All posts tagged: artificial intelligence

U.S., China to hold AI talks in September, Reuters sources say

U.S., China to hold AI talks in September, Reuters sources say

Published by Sam Flores

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent looks on as First Lady Melania Trump (out of frame) speaks during an event to launch “Fostering the Future Accounts,” a new financial vehicle for youth in foster care, at the Treasury Building in Washington, DC, on June 11, 2026. Brendan Smialowski | AFP | Getty Images The United States and China are planning to hold talks over artificial intelligence in September, five sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as the superpowers confront how to regulate the risks posed by their increasingly powerful rival frontier models. The AI talks, a significant outcome of the Trump-Xi summit in May, will likely take place before Chinese President Xi Jinping’s planned September 24 visit to the U.S., although the dates have not been finalized, said the sources, who asked not to be named as the information is not public. The talks would be led on the U.S. side by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, four of the sources said. The identity of other participants on the U.S. and Chinese side, as well as the agenda and location of the discussion, are …

‘It’s a Modern-Day Draft’: Why Stanford Students Walked Out on Sundar Pichai’s Commencement Speech

‘It’s a Modern-Day Draft’: Why Stanford Students Walked Out on Sundar Pichai’s Commencement Speech

Published by skeptic

EVA JONES: I am a recent graduate, having studied hydrology and water resources for my master’s degree, but I also did my bachelor’s programs there, in feminist philosophy and in freshwater engineering. I came to Stanford five years ago now, from a rural town in Oregon, because I truly believed that a place like Stanford was looking to pool together minds and resources to tackle these existential threats to humanity, to build the kind of world that I always envisioned could be possible, one of connection, one of belonging. I’m curious, Amanda, you talked about how you got involved with student organizing to begin with, but I’d love to hear from both of you a little bit more about that. How did you go from student to campus activist and organizer? Jones: I came to Stanford as a student organizer. I was of the generation of students who were part of climate justice organizing, anti-gun-violence things, people who came into university ready to use their voice, thinking of that as a way to build a …

The Army Is Burning Through Its AI Tokens

The Army Is Burning Through Its AI Tokens

Published by skeptic

A little over a month after the Department of Defense (DOD) bragged that nearly half of its 3.5 million employees were using AI at work, members of the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) received an email informing them that they were burning through tokens, and needed to limit use. “Although the Army CIO announced in May 2026 that they were offering unlimited tokens, by mid-June the Army CIO pool was exhausted of tokens and had to re-establish limits,” the email reads. The email goes on to say that although the Army has chosen to renew token usage at “its current levels,” it’s unclear “if the Army CIO pool will be renewed after 1 Oct.” The Army uses Ask Sage, a multimodal generative AI platform where users can run different large language models (LLMs), including Alphabet’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. “Apparently the whole Army burned through the whole year of tokens for just one service,” says an Army employee who spoke to WIRED anonymously because they were not authorized to speak to the …

Etsy Is In Its Flop Era, and Sellers Are Fleeing

Etsy Is In Its Flop Era, and Sellers Are Fleeing

Published by skeptic

In 2017, Emily Olson, a stay-at-home mom based in Boulder, Colorado, started selling prints and custom-made puppy portraits on Etsy. Her watercolors were simple and relatively cheap—images of saucer-eyed corgis and malamutes in mini-tuxes, which she sold for $75 to $300 each—but dog owners adored them: “They were a labor of love,” she says. In 2021, she says she made more than $40,000 off her Etsy store, and her social media following ballooned to 180,000 followers on YouTube. But in 2022, she noticed something odd: Her sales started precipitously declining. Competitors flooded the platform, and she kept finding copies of her work on drop-shipping sites like Alibaba, where they were advertised as original creations. Then there were the AI-generated pet portraits, which were supplanting her listings in search results and selling for a fraction of the price. The most frustrating part, she says, was that the AI-generated portraits were getting great reviews. “People were like, ‘Oh, this is the cutest image, I love it in my daughter’s bedroom.’ They didn’t really know or care who …

Advancing multicore fiber technologies for future applications

Advancing multicore fiber technologies for future applications

Published by skeptic

The MATCH project is a European doctoral training network advancing multicore fiber technologies through collaboration between 14 academic and industrial partners. As artificial intelligence, cloud computing, video streaming, 5G networks, and the Internet of Things continue to accelerate digital transformation, global data traffic is growing at an unprecedented rate. To support this growth, future communication infrastructures must provide significantly greater transmission capacity while reducing energy consumption and optimising network resources. One of the most promising solutions is multicore fiber (MCF) technology. By integrating multiple optical cores within a single fiber, MCFs enable parallel transmission channels that can dramatically increase communication capacity while maintaining compatibility with existing optical network infrastructures. In addition to telecommunications, MCFs are opening new possibilities in distributed sensing applications, including environmental monitoring, fire detection, seismic activity monitoring, and structural health assessment. Technology for the next generation of networks Conventional single-mode fibers have enabled decades of growth in global communications. However, with traffic volumes continuing to increase, entirely new approaches are needed to scale network capacity in a sustainable manner. Space-Division Multiplexing (SDM) …

