The success of DeepSeek's powerful artificial intelligence (AI) model R1 that made the US stock market plummet when it was released in January did not hinge on being trained on the output of its rivals, researchers at the Chinese firm have said. The statement came in documents released alongside a peer-reviewed version of the R1 model, published today in Nature.
Zoom's vision of filling meetings with AI clones has nearly arrived. On Wednesday, the video conferencing app announced that you'll soon be able to create a "photorealistic" avatar of yourself in case you aren't "camera-ready." That means your AI avatar can appear polished if you've just crawled out of bed. Zoom plans on launching this feature to Workplace users in December, allowing you to generate an AI lookalike based on a photo of yourself that you upload or capture directly in the app.
From stealth mode to center stage, Mach Industries is bringing AI into one of the world's most complex and controversial sectors: defense. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, Ethan Thornton, CEO and founder of Mach Industries, steps onto the AI Stage to share what it takes to build in high-stakes environments where speed and autonomy matter most - and why next-gen infrastructure starts with rethinking the fundamentals.
A new study from Pew suggests that Americans aren't particularly optimistic about AI. A full 50 percent of respondents said they were more concerned than excited about the use of AI in their daily lives. That's down ever so slightly from 52 percent in 2023, but it's up significantly from 37 percent in 2021. Americans expressed a number of concerns about AI, chief among them that it will negatively impact our ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships with other people.
A good place to start finding answers is the most recent State of the Bots report from AI startup TollBit. For publishers that are feeling the heat of AI, it attaches real numbers to the presence of AI in the media ecosystem and how quickly it's growing. And while the rise of AI bots is a worrisome trend to those in the content business, it may also be an opportunity.
Headless browsers - the behind-the-scenes software that lets machines surf the web like people - were once the domain of quality-assurance testers and SEO agencies. But new AI-powered browsers launched this last year - like Perplexity's Comet and Browser Company of New York's Dia - are bringing new meaning to the term. These players are using headless browsers to power AI agents that need to click, scroll and interact with websites as a human would, to retrieve information.
The admission came in a paper [PDF] published in early September, titled "Why Language Models Hallucinate," and penned by three OpenAI researchers and Santosh Vempala, a distinguished professor of computer science at Georgia Institute of Technology. It concludes that "the majority of mainstream evaluations reward hallucinatory behavior." Language models are primarily evaluated using exams that penalize uncertainty. The fundamental problem is that AI models are trained to reward guesswork, rather than the correct answer.
EPAM is building its DIAL platform to become one of the most advanced enterprise AI orchestration systems in operation. With its recent DIAL 3.0 release, it addresses how to harness AI at scale without sacrificing governance, cost control, or transparency. We spoke with Arseny Gorokh, VP of AI Enablement & Growth at EPAM, about the platform. DIAL might not be the most known technology out there, but it has some history to build on.
"The AI growth zone will generate growth opportunities across the region, capitalising on access to the UK's largest source of low carbon and renewable energy, world-class universities and the region's emerging tech ecosystem in areas including advanced manufacturing, robotics and space," said the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), in a statement. It is understood that Cobalt Park is already home to three carrier-neutral colocation datacentres, which benefit from a dedicated energy supply from the National Grid.
For years,mainframes were synonymous with stability, but rarely with innovation. That image seems to be changing rapidly. New figures from BMC's annual mainframe survey show that confidence in the future of the platform has never been higher. No less than 97 percent of the professionals surveyed indicate that mainframes will remain part of their IT infrastructure. Increasingly, the system is even seen as a driver for new workloads.
Shares of the database software company have soared more than 80% this year, the seventh-best performance in the S&P 500 Index, as scorching demand for AI computing turbocharges its revenue growth. The latest leg of the rally came after Oracle projected revenue in its cloud-computing business will jump 700% in the next three fiscal years, sending the stock up 36% on Sept. 10.
For Walmart, it's a priority to quickly stock store shelves with the freshest food possible. In doing so, the nation's largest grocery-store retailer can prevent food waste from eating into its profits, even in an industry known for thin margins. Yasemin Gunay, a managing director at Boston Consulting Group, told Business Insider that retailers and restaurants have historically planned their inventory levels based on their internal data, mostly based on past sales trend data.
The speed of that displacement could require government intervention to help support the workforce, executives said. What they're saying: "As with most things, when an exponential is moving very quickly, you can't be sure," Amodei said. "I think it is likely enough to happen that we felt there was a need to warn the world about it and to speak honestly." Amodei said the government may need to step in and support people as AI quickly displaces human work.
Google is testing placing AI-generated search result snippet summaries. Under each Google search result, there is a thing bar, followed by the Gemini logo and then a short AI-generated summary of the page. This test was spotted by Landon Moore who shared screenshots with me on X - he wrote that his team found this "new test showing AI-generated summary of what the page includes under results."
Microsoft has unveiled its largest ever UK investment, committing £22 billion over the next four years to build Britain's biggest artificial intelligence supercomputer and expand its data centre network. The announcement, timed to coincide with President Trump's state visit, dwarfs other Big Tech pledges and forms the centrepiece of £31 billion in new US-led tech investment. Half of Microsoft's spend will go towards capital expansion, while the other half will bolster its UK operations, which already employ 6,000 people.
Developers can now use search and vector search functionality in MongoDB Community Edition and Enterprise Server. These capabilities were previously only available in the Atlas cloud service. During the MongoDB.local NYC conference, MongoDB announced that search and vector search will be available for local installations. The previews are intended for development and testing. Until now, developers and organizations that wanted to use these features had to rely on the fully managed MongoDB Atlas cloud service.
"I scraped millions of Google Maps restaurant reviews, and gave each reviewer's profile picture to an AI model that rates how hot they are out of 10," says San Francisco-based website creater Riley Walz. "This map shows how attractive each restaurant's clientele is. Red means hot, blue means not."
The assistant can answer participant's questions by referring to captions generated during the call, resources like Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides they have permission to view, and public websites. It can also provide summaries of what a specific participant said, identify important decisions and action items, and generate a summary of what you missed when joining a meeting late, but only when Google Meet's Take Notes for Me feature has been activated by the host.
Now, Honig is bringing her innovation-first mindset to Samsung in the newly created role that puts her at the helm of the tech giant's customer experience and AI transformation. Her remit? Help customers understand how they can use AI more day-to-day. "I believe we are going through the most exciting phases of change in our history," she adds. "The AI revolution is one of the most important technological shifts we'll experience in our lifetime."
Nvidia started producing chips tailored for the Chinese market after former US President Joe Biden banned the company from exporting its most powerful products to China, in an effort to rein in Beijing's progress on AI. Beijing's regulators have recently summoned domestic chipmakers such as Huawei and Cambricon, as well as Alibaba and search engine giant Baidu, which also make their own semiconductors, to report how their products compare against Nvidia's China chips, according to one of the people with knowledge of the matter.
