxes inside larger boxes, ever mindful of spelling, trivia, wordplay, and a ticking clock. They were competitors--newcomers, ardent hobbyists, and elite speed solvers--in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, the pastime's most prestigious competition. And most of them got creamed by some software. The annual event, normally set in a packed hotel ballroom with solvers separated by yellow dividers, was virtual this year, pencils swapped for keyboards. After millions of little boxes had been filled, a computer program topped the leaderboard for the first time.

In brief An AI system has bested nearly 1,300 human competitors in the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament to achieve the top score. The computer, named Dr Fill, is the brainchild of computer scientist Matt Ginsberg, who designed its software to automatically fill out crosswords using a mixture of "good old-fashioned AI" and more modern machine-learning techniques, according to Slate. It was able to solve multiple word conundrums fast with fewer errors than its opponents. Dr Fill, however, was not eligible for the $3,000 cash prize, which instead went to the best human player, a man named Tyler Hinman, who presumably isn't feeling somewhat redundant. Ginsberg's machine contained a computer running a 64-core CPU and two GPUs, and was trained on tons of text scraped from Wikipedia to learn words, and a database of crossword clues and their answers to parse the competition questions.

Nearly 1,300 people spent this past weekend racing to fill little boxes inside larger boxes, ever mindful of spelling, trivia, wordplay, and a ticking clock. They were competitors--newcomers, ardent hobbyists, and elite speed solvers--in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, the pastime's most prestigious competition. And most of them got creamed by some software. The annual event, normally set in a packed hotel ballroom with solvers separated by yellow dividers, was virtual this year, pencils swapped for keyboards. After millions of little boxes had been filled, a computer program topped the leaderboard for the first time.

Tinder is adding a'panic button' to its app that will allow people to alert the police if they feel unsafe while out on a date. It will be rolled out to users of the dating service from the end of January in the USA, according to a Wall Street Journal report. They will use a technology that tracks the location of users and notifies authorities of any safety issues that is built by company Noonlight. Tinder has not said when or if the service will be rolled out to the rest of the world. 'You should run a dating business as if you are a mom,' Mandy Ginsberg, CEO of Tinder parent company Match Group, told the Wall Street Journal.

For many people, AI has sinister connotations. For them it conjures up a future where robots rule the world and humans are slaves to the algorithm. And they're right to be wary. But like it or not, it's here to stay. In season seven, episode five of Mad Men, Michael Ginsberg gives Peggy his nipple in a box. That's perhaps not the most romantic love token ever, but it certainly made an impact.

Matt Ginsberg, today's constructor, is known for creating Dr. Fill, an artificial intelligence-based program that solves puzzles (you can see the doctor in action in the constructor's notes below). There is a growing thrum of A.I. in the world, and it is amazing and alarming what machines are increasingly able to do, quickly and accurately. Still, there are a lot of occupations and skills that are hard to imagine being conquered by programs. Today's puzzle concerns a type of performance that requires a human touch to pull off, not to mention an audience with the ability to experience surprise and inspiration. In a 2012 article, Dr. Fill was stymied by a puzzle with punny spoonerisms, unable to reach an AHA moment that transcends logic.