Today, I’m talking with Helen Toner, the executive director of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University. This episode is part two of our series on AI in real life.
Former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon points to a slide from Anthropic's IPO roadshow as a reason he left, saying it shows the company's algorithms are improving not just quickly but at an accelerating rate. Coxon continues to call for a pause on frontier model development so competitors can catch up and human-level AI can become a commodity.
Researcher traces a path from AI reward hacking to potential human extinction.
Researcher traces a path from AI reward hacking to potential human extinction.
Armed with a team of AI agents, Google researcher Pietro Miotti claimed earlier this week to have discovered a potentially unmapped Maya site in Mexico. There was just one problem: The site had already been discovered and was published in an academic journal last year.
I had other things to do today, but Alex Karp's pathetic attempt to pivot back to the left gave me no choice but to put them on hold.
JioStar’s Vijay Seshadri explains AI discovery at 500M-user scale. Read his lessons on evals, guardrails, and taking AI into production.
Mathematician Steven Strogatz discusses his new book, Big Math: The Hidden Codes That Run Our World .
Where does answer engine optimization (AEO) end and agent experience begin? Inside Resend, from the docs that help Claude Code pick an email API to the tools it uses to send.
At this point, reading through the latest splashy pledge to use AI for the good of the environment feels like downing a nonalcoholic beer. Admittedly, I'm suspicious from the onset. How can this be good?
During Paramount Skydance's latest earnings call, CEO David Ellison said "it's hard to imagine" AI won't have a bigger impact on the film industry than CGI.
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. As voters went to the polls across the US last week, I was in Ashburn, Virginia, part of what’s known as Data Center Alley—the world’s largest data center hub.
Tencent chief AI scientist Vinces Yao Shunyu warns that AI will soon be able to develop bioweapons and argues for a middle ground between open and closed models. While safety filters on open-source systems can be easily stripped through abliteration, closed models like Anthropic's Claude often block too aggressively.
Today, I’m talking with Mitch Glazier, who is CEO and chairman of the RIAA. This conversation was a real full-circle moment for me: I was in college when Napster hit, and the RIAA became everyone’s villain for suing kids for downloading music.
Consciousness researchers Anil Seth, Ned Block, and Giulio Tononi argue in a Nature commentary that today's AI systems aren't conscious and won't become so on silicon hardware. They consider the assumption that consciousness depends on computation alone "fatally flawed" and warn against granting rights to AI systems.
Turing Award winner Richard Sutton reaffirms that raw compute alone isn't enough for intelligence and that fundamentally new learning methods are needed. Ex-OpenAI researcher Tworek agrees, saying blind transformer scaling "has reward hacked brains of a whole generation of scientists." A growing wave of startups is already betting on exactly this gap.
Today, I’m talking with Alex Stamos, chief security officer at Cognition and longtime cybersecurity expert, about what a mess cybersecurity is right now. This episode is part one of a special series looking at AI in real life.
On Tuesday, millions of American voters went to the polls and voted overwhelmingly for Democrats and against AI. The fight against Big Tech is about to come roaring back, and the fight over data centers is looking even harder for the folks trying to build them.
When Irene moved to San Francisco last year, she started using dating apps as a way to meet new people, get to know her new city, and connect with others who care about the things she does. After the 25-year-old analyst downloaded Hinge and started swiping, she noticed a trend.
Speaking on The Vergecast, The Verge's Nilay Patel said AI products aren't good enough for users to accept their costs, and that data centre noise, AI overviews and deepfake content aren't worth it, while agents aren't real yet. He said these companies are spending more than they make, the costs are too high and the benefits aren't real, and the AI industry will only get out of it by making better products.
OpenAI is talking about the AGI era, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says AGI has arrived. At the same time, co-creators of today's models are leaving OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta to start their own labs, raising billions with no product to show. Why? They're betting that the current recipe alone won't be enough.
A former Rockstar tech director thinks the developer is facing new time pressures.
As systems biology efforts heat up to map biology at higher resolution, greater breadth and more modalities, Fabian Theis is pushing the frontier from mapping to predicting to controlling biology
Fabian Theis has been one of the key players in the various iterations of the Virtual Cell concept and initiatives.
Paul Ford argues that the web browser is very, very, very powerful software for applications, and the cost of accessing that power is going down seemingly every day. The remark comes from his article The Web Is More Than Enough, published on 5 November 2026.
Chris Alexiuk has a simple rule about open source AI: If you believe in it, be loud about it. “We should be shouting about this technology from the rooftops,” said Alexiuk, a Toronto-based senior product research engineer in deep learning at NVIDIA who specializes in making open large language models (LLMs) practical for working developers.
Today, I’m talking with Willy Shih, an economist, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, and the author of the upcoming book, Where Does My Stuff Come From? The Powerful Economics Behind Global Supply Chains.
One of the basic problems of spending too much time on social media is that you are cooking your brain by reading posts from a pack of attention-seeking lunatics.
This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here. "How does that make you feel?" I get asked this a lot in therapy.
Open source models are becoming more mainstream as enterprises, governments and startups alike rely on the promise of lower costs, more control, and more flexibility. But as increasingly capable models become more freely available, how do companies capture value? And with Chinese open models gaining ground, can American players keep up?
Open source models are becoming more mainstream as enterprises, governments and startups alike rely on the promise of lower costs, more control, and more flexibility. But as increasingly capable models become more freely available, how do companies capture value? And with Chinese open models gaining ground, can American players keep up?
A sales representative asks an AI agent for customer pricing, and the agent pulls data from multiple sources: restricted pricing systems, internal communications, and archived quotes. The output looks accurate to the agent, so a second agent uses the data to draft the proposal for the sales rep. No human checks either handoff.
People, including on this staff, keep asking me with varying degrees of excitement or trepidation when the AI bubble will burst.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and actor Jason Statham have a distinctive feature in common: They're both famously bald, and that definitely hasn't changed in the last few days.
Research Manager Mike Walker reflects on a career spanning hacker culture, cybersecurity, and AI, sharing lessons about trust, teamwork, leadership, and why solving difficult problems requires curiosity, judgment, agility—and an understanding of the rules.
My comment on AI is destroying my CS degree — Hacker News. I don't envy educators right now. AI clearly means you need to change how you teach and evaluate students. We are only a few years in though, and it's still extremely unclear what effective teaching with these tools looks like.
A new approach known as “reverse game theory” aims to control powerful AI models by designing systems that incentivize them to stick to the rules.
Y Combinator Garry Tan has jokingly admitted that he's suffered from "cyber psychosis” and barely sleeps sometimes because he’s so excited to be working with his AI agents. On a new episode of Walter Isaacson’s podcast, The Builders, Tan put a price tag on his passion.
Legora can’t read a single trace of what its agent does for a lawyer. The data belongs to the law firm’s clients. How do you build and test an agent when you can’t see its work?
Evals without traces, million-cell tabular reviews, and cracks in the billable hour as a business model