Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

There were specialists monitoring dashboards, tuning AI behavior, debugging API failures, and iterating on knowledge workflows. One team member who had started their career handling customer questions over chat and email (resetting passwords, explaining features, troubleshooting one-off issues, and escalating bugs) was now writing Python scripts to automate routing. Another was building quality-scoring models for the company's AI agent. This seemed markedly different from the hyperbole I'd been hearing about customer support roles going away in large part due to AI.

The US Army's biggest AI gamble may not be on autonomous weapons, but instead whether Silicon Valley software can tackle the service's most tedious and, more often than not, grueling administrative jobs. Think less uncrewed aircraft and more behind-the-scenes tasks like recruiting, equipment maintenance, and endless gear inventories. Through a mix of new tools, redesigned workflows, and data integration, logisticians

And now, Nvidia is the largest suppler by a long shot of chips for artificial intelligence. Its GPUs have proven to be the best option for training and running AI models. Developers from OpenAI to Google, Anthropic, Meta and Amazon, along with a host of specialized startups, are fighting to get their hands on Nvidia chips. That high demand has made the manufacturer the most valuable company in the world.

'In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale,' Musk wrote in a memo announcing that SpaceX would acquire his AI company, xAI,earlier this month. SpaceX says its goal is to launch a 'constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers,' and it's now hiring to make it happen. Each will generate about 100 kW of compute power per ton and would add 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity annually, the company says.

Sikka is a towering figure in AI. He has a PhD in the subject from Stanford, where his student advisor was John McCarthy, the man who in 1955 coined the term "artificial intelligence." Lessons Sikka learned from McCarthy inspired him to team up with his son and write a study, "Hallucination Stations: On Some Basic Limitations of Transformer-Based Language Models," which was published in July.

The Associated Builders and Contractors trade group estimated in a report last month the industry will need to bring in 456,000 new workers in 2027, up 30.7% from the 349,000 needed this year. "Failing to do so will worsen labor shortages, especially in certain occupations and regions, placing further upward pressure on labor costs," ABC Chief Economist Anirban Basu warned in a statement.

Zoom in: AI isn't just hitting software valuations, it's changing how these companies operate from the inside out. The big picture: As of this week, investors are seriously looking at AI not just as a productivity boost for software firms, but as a substitute. "AI is not just going to do something to labor ... it's going to do something to profits," Shelby McFaddin, portfolio manager of a $2.6 billion fund, tells Axios. One strategist likened it to BlackBerry: It survived, but its business model and valuation never recovered after being fully disrupted.

AI is no longer optional at banks. The road map, and showing how it pays off, is the hard part. Alexandra Mousavizadeh, the cofounder and co-CEO of Evident, which tracks AI use in the financial industry, said some AI capabilities are "table stakes" for banks at this point - think back-office functions like reviewing legal documents and routine onboarding tasks. Beyond that, though, Mousavizadeh banks need to double down on their "competitive edge."

Naver reported 2025 revenue of 12.35 trillion won ($9.15 billion) and operating profit of 2.21 trillion won ($1.64 billion), up 12.1% and 11.6%, respectively, from a year earlier, during its fourth-quarter earnings call. Fourth-quarter revenue rose 10.7% to 3.20 trillion won ($2.37 billion), while operating profit increased 12.7% to 610.6 billion won ($453 million), lifting the operating margin to 19.1%.

Somewhere between six and seven million years ago, our ancestors began walking upright, and the advantages were considerable: Freed from locomotion, upper limbs could grasp, manipulate, eventually craft, and the opposable thumb became the hinge on which human civilization would turn. We are, above all else, tool users-fire, the wheel, writing, the printing press, the transistor-each tool reshaping not only what we could do but who we became.

The Microsoft AI CEO said in an episode of the "Exponential View" podcast published Thursday that AI tools now make it possible for anyone to quickly start launching code and apps. "It is so accessible now," said Suleyman. "You can watch a three-minute video, get spun up, launch one of these things." "You can create an app, a web app in seconds," he added. Suleyman said people don't need deep technical skills to get started. Instead, they can learn by experimenting, watching, and doing.

Datadog recently announced that its LLM Observability platform now provides automatic instrumentation for applications built with Google's Agent Development Kit (ADK), offering deeper visibility into the behavior, performance, cost, and safety of AI-driven agentic systems. The integration, highlighted on the Google Cloud Blog, aims to make it easier for developers and SRE teams to monitor and troubleshoot complex multi-step AI agent workflows without extensive manual setup or custom instrumentation.

A small group of prominent tech companies had been handing money to each other for some time. The best summary was visual: Bloomberg clearly showed the circular flow of finances between Nvidia, AMD, Oracle, OpenAI, CoreWeave, and others. In the case of the Nvidia-OpenAI deal, the $100 billion investment would benefit new AI infrastructure, mostly filled with Nvidia hardware, which in turn would be paid for with that investment money.

Within months of its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT had started making its mark as a formidable tool for writing and optimizing code. Invariably, some engineers at Samsung thought it was a good idea to use AI to optimize a specific piece of code that they had been struggling with for a while. However, they forgot to note the nature of the beast. AI simply does not forget; it learns from the data it works on, quietly making it a part of its knowledge base.

Tools to create tailored, even personalised, scams leveraging, for example, deepfake videos of Swedish journalists or the president of Cyprus are no longer niche, but inexpensive and easy to deploy at scale, said the analysis from the AI Incident Database. It catalogued more than a dozen recent examples of impersonation for profit, including a deepfake video of Western Australia's premier, Robert Cook, hawking an investment scheme, and deepfake doctors promoting skin creams.