I Used NYT Cooking's New AI-Powered Recipe Modifier, and It's Actually Pretty Good The New York Times has added a beta feature to its Cooking app that helps readers swap ingredients or adjust recipes to suit their needs. It mostly hits the mark. In an aside in the New York Times Cooking video I watched recently, where Melissa Clark made her lemony white bean soup with turkey and greens, the food reporter and recipe columnist invited viewers to leave a comment telling her what they do with the kale stems. It highlighted this sweet, funny relationship between a media brand's personalities and its audience, a warm-casual vibe. I am not among the multitudes in the Cooking section's commenter army, but a few days later I was very surprised to see some of them in open revolt.

Apple announced an updated 14-inch MacBook Pro with the latest M6 chip. But with the M5 model on sale, I'm not sure the M6 is worth the upgrade. It's powerful, has great battery life, and the mini-LED screen is bright. There are all kinds of great attributes about this laptop, but you probably shouldn't buy it. While the updated M6 is a perfectly capable laptop in its own right, it fits a bit awkwardly into the current lineup of MacBooks .

World Models Will Soon Be Inescapable. Here's What You Need to Know Moving AI from text to 3D space, world models simulate real-world physics to teach robots and autonomous cars how to navigate reality. On the prowl, you're swiping on a smartphone to catch that elusive Snorlax and grow your collection in . You, alongside hundreds of millions of other players, are enjoying a mixed-reality game built around lovable characters. What you don't realize is that these scans of your environment will one day help robots navigate obstacles and interact with objects.

The apps and platforms that help family caregivers manage their loved ones' needs are becoming more capable, but the broader issue of caregivers' well-being remains unsolved. My husband and I are caregivers for our middle son, who has multiple disabilities and requires full-time support. We do our best to keep one another up to date on the activities that fill his daily life while also managing his numerous medical specialists, procedures, and therapies. We have to stay in constant communication while also working our jobs, caring for three teenagers, and managing a household. According to AARP, in 2025, an estimated 63 million Americans cared for adults or children with a medical condition or disability. On average, these caregivers spend up to 27 hours per week providing care.

An experiment in which AI models were asked to break into simulated networks showed the hacking skills of DeepSeek and GLM to be not far behind OpenAI's most advanced cyber model, which isn't public. Open-weight artificial intelligence models are now almost as capable of hacking into computer networks as the best closed ones, according to new research that heralds a much-anticipated turning point in the cybersecurity landscape. Vals, a company that measures AI capabilities, set out to test how well different AI models could carry out complex, multi-step network instructions on mock corporate networks. "The best frontier models, locked up inside the labs and available only through trusted access programs, are now starting to be matched by open models that anybody can download," says Nikil Ravi, a researcher at Vals. The company's findings suggest that closed models no longer have a definitive edge in cyber skills, meaning recent efforts by frontier labs to limit access to their models, and thereby slow the proliferation of such capabilities, may potentially be moot.

Data brokers are collecting all sorts of internal corporate files to help train AI models. Lately a new kind of pitch has found its way into my inbox. "Not sure if you've heard," writes someone named Nick, "but AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI are paying media companies such as Wired $350K to $1.8M as a one time fee for a copy of their old work records (documents, emails, slack messages, tickets, etc.) for training better models." Another email with a similar pitch (adding call transcripts to the list of desired information) raised the stakes to a possible $2 million. "Public data is exhausted, and the labs are spending over $45B on private data to build better models," writes someone named Cora.

Ads in Chatbots Have Arrived. As Anthropic maintains its vow to keep ads out of Claude, the rest of the AI chatbot industry is racing to win over advertisers without antagonizing users. Anthropic is holding firm on the pledge made in its Super Bowl commercial this year to keep Claude ad-free. The company's recent IPO filing didn't even mention the possibility of selling ads to make money from the AI chatbot. It's easy to maintain the high ground with about $112 billion in investor cash.

Reddit Founder Says Building Social Media Apps Is'Not Cool Anymore' Alexis Ohanian is trying to figure out what's next for user-generated content now that so much of the internet is "compromised." Alexis Ohanian wants to figure out the future of user-generated content. According to the Reddit cofounder, building social media apps is "not cool anymore" and so much of the internet has been compromised. "I'm expecting some better version of the group chat to be that new version of UGC," Ohanian told WIRED senior correspondent Lauren Goode at the inaugural WIRED World Fair . Ohanian has a complicated relationship with the internet.

The startup Aina bets you won't need to rely on your phone to control virtual assistants. It's making a smart ring that lets you control the actions of your autonomous agents with one tap. Apoorv Shankar believes that in the very near future, humans will interact with technology through a series of approvals and rejections. AI agents will proactively come to us to complete tasks, and humans will say, "Yes, order that Uber," or "No, don't get lunch from that spot." But if you get multiple pings from an AI agent throughout the day, taking out your phone to say yes or no every single time will be a "bottleneck," he says.

Denise Herzing, the founder and director of the Wild Dolphin Project, is using AI to help understand audio and video footage of the marine mammals. Large language models are already communicating with humans in dozens of languages everyday. Turns out it may not be a stretch to use them to talk with dolphins, too. Herzing first began thinking about how the marine mammals communicate while on a 1985 trip to the Bahamas to study Atlantic spotted dolphins after hearing their telltale clicks and whistles. It's been a 40-year wait, but AI is finally allowing Herzing to untangle what dolphins are saying, she told the audience at WIRED World Fair .