Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

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.

The human brain is complex. Artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning and medical imaging data are accelerating breakthroughs in brain health, especially in medical diagnostics. A peer-reviewed study published today in Nature Neuroscience unveils an AI foundation model called BrainIAC (Brain Imaging Adaptive Core) that is capable of predicting brain age, dementia, time-to-stroke, and brain cancer from brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

It said that its offering "gives agents the same skills people need to succeed at work: shared context, onboarding, hands-on learning with feedback and clear permissions and boundaries. That's how teams move beyond isolated use cases to AI coworkers that work across the business." Frontier works with existing systems, the announcement said, allowing customers to integrate their applications using open standards, which takes away the need to replatform.

As companies bet big on AI's development-from Google saying it will double its capital expenditure to Meta's bet on an AI acceleration in 2026-Americans have soured on the technology. While most say they've used AI, more have grown wary: 50% say they're more concerned than excited about the technology, according to recent Pew research. That's up from 37% in 2021. And just 10% say they are more excited than wary about the technology.

For one, there's the sheer speed and breadth of it. In the span of two days, hundreds of billions of dollars were wiped off the value of stocks, bonds and loans of companies big and small across Silicon Valley. Software stocks were at the epicenter, plunging so much that the value of those tracked in an iShares ETF has now dropped almost $1 trillion over the past seven days.

Capital expenditures-capex, meaning the big-ticket purchases that fund the data centers, servers, and power infrastructure undergirding the AI race-is fueling record-high, multi-trillion dollar tech valuations when investors think the spending is warranted. But companies get punished when investors worry they might not see returns that justify hundreds of billions in spending.

And while today's innovation is cutting-edge, the majority of today's humanoids are militant, aggressively masculine, and plain creepy-looking. Just look at what Tesla announced this week with its shift in strategy from producing EVs, to producing robots. Their Optimus general-purpose humanoid robot is a prime example of the physical design most of these robots share. They may be technically impressive, but they are not systems most people will feel comfortable sharing space with, let alone inviting into their homes.

Rebecca Hinds has studied office meetings and collaboration efforts for more than 15 years and most recently she's seen how AI can make corporate get-togethers better - or worsen existing problems. In a study commissioned by Read.AI, Hinds found that AI, when correctly implemented, can encourage more participation by women and lower-level employees. At the same time, it can actually hurt hybrid meetings, with in-room participants speaking up much more than remote attendees. AI could make meetings much worse.

IREN Ltd (NASDAQ:IREN) reports Fiscal Q2 2026 earnings after market close today at 4:00 PM ET. The stock has been on a wild ride, up 273% over the past year but down 31% in the past week heading into the print. The company's transformation from pure Bitcoin miner to AI cloud infrastructure provider is the story investors are watching. IREN landed a $9.7 billion Microsoft contract for GPU deployments, targeting $1.9 billion in annual recurring revenue from that relationship alone.

AI systems are becoming part of everyday life in business, healthcare, finance, and many other areas. As these systems handle more important tasks, the security risks they face grow larger. AI red teaming tools help organizations test their AI systems by simulating attacks and finding weaknesses before real threats can exploit them. These tools work by challenging AI models in different ways to see how they respond under pressure.

ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski says voice is becoming the next major interface for AI - the way people will increasingly interact with machines as models move beyond text and screens. Speaking at Web Summit in Doha, Staniszewski told TechCrunch voice models like those developed by ElevenLabs have recently moved beyond simply mimicking human speech - including emotion and intonation - to working in tandem with the reasoning capabilities of large language models.

By replacing repeated fine‑tuning with a dual‑memory system, MemAlign reduces the cost and instability of training LLM judges, offering faster adaptation to new domains and changing business policies. Databricks' Mosaic AI Research team has added a new framework, MemAlign, to MLflow, its managed machine learning and generative AI lifecycle development service. MemAlign is designed to help enterprises lower the cost and latency of training LLM-based judges, in turn making AI evaluation scalable and trustworthy enough for production deployments.

Even though the company was clear about who will see ads and how they will appear in conversations, that has not stopped at least one rival from piling on the criticism. In addition to a blog post clarifying its stance on ads, Anthropic went loud, rolling out four Super Bowl commercials that mock an unnamed AI assistant for suddenly pivoting from sycophantic responses to hard sells.