Author: Art Ryan

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI has deleted “inappropriate” posts on X after the company’s chatbot, Grok, began praising Adolf Hitler, referring to itself as MechaHitler and making antisemitic comments in response to user queries. In some now-deleted posts, it referred to a person with a common Jewish surname as someone who was “celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids” in the Texas floods as “future fascists”. “Classic case of hate dressed as activism – and that surname? Every damn time, as they say,” the chatbot commented. In another post it said, “Hitler would have called it out and crushed…

In its call centres alone last year. Microsoft saved more than US$500 million ($765 million) in its call centres alone last year by using artificial intelligence, Bloomberg News reported. The tech giant last week announced plans to lay off nearly four percent of its workforce as it looks to rein in costs amid hefty investments in AI infrastructure. In May, the company had announced layoffs affecting around 6000 workers. AI tools were helping improve productivity in segments from sales and customer service to software engineering and the company has begun using AI to handle interactions with smaller customers, Microsoft’s chief commercial officer…

Amazon said Wednesday that its cloud division has developed hardware to cool down next-generation Nvidia graphics processing units that are used for artificial intelligence workloads. Nvidia’s GPUs, which have powered the generative AI boom, require massive amounts of energy. That means companies using the processors need additional equipment to cool them down. Amazon considered erecting data centers that could accommodate widespread liquid cooling to make the most of these power-hungry Nvidia GPUs. But that process would have taken too long, and commercially available equipment wouldn’t have worked, Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at Amazon Web Services, said in a…

How to power the AI economy while supporting local communities American leadership in artificial intelligence promises massive economic opportunities and transformation across industries: AI systems are poised to drive breakthroughs in drug discovery, enable critical infrastructure, and revolutionize sectors from healthcare to finance. To drive these shifts, AI needs a massive amount of energy. By 2028, AI data centers are expected to account for 12 percent of nationwide electricity demand. Data centers’ median size will more than double over the next decade, according to a survey of US data center operators from power provider Bloom Energy. Some will require more than a gigawatt of…

Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab briefly reached a market capitalization of $4 trillion on Wednesday, making it the first company in the world to reach the milestone and solidifying its position as one of Wall Street’s most-favored stocks. Shares of the leading chip designer rose as much as 2.8% to an all-time high of $164.42, benefiting from an ongoing surge in demand for artificial-intelligence technologies. Nvidia’s soaring market value underscores Wall Street’s confidence in the rapid growth of AI, with the company’s high-performance chips forming the backbone of this technological advance. “It highlights the fact that companies are shifting their asset spend in the…

California State Senator Scott Wiener on Wednesday introduced new amendments to his latest bill, SB 53, that would require the world’s largest AI companies to publish safety and security protocols and issue reports when safety incidents occur. If signed into law, California would be the first state to impose meaningful transparency requirements onto leading AI developers, likely including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and xAI. Senator Wiener’s previous AI bill, SB 1047, included similar requirements for AI model developers to publish safety reports. However, Silicon Valley fought ferociously against that bill, and it was ultimately vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom. California’s governor then called for a group of AI…

AI-powered coding tools like Cursor, Replit, Claude Code, and Lovable are helping developers write many lines of code every day to ship products faster. However, app makers still have to rely on either shipping full beta versions of their apps or using simulation software to gauge how upcoming features will work. Blok, a company that is coming out of stealth, allows developers to use AI to simulate different user personas to test an app’s features and learn how to make their apps better. The company was founded by Tom Charman and Olivia Higgs in 2024. Both have been serial entrepreneurs…

AI data platform iMerit believes the next step toward integrating AI tools at the enterprise level is not more data, but better data. And better data doesn’t come from hordes of gig workers, but from experts across mathematics, medicine, healthcare, finance, autonomy, and other cognitive fields, the company says. “What’s become exceedingly important is the ability to attract and retain the best cognitive experts, because we have to take these large models and make them very customized towards solving enterprise AI problems,” Radha Basu, CEO and founder of iMerit, told TechCrunch. The California- and India-based startup has for the past nine years…

As generative AI reshapes industries, one of its most important yet invisible challenges is retrieval, the process of fetching the right data with relevant context from messy knowledge bases. Large language models (LLMs) are only as accurate as the information they can retrieve. That’s where ZeroEntropy wants to make its mark. The San Francisco-based startup, co-founded by CEO Ghita Houir Alami and CTO Nicholas Pipitone, has raised $4.2 million in seed funding to help models retrieve relevant data quickly, accurately, and at scale. The round was led by Initialized Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Transpose Platform, 22 Ventures, a16z Scout, and a long list…

Tencent has introduced a new benchmark, ArtifactsBench, that aims to fix current problems with testing creative AI models. Ever asked an AI to build something like a simple webpage or a chart and received something that works but has a poor user experience? The buttons might be in the wrong place, the colours might clash, or the animations feel clunky. It’s a common problem, and it highlights a huge challenge in the world of AI development: how do you teach a machine to have good taste? For a long time, we’ve been testing AI models on their ability to write code that…

