Author: Art Ryan

RIYADH: The King Abdulaziz Public Library will host an international symposium on artificial intelligence and translation in Seoul, bringing together experts from Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and South Korea. The event on Sept. 30 is titled “Translation and Artificial Intelligence: Opportunities and Challenges,” according to Saudi Press Agency. It will be held at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies as part of the 11th King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Award for Translation. Organizers said discussions will cover key issues for the industry, including the most effective AI tools for translators, ethical and copyright concerns, practical applications, and frameworks for responsible adoption. The…

Artificial intelligence capabilities are developing rapidly and companies globally are frantically trying to keep up and implement AI tools, but there are consequences to sloppy execution. In fact, 79% of companies globally expect to incur an “AI debt” as a result of poorly implemented autonomous tools, according to a new report by Asana on the State of AI at Work which surveyed over 9,000 knowledge workers across the U.S., U.K., Australia, Germany, and Japan. The report highlighted that companies are unprepared and lack the infrastructure and oversight required to foster a smooth collaboration between human employees and autonomous AI agents. Differing from generative…

From tech giants to startups, South Korean players are developing large language models tailored to their own language and culture, ready to compete with global heavyweights like OpenAI and Google. Last month, the nation launched its most ambitious sovereign AI initiative to date, pledging ₩530 billion, (about $390 million), to five local companies building large-scale foundational models. The move underscores Seoul’s desire to cut reliance on foreign AI technologies, hoping to strengthen national security and keep a tighter control over data in the AI era. The organizations picked by the Ministry of Science and ICT to compete were LG AI Research, SK Telecom, Naver Cloud, NC…

Researchers have developed a new attack that reveals privacy vulnerabilities by determining whether your data was used to train AI models. The method, named CAMIA (Context-Aware Membership Inference Attack), was developed by researchers from Brave and the National University of Singapore and is far more effective than previous attempts at probing the ‘memory’ of AI models. There is growing concern of “data memorisation” in AI, where models inadvertently store and can potentially leak sensitive information from their training sets. In healthcare, a model trained on clinical notes could accidentally reveal sensitive patient information. For businesses, if internal emails were used in training, an attacker…

When ransomware attacks like Akira and Ryuk began crippling organisations worldwide, the cybersecurity industry’s first instinct was predictable: build bigger walls, deploy more aggressive automated responses, and lock down everything. But there was a different problem emerging, according to Romanus Prabhu Raymond, Director of Technology at ManageEngine. The company’s customers were demanding aggressive containment features, yet automatically quarantining a suspicious hospital computer or bank teller system might prove more devastating than the original threat. The dilemma – balancing rapid threat response with real-world consequences – exemplifies why ethical cybersecurity practices have become one of the defining challenges of 2025. In…

Samsung is overcoming limitations of existing benchmarks to better assess the real-world productivity of AI models in enterprise settings. The new system, developed by Samsung Research and named TRUEBench, aims to address the growing disparity between theoretical AI performance and its actual utility in the workplace. As businesses worldwide accelerate their adoption of large language models (LLMs) to improve their operations, a challenge has emerged: how to accurately gauge their effectiveness. Many existing benchmarks focus on academic or general knowledge tests, often limited to English and simple question and answer formats. This has created a gap that leaves enterprises without a reliable…

If you’ve been on the New York City subway recently, you’ve probably seen stark white ads promoting a wearable AI device called Friend. CEO Avi Schiffman told Adweek that the company spent more than $1 million on a campaign with more than 11,000 cards on subway cars, 1,000 platform posters, and 130 urban panels. Some stations, like West 4th Street, are completely dominated by Friend ads. “This is the world’s first major AI campaign,” Schiffman said. (There have been other AI ads of questionable effectiveness, but perhaps not a print campaign of this scale.) He described it as “a huge gamble,” adding, “I don’t…

Generative artificial intelligence tools have reportedly lowered the cost and increased the frequency of bot network attacks targeting corporations on social media. While the deployments of bot networks on social media were previously made primarily by fraudsters and state-based actors, they have become more common over the past year or two due to the capabilities of gen AI, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Friday (Sept. 26). The report pointed to “culture wars” attacks on social media, such as those that followed Cracker Barrel’s change to its logo and Amazon’s and McDonald’s changes to their diversity, equity and inclusion policies. Bot networks magnified posts aimed at Amazon and McDonald’s and authored about half of the…

Tech consultancy Accenture has set out plans to lay off staff who aren’t able to reskill on artificial intelligence amid a broader restructuring strategy which will see the company prioritize AI efforts. Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said in a call Thursday that as advanced AI becomes “a part of everything we do” and the global professional services company continues to invest significantly in the area, it expects employees to “retrain and retool” at scale. “We are investing in upskilling our reinventors, which is our primary strategy,” Sweet said. She explained that the company is “exiting on a compression timeline” people for whom…

YouTube Music is testing AI music hosts that provide relevant stories, fan trivia, and commentary about what you’re listening to, the company announced on Friday. The move comes two years after Spotify launched an AI DJ that delivers a curated selection of music alongside AI-powered spoken commentary about the tracks and artists you like. YouTube Music’s new feature builds on its ongoing experiments with conversational AI. In July, the service rolled out an AI conversational radio feature that lets users create a custom radio station by describing what they want to hear. YouTube Music’s new AI hosts are currently being tested through YouTube Labs, the platform’s…

