Do You Actually Need to Pay for Transcription Software? I tested Wispr Flow and various AI-powered transcription software to see whether you should bother subscribing or stick with free services. The pitch--that you'll be able to write faster by talking out loud instead of typing-- is compelling, especially if you're a slow typist. The marketing promises you'll be able to write at the speed of thought, 4x faster than your keyboard. I already type faster than I can think.

Amazon Is Making an AI-Animated TV Show. The company licensed the character for a new Amazon series--made with AI--without her consent. Author and illustrator Loryn Brantz never imagined that a popular cartoon character she created almost a decade ago would one day be the subject of an intellectual property dispute involving BuzzFeed, Amazon's video streaming service, and generative artificial intelligence. But that's exactly the situation she finds herself in today. "Nothing said in good faith by managers and executives was followed through with," Brantz says of BuzzFeed, her former employer.

We Asked the Author to Explain How He Used AI. A book about how AI shapes perceptions of reality came under fire for using AI-generated quotes. Its problems go beyond that. Earlier this month, WIRED published an excerpt from Steve Rosenbaum's buzzy new book,, which looks at how artificial intelligence warps people's sense of reality. Shortly thereafter, The New York Times reported that the book contained over a half-dozen made-up or misattributed quotes.

Pope Leo XIV may not be able to disarm AI, but he's got the attention of the industry. For one thing, Olah is an atheist who at 15 rejected his evangelical Christian upbringing. As a Thiel fellow, he accepted a grant from the guy who thinks that anyone who slows down AI progress is a legionnaire of the antichrist . Olah is also a cofounder of Anthropic, a leading AI company reportedly about to go public with a nearly trillion-dollar valuation. Olah commented on the oddness in his remarks at the Vatican.

Plus: Anthropic is now valued higher than OpenAI. How a new extraction process could unlock the world's lithium A new method for extracting lithium could cut costs and emissions from one of the world's most important materials for EVs and energy storage. The technique uses a weak acid to dissolve silicate minerals. That frees not only the lithium but also other useful materials, including alumina and silica. "At scale, we believe this will be the lowest-cost way of sourcing lithium in the world," says Yet-Ming Chiang, an MIT professor who co-authored a study of the process published yesterday in . Startup Rock Zero is already working to commercialize the research.

How the Pope's Magnifica Humanitas offers a template for individuals to meet the AI moment Despite a lack of regulation, we still have the ability to steer artificial intelligence in ways that can benefit our common humanity. Pope Leo XIV's new encyclical on artificial intelligence includes a statement that warrants serious attention from technologists and policymakers: "Technology is never neutral." As the pope says, the choice before us--the choice AI presents--is one between the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of our common humanity. In the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, humans sought to build a massive structure that reached all the way to Heaven, only to have their project thwarted when God made those involved unable to understand one another. It was a pursuit fixated on relentless growth, divorced from any concern about God's commandments or the human cost. It resulted in failure and atomization.

Pages from the Anthropic website and the company's logo are displayed on a computer screen in New York on 26 February 2026. Pages from the Anthropic website and the company's logo are displayed on a computer screen in New York on 26 February 2026. Anthropic reaches valuation of $965bn, beating OpenAI to become world's most valuable AI firm Claude's parent company's $65bn in latest funding round underscores vast sums of money still flowing into industry Anthropic, the AI firm behind the Claude chatbot, announced on Thursday it had raised $65bn in funding to value the company at $965bn post-money. The move makes Anthropic the world's most valuable AI startup, eclipsing its competitor OpenAI. The deal marks an exceedingly successful period of growth for Anthropic, which was once considered to be a smaller player in the global AI arms race.

Just a week after an AI disproved an 80-year-old conjecture and astonished mathematicians, another conjecture that had stood for half a century has fallen, inspired by the same techniques, but this time written entirely by humans. Last week, an unreleased AI model from OpenAI disproved an important conjecture first posed by Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, called the unit distance problem. The puzzle, which Erdős considered his "most striking contribution to geometry" and which many mathematicians had failed to unravel, concerns the number of similar-sized connections you can make between dots arranged on a flat surface. Erdős had set an upper ceiling on this number, which many experts had assumed was correct. But the AI model showed that this number could in fact be much larger, using an obscure trick from algebraic number theory to make complex structures with extremely high dimensions, which could then be used to arrange the dots in a very different arrangement than humans had considered.

Plus: Illinois just passed what could become America's strongest AI safety law. Climate tech companies are going public. Solar and battery company Solv Energy went public in February, hitting a $6 billion valuation. X-energy, which builds small modular nuclear reactors, followed at $11.5 billion. Then came geothermal company Fervo Energy, reaching a market cap of about $12.4 billion. All three have been IPO success stories.

Oura's New Ring 5 Is Smaller and Lighter--and Adds an AI Health Coach But the real upgrade is Oura's push into AI-powered health insights and proactive monitoring. Two years on since the Oura Ring 4, Finnish health tech company Oura is back with a new smart ring --right in time to compete with the other screenless fitness tracker of the moment, the Fitbit Air . The Oura Ring 5 doubles down on the company's minimalist ethos with a smaller ring design, upgraded durability, and--unsurprisingly--a suite of AI-powered wellness features . The Ring 5 is available for preorder today and begins shipping June 4. It starts at $399 in silver and black, while premium finishes--Stealth, Brushed Silver, an updated Gold, and a new Deep Rose color--cost $499.