Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

In 2025, AI became officially unavoidable: It had been lurking in the background before, as early adapters experimented with it. But this year, companies invested more than $202 billion in AI, a 75% increase from $114 billion invested in 2024. Major tech companies fought bitterly over AI talent, offering astronomical pay packages. There was a groundswell of demand for talent, and unsurprisingly this spread to the demand for AI,

A report in The Information today suggests that OpenAI is already exploring possible ad formats and partnerships, with one of the favorite ideas being to integrate them within ChatGPT's responses. Though the initiative is still in the initial planning stage, it's believed that the company sees ads as key to building a sustainable business model over the long term.

Jain said he had tried to automate internal workflows at Glean, including an effort to use AI to automatically identify employees' top priorities for the week and document them for leadership. "It has all the context inside the company to make it happen," said Jain, adding that he thought AI would "magically" do the work. The idea seemed simple, but it hasn't worked.

In the year ahead, your relationship with your software vendors may change radically, perhaps even a greater shift than the switch from disks to Software as a Service. You may start paying only for the actual results the software delivers, versus simply paying a monthly charge that you pay even if the application sits on a shelf.Also: 6 essential rules for unleashing AI on your software development process - and the No. 1 risk

Keenan wrote that Salesforce users have been building their own MCP servers using OpenAI's Apps SDK and exposing Salesforce data to various frontier LLMs in the bargain. That puts the company's data outside the governance and usage metering of Salesforce. "The thing that I worry about, and what I wanted to get ahead of, was homegrown MCP servers from customers just spitting out data to OpenAI around the trust boundary," Billmaier told Keenan. "And with this, we're actually kind of being full of our destiny as we think about other players emerging in this space."

In this episode, our managing editor Allison Schiff interviews Paul Longo, Microsoft's GM of AI in ads. They discuss the ways AI will transform advertising, from the use of AI technology to create advertising, which Microsoft is doing, to how advertising will become part of agentic AI experiences. (As a writer myself, I also enjoyed hearing him talk about experimenting with AI in some of his work as a screenwriter.)

The AI X Leadership Summit is an exclusive forum embedded within ODSC AI East 2026 that brings together leaders from across industries to explore how AI and data science are reshaping business strategy, operations, and future growth. Through high-impact keynotes, panel discussions, and leadership-focused sessions, this summit focuses on the non-technical, strategic side of AI adoption - from defining enterprise AI strategy to building governance, scaling AI initiatives, and navigating risk.

As AI systems grow more capable, the bar for human training has risen sharply, and generalist data labelers are being pushed aside. That's according to HireArt's 2025 AI Trainer Compensation Report, which collected information from more than 150 sources, including a survey of active workers, public job postings, and internal data. The study shows that today's AI models demand nuanced reasoning, domain expertise, and multilingual fluency, transforming "data labeling" into specialized cognitive work.

The country is renowned for its highly developed, strongly regulated, and thriving gambling environment, which has been fueled by dynamic tech niches that have blended digital entertainment, online casinos, and sports betting into a high-growth industry. Regulation and consumer demand have also played a role in this growth, with more non GamStop casinos emerging to target UK players and meet this demand.

Shares of Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ: META) gained 1.44% over the past five trading sessions after gaining 1.14% the five prior. The fallout from concerns over its AI CapEx announced during the company's Q3 earnings report caused the stock to correct more than 21%, but since bottoming on Nov. 19, shares of META are up 12.64%. The Magnificent Seven member's year-to-date performance stands at a gain of 10.96%.

AI search builds on the same signals that support traditional SEO, but adds additional layers, especially in satisfying intent. Many LLMs rely on data grounded in the Bing index or other search indexes, and they evaluate not only how content is indexed but how clearly each page satisfies the intent behind a query. When several pages repeat the same information, those intent signals become harder for AI systems to interpret, reducing the likelihood that the correct version will be selected or summarized.

The research evaluated chatbots on hallucination rate, customer ratings, response consistency, and downtime rate. The chatbots were then assigned a reliability risk score from 0 to 99, with higher scores indicating bigger problems. Grok achieved an 8% hallucination rate, 4.5 customer rating, 3.5 consistency, and 0.07% downtime, resulting in an overall risk score of just 6. DeepSeek followed closely with 14% hallucinations and zero downtime for a stellar risk score of 4. ChatGPT's high hallucination and downtime rates gave it the top risk score of 99, followed by Claude and Meta AI, which earned reliability risk scores of 75 and 70, respectively.

Rather than being a one-size-fits-all solution, AI will likely deliver distinct benefits to particular industries and jobs. It'll therefore be the responsibility of every individual to figure out how the technology fits within the unique contours and requirements of their particular role. The watchwords of the hour when it comes to the use of AI at work are experimentation and adaptation, not copy and paste.

"The problem isn't a lack of AI options; it is finding the one that truly understands your specific context," says Ofer Tirosh, CEO of Tomedes, the language services provider behind MachineTranslation.com. "That is the power of MachineTranslation.com's SMART option. You don't have to rely on a single opinion. SMART compares all AIs and automatically selects the translation that the majority agree on per sentence. It is about achieving accuracy through aggregation and consensus."

Not only will they be reeling in sky-high salaries, but Altman says they'll also be "feeling so bad for you and I that we had to do this really boring, old work and everything is just better." "In 2035, that graduating college student, if they still go to college at all, could very well be leaving on a mission to explore the solar system on a spaceship in some completely new, exciting, super well-paid, super interesting job," Altman told video journalist Cleo Abram.

Merriam-Webster just named "slop" its word of the year, defining it as "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence." The choice is blunt, almost mocking, and it captures something that has been building for months: a collective exhaustion with AI hype that promises intelligence but delivers mediocrity. Over the past three months, that exhaustion has started bleeding into Wall Street.

