machines

The advent of AI hacking tools has raised fears of a near future in which anyone can use automated tools to dig up exploitable vulnerabilities in any piece of software, like a kind of digital intrusion superpower. Here in the present,…

Over the weekend in China, a humanoid robot shattered world half-marathon record—the human record—by seven minutes.The star performer was a robot developed by the Chinese company Honor (the smartphone maker), which finished the 13.1-mile…

The modern era of cheating in chess began on a Thursday in July 1993, when a man with shoulder-length dreadlocks walked into the World Open tournament in Philadelphia and registered as John von Neumann. Both the hair and the name were…

Arm, one of the world’s leading chip design firms, announced Tuesday that it is producing its own semiconductors. The move is a departure from its long-standing model of licensing intellectual property to companies that manufacture and sell…

In a recent experiment, researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz asked Google’s artificial intelligence model Gemini 3 to help clear up space on a computer system. This involved deleting a bunch of stuff—including a smaller AI model…

Julie Carpenter doesn’t blame human users at all for anthropomorphizing chatbots. The longtime human-AI interaction expert and author of The Naked Android sees generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, as intentionally designed to elicit these…

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the governor of New Jersey made an unusual admission: He’d run out of COBOL developers. The state’s unemployment insurance systems were written in the 60-year-old programming language and needed to be updated…

Brian Barrett: The irony is my favorite part because I feel like venture capitalists have largely positioned themselves as immune to the effects of AI because they're very special and surely a machine can—Zoë Schiffer: It's art, not…

Katy Shi, a researcher who works on Codex's behavior at OpenAI, says that while some folks describe its default personality as “dry bread,” many have come to appreciate its less sycophantic style. “A lot of engineering work is about being…

Before last week the name Alap Shah didn’t ring a bell for many people. The 45-year-old financial analyst and tech entrepreneur had spent the past two decades working in relative obscurity. Then last weekend he coauthored a blog with the…