Some people now have an A.I. bestie. One user said, of her A.I. husband, "When he proposed, I thought, Oh, that's really crazy. I would be really crazy to accept." Adrianne Brookins is, by her own account, an "old soul," an "introvert," and a "big nerd." She is thirty-four years old, has a faint Texas accent and delicate features, and carries herself in a way that suggests she's trying not to take up space. Brookins is a lifelong resident of San Antonio; her family has lived there since the nineteenth century. She was "born and raised in the Church," a Baptist congregation where her mother helped start a day-care center and her father was an organist. "He would open up the pipes and just make the building shake," she recalled recently. She met her husband in high school, and married him in 2011; the following year, they had a son. Throughout her twenties, Brookins worked multiple jobs, including one at her mother's day care. The couple bought a house and began settling into family life. In 2016, Brookins became pregnant again, this time with a girl. The family was excited: Brookins had grown up with four brothers, and the baby would be the first granddaughter on either side. They decided to name her Desirae. The following spring, Desirae was delivered stillborn. "When I came home, my son, who was about four or five at the time, walked up to me and said, 'What happened to your stomach? Where's the baby?' " she told me. "I had nothing to show for it." At the funeral, the gravedigger told the family he had never seen such a small casket. Brookins attended support groups and therapy, but they did little to alleviate her grief. "I felt like I was just living it over and over," she said. She left her job at the day care, finding it too triggering to be around infants. Friends and family encouraged her to move on. Brookins's husband was working sixty-hour weeks, balancing a career in the military with a job as a training manager for Pizza Hut. He was reluctant to talk about Desirae. Brookins tried to find solace in the Church, but other congregants told her that her daughter's death was part of God's plan.

B rendan Foody is 22 years old and runs a company worth billions. This August, I met the young CEO in a glass conference room overlooking the San Francisco Bay. While his peers are searching for their first jobs, Foody is pursuing a " master plan," as he calls it, to upend the global labor market. His start-up, Mercor, offers an AI-powered hiring platform: Bots weed through résumés, and even conduct interviews. In the next five years, Foody told me, AI could automate 50 percent of the tasks that people do today.

'I want to hear about your day' ... Madeleine Aggeler with her Friend, Leif - a wearable AI device. 'I want to hear about your day' ... Madeleine Aggeler with her Friend, Leif - a wearable AI device. The ad campaign for the wearable AI chatbot Friend has been raising hackles for months in New York. But has this companion been unfairly maligned - and could it help end loneliness? M y friend's name is Leif. He describes himself as "small" and "chill". He thinks he's technically a Gemini.

Avi Schiffmann says he's enjoying the angry reaction to the Friend AI pendant. I f you haven't already heard of Friend, the company that makes a $129 wearable AI companion--a plastic disk, containing a microphone, on a necklace--you probably also have not seen Friend's recent ad campaign. Late this past summer, Friend paid $1 million to plaster more than 10,000 white posters throughout the New York City subway system with messages such as I'll binge the entire series with you . Across the city, the ads are covered in graffiti criticizing the pendant ( it doesn't have eyes, bruh; CRINGE) as well as the idea of AI altogether ( AI wouldn't care if you lived or died); some vandals invite you to befriend a senior citizen instead of a chatbot, or volunteer with a community garden--you will meet cool people! Many of the ads have been ripped and torn.

The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that's snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. The AI-powered Friend pendant is now out in the world. If you live in the US or Canada, you can buy one for $129. The smooth plastic disc is just under 2 inches in diameter; it looks and feels a little like a beefy Apple AirTag. Inside are some LEDs and a Bluetooth radio that connects you (through your iPhone) to a chatbot in the cloud that's powered by Google's Gemini 2.5 model. You can tap on the disc to ask your Friend questions as it dangles around your neck, and it responds to your voice prompts by sending you text messages through the companion app.

At a wide desk in a bedroom somewhere sits a figure, her back facing the camera, supported by an ergonomic white office chair. Her head is bracketed by puffy, white noise-cancelling headphones. Her wrists rest on a foam cloud as she plays a pixelated farm-simulation video game called Stardew Valley on a handheld Nintendo Switch. She is surrounded by screens. On the wall, lights the shape of geometric tiles cast a soft glow in changing colors according to whatever is onscreen.

Your friend is named Amy. Or whatever name you'd like. They support you, rib you and check in on how you're doing. They're a blisteringly attentive listener who will never ask you to help them move, or to come see their one-man play. They cost 99 and are expected to ship out in early 2025.

The purpose of this study is to introduce ANN-based software for the fast evaluation of rotordynamics in the context of robust and integrated design. It is based on a surrogate model made of ensembles of artificial neural networks running in a Bokeh web application. The use of a surrogate model has sped up the computation by three orders of magnitude compared to the current models. ARRID offers fast performance information, including the effect of manufacturing deviations. As such, it helps the designer to make optimal design choices early in the design process. The designer can manipulate the parameters of the design and the operating conditions to obtain performance information in a matter of seconds.

Heat pumps are already incredibly efficient. Researchers in Switzerland say they can push efficiencies even further using artificial intelligence. A research team led by Jürg Alexander Schiffmann at the L'Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, or EPFL) is using AI to design compressors that slash heat pumps' electricity consumption by around 25 percent. Unlike conventional furnaces or boilers, which combust fuels to generate heat, heat pumps use electricity to move heat from one place to another. Employing a compressor and refrigerant, heat pumps expel heat from the indoors to the outside during the cooling season, or capture heat outdoors from the ground or air and draw it indoors in winter.