Perplexity AI on Wednesday launched a new artificial intelligence-powered web browser called Comet in the startup’s latest effort to compete in the consumer internet market against companies like Google and Microsoft. Comet will allow users to connect with enterprise applications like Slack and ask complex questions via voice and text, according to a brief demo video Perplexity released on Wednesday. The browser is available to Perplexity Max subscribers, and the company said invite-only access will roll out to a waitlist over the summer. Perplexity Max costs users $200 per month. “We built Comet to let the internet do what it has been begging to do: to…

Adobe said Monday (July 7) that during Amazon’s Prime Day sales event that runs from Tuesday (July 8) through Friday (July 11), it expects the amount of traffic to all U.S. retailers that comes from generative artificial intelligence (AI) chat services and browsers to leap 3,200% year over year. “And while AI-driven traffic remains modest compared to other channels such as paid search or email, the growth shows the value consumers are seeing in leveraging AI to quickly find information on deals and product details,” Vivek Pandya, director, Adobe Digital Insights at Adobe, said in a Monday blog post. Adobe saw the first material surge in this kind of traffic to U.S. retail sites during the holiday shopping season, from Nov. 1 through Dec. 31,…

America’s largest power grid is under strain as data centers and AI chatbots consume power faster than new plants can be built. Electricity bills are projected to surge by more than 20% this summer in some parts of PJM Interconnection’s territory, which covers 13 states – from Illinois to Tennessee, Virginia to New Jersey – serving 67 million customers in a region with the most data centers in the world. The governor of Pennsylvania is threatening to abandon the grid, the CEO has announced his departure and the chair of PJM’s board of managers and another board member were voted out. The upheaval…

American Airlines is deepening its deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) to make the travel experience more comfortable for its passengers — including predicting if they’ll miss a flight and waiting for them. In a recent company podcast, Chief Digital and Information Officer Ganesh Jayaram described the airline’s use of AI to transform both its consumer self-service capabilities and employee productivity efforts. But first, American set up a governance framework to underpin its AI efforts. “We spent quite a bit of time over the last year to set up a governance framework … ensuring that we put all the privacy controls and other protections in…

America’s often-overlooked engine of commerce, the middle-market business landscape, is shifting its innovation experiments down the priority list. The biggest reason? Trade policies, geopolitical scuffles and economic volatility are, and have been for months, hammering mid-market firms’ supply chains and margins, leaving little room for anything but a dedication to unlocking efficiency. The latest findings from the PYMNTS Intelligence Uncertainty Project’s May 2025 edition reveal that 100% of mid-market U.S. goods and retail firms report experiencing direct impacts from tariff volatility. Around 4 in 10 of companies (38%) surveyed tell PYMNTS Intelligence that they have delayed, canceled or reworked product launches or…

Before you read this story, let’s take a little quiz to test your knowledge of financial crimes. One rule before you do: No AI allowed. A customer opens an account and provides information that is inconsistent with their stated occupation. What should the financial institution do? (a) Ignore the discrepancy as it’s common for people to have multiple sources of income. (b) Immediately file a suspicious activity report (SAR). (c) Conduct further due diligence to verify the customer’s information. (d) Close the account immediately. If you chose “c” go to the head of the class. Or you could apply to join…

Lunit, a provider of AI for cancer diagnostics and therapeutics, has announced a collaboration with Microsoft to accelerate the delivery of AI-powered healthcare solutions. In conjunction with their recent acquisition of Volpara, a Microsoft Industry Health Certified Partner, this collaboration will give health professionals globally access to tools that will assist in the detection of cancer. This underscores Lunit’s long-term vision to move beyond standalone AI tools — toward building integrated solutions that align with real-world clinical practice. By joining forces with Microsoft, Lunit is poised to deliver scalable technologies that not only streamline radiology workflows but also drive measurable…

In a bid to empower young people with cutting-edge digital skills, a local Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) today launched a free artificial intelligence (AI) course aimed at upskilling the youth of Uttar Pradesh. Bridging the Skills Gap Speaking at the launch event in Lucknow, the MLA emphasized the growing importance of AI in shaping the future of jobs and industry. The initiative seeks to bridge the skills gap by offering young learners access to foundational and advanced knowledge in AI, enabling them to compete in a rapidly evolving global economy. “With the rise of AI across industries, it…

Knime is in on agentic AI development. Like peers such as Domo and ThoughtSpot, Knime first unveiled a framework for building agentic AI tools during its Spring Summit in March. The vendor’s latest platform update adds new capabilities to the framework that make it easier for users to build agents. Agents are the dominant trend in AI. Unlike generative AI-powered chatbots that are reactive, agents are AI applications that have contextual awareness and can reason on their own. As a result, agents can act autonomously to assist workers. Given that the update — which includes no-code capabilities — makes it easier for users to build…

A group of leading tech companies is teaming up with two teachers’ unions to train 400,000 kindergarten through 12th grade teachers in artificial intelligence over the next five years. The National Academy of AI Instruction, announced on Tuesday, is a $23 million initiative backed by Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, the national American Federation of Teachers and New York-based United Federation of Teachers. As part of the effort, the group says it will develop AI training curriculum for teachers that can be distributed online and at an in-person campus in New York City. The announcement comes as schools, teachers and parents grapple…