Meta denied a media report that it is considering using Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) models in its ad business. The Information reported Thursday (Sept. 25), citing unnamed sources, that Meta is considering this move and has had discussions with Google Cloud about doing so. Reached by PYMNTS, a Meta spokesperson said the company is only using Google’s models for benchmarking. “We’ve always built our own industry-leading, proprietary ad targeting and recommendation systems,” the Meta spokesperson said in an email. “Separate from that, we regularly evaluate third-party tools for the purpose of benchmarking, which is the case here.” The Information report said Meta was looking into using Google’s AI models to…

Light raised $30 million in a Series A funding round to accelerate the global expansion of its artificial-intelligence-native finance platform that is designed to replace legacy tools and meet the needs of hypergrowth companies. The Denmark-headquartered company will use the new capital to open a new office in New York, triple its engineering team, launch a process-optimization workbench and further build out its deployment department, it said in a Thursday (Sept. 25) press release. Light’s AI-native platform is designed to keep pace with hypergrowth companies, according to the release. It handles 280 million records in under a second; generates balance sheets instantly; manages multi-entity…

Apple is building a ChatGPT-like iPhone app to test a revamped version of Siri. Still, the tool is restricted to internal testing only and will not be released to consumers, Bloomberg reported Friday (Sept. 26). The app lets Apple engineers experiment with features such as searching through emails and music or completing in-app tasks like editing photos, giving the company a faster way to refine Siri’s capabilities. According to Bloomberg, the software code-named Veritas, Latin for “truth,” is meant for internal use, at least for now. Apple has no current plans to release it to consumers. The project further underscores Apple’s late…

Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity has launched an application programming interface (API) that it claims provides developers with access to the same infrastructure that powers the company’s public search engine. The new Perplexity Search API provides a single interface through which developers can tap information from the company’s index of hundreds of billions of webpages, Perplexity said in a Thursday (Sept. 25) blog post. “Perplexity Search API is designed for the unique demands of AI applications,” the post said. “Unlike other API offerings that expose a restricted universe of information, our API provides rich structured responses that are ready for use in AI and traditional applications…

OpenAI is reportedly seeking someone to help carry out its monetization plans. Fidji Simo, the artificial intelligence (AI) startup’s new CEO of applications, has been meeting with candidates for this role, per a report Wednesday (Sept. 24) by the tech industry-focused news site Sources. This new executive would oversee a team responsible for bringing ads to ChatGPT, and handle all monetization endeavors at OpenAI, including subscriptions, the report said. While talks are ongoing, Sources added, the successful applicant would report directly to Simo, who recently began at OpenAI after serving as Instacart’s chief executive. PYMNTS has contacted OpenAI for comment but has not yet received a reply.…

Autonomous vehicle technology provider Kodiak AI, formerly known as Kodiak Robotics, is set to begin trading on Nasdaq Thursday (Sept. 25) under ticker symbols KDK and KDKRW. Kodiak AI was created by the business combination of Kodiak Robotics and publicly traded special purpose acquisition company Ares Acquisition Corporation II (AACT), according to a Wednesday (Sept. 24) press release. The combination was approved by AACT’s shareholders Tuesday (Sept. 23) and the SPAC was renamed Kodiak AI, according to the release. Kodiak received more than $212.5 million from institutional investors in connection with the business combination, and the operating company de-SPAC transaction valued Kodiak at about…

Federal agencies can now access xAI’s Grok artificial intelligence models for 42 cents per agency for 18 months, through March 2027. This offer is enabled by a OneGov agreement between xAI and the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), the GSA said in a Thursday (Sept. 25) press release. The agreement gives participating agencies access to xAI’s most advanced reasoning models — Grok 4 and Grok 4 Fast — and dedicated xAI engineers who will help the agencies integrate these tools into their workflows, according to the release. It also provides agencies with an upgrade path to Federal Risk and Authorization Management…

OpenAI is launching a new feature inside of ChatGPT called Pulse, which generates personalized reports for users while they sleep. Pulse offers users five to 10 briefs that can get them up to speed on their day and is aimed at encouraging users to check ChatGPT first thing in the morning — much like they would check social media or a news app. Pulse is part of a broader shift in OpenAI’s consumer products, which are lately being designed to work for users asynchronously instead of responding to questions. Features like ChatGPT Agent or Codex aim to make ChatGPT feel more like…

For years, recruiters used machine learning to find potential hires by searching for keywords in résumés and LinkedIn profiles. Although this method helps to narrow the candidate pool, recruiters still have to manually review each profile to determine the best fit for the job. David Paffenholz (pictured left) and Ishan Gupta, then just 22 and 19, respectively, realized that LLMs could find talent faster and more efficiently. They built Juicebox, an AI-powered search engine that uses natural language to analyze professional profiles, personal websites, and other publicly available information to identify the most qualified candidates. After attending startup accelerator Y Combinator…

Artificial intelligence (AI) hyperscaler CoreWeave has expanded its multi-billion dollar agreement with OpenAI. Earlier this year, CoreWeave inked a partnership with OpenAI to power the training of its most advanced models. On Thursday (Sept. 25), the companies agreed to a new deal worth up to $6.5 billion, bringing the total contract value to $22.4 billion. “We are proud to expand our relationship with OpenAI, a company consistently at the forefront of advancing artificial intelligence,” Michael Intrator, Coreweave’s co-founder, chairman and CEO, said in a news release. “This milestone affirms the trust that world-leading innovators have in CoreWeave’s ability to power the most demanding inference and training…