Scientists reveal limits of AI – where it succeeds and where it fails

Scientists reveal limits of AI – where it succeeds and where it fails

Published by Jenni Sidey

Artificial intelligence promises clear answers from complex data. Yet new research suggests there are limits that no amount of data can overcome. Some problems, scientists now show, cannot be solved by AI at all. A study explores where machine learning succeeds and where it fails. Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the University of California Santa Barbara designed mathematical systems meant to expose these limits. Their findings reveal a deeper truth. In some cases, learning is not just difficult, it is impossible. Mapping The Boundaries Of AI Modern science often relies on AI to study systems that are too complex for traditional equations. These include ocean currents, brain activity, and robotic motion. Instead of writing down exact rules, scientists collect data and train algorithms to learn patterns. Convergent general-purpose methods for Koopman learning. (CREDIT: Nature Communications) This approach has led to major breakthroughs. Still, it does not always work. Models can give unstable results or predictions that drift over time. Dr Matthew Colbrook, the study’s lead author from Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and …

Journalists still resisting AI in newsrooms, new global survey finds

Journalists still resisting AI in newsrooms, new global survey finds

Published by Sam Flores

Journalists are resisting the adoption of artificial intelligence and lack the skills or expertise to use it, creating barriers to AI’s wider adoption in the newsroom, according to a major new survey of newsrooms worldwide.  More than half (52%) of those surveyed for the Future Newsrooms Study 2026 said “cultural resistance or scepticism” was the biggest barrier to wider AI adoption in the newsroom, with six in ten (61%) claiming a lack of internal technical skills or AI expertise was to blame. Nearly half (45%) said “unclear use cases or strategic direction” was also hampering take-up. The inaugural annual study, from FT Strategies and WAN-IFRA, reported: “Too often AI vision setting is done outside the newsroom, with few having dedicated AI editorial roles. Bringing journalists into the technology fold can alleviate messaging problems and resistance.” Involving journalists in tech to overcome AI resistance The report revealed 61% of newsrooms offer no formal training for developing new skills among staff. It recommended specialised AI training for newsrooms to combat a lack of technical skills which are the result …

New Phantom Twist drone spins so quickly that it virtually disappears

New Phantom Twist drone spins so quickly that it virtually disappears

Published by Jenni Sidey

A drone spinning above the ground can become difficult to separate from the scenery behind it. Northwestern University engineers have turned that visual weakness into the defining feature of a new aircraft called Phantom Twist. The drone does not rely on camouflage paint, transparent shells or optical systems that bend light. Instead, its entire body rotates as fast as 25 times per second. At that speed, the human eye no longer sees a clear machine. What remains is a pale, ghostlike blur. The design uses motion blur, the familiar effect that makes a fast fan or propeller appear transparent. By spreading the drone’s components apart and keeping the full structure in motion, the team reduced the sharp edges and stationary forms that normally make a flying robot easy to notice. Components are spread around the drone — at different heights and different angles with lots of space in between — to prevent them from visually overlapping when spinning. So, when everything blurs together, the drone becomes a faint, semi-transparent cloud rather than a distinct shape. …

Your Period Tracker Is (Probably) Spying on You

Your Period Tracker Is (Probably) Spying on You

Published by skeptic

Hours of San Francisco Police Department drone video footage exposed on the open web illustrates a new era of incredibly granular—and consequential—urban surveillance. Meanwhile, the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office sent cease-and-desist letters to Apple and Google this week demanding that the tech giants delete 13 AI nudifying “face-swap” apps from their app stores that are almost exclusively used to target women and girls. Since WIRED first reported in June about Meta’s NameTag face-recognition system, company executives have made opaque and conflicting comments about whether the feature even exists. We took a step back to lay out both the claims and the facts about the very real system. In a speech on Thursday, President Donald Trump continued to push unsubstantiated and thoroughly debunked claims about interference in the 2020 US election. He even promised massive revelations in a trove of documents posted to the White House website, but the files did not prove his assertions—and in some cases actually contradicted Trump’s claims. As adoption of AI tools rapidly expands and their capabilities increase, the tech …

How Google’s New Gemini Rates Work and How to Track Your Usage

How Google’s New Gemini Rates Work and How to Track Your Usage

Published by skeptic

Google doesn’t specify what the usage limits are on the free tier—it describes them only as “standard.” You then get 2x these “standard” limits on the AI Plus plan, and 4x on the AI Pro plan. The AI Ultra limits are either 5x or 20x higher than those on AI Pro, depending on which level of payment you’re on. All users have access to all the Gemini AI models, including Flash-Lite, Flash, and Pro. As you progress through those models, they get smarter and will count more toward usage. Each model also has different “thinking” levels—Standard, Extended, and Deep Think—which also affect response quality, speed, and usage limits. The final difference between these models is context window size. Basically, this indicates how much information you can include in a single conversation thread. For free users, the context window is 32K tokens (small chunks of text)—roughly 24,000 words. For AI Plus users, it goes up to 128K tokens (about 96,000 words), and for AI Pro and Ultra users, the limit is a million tokens (about 750,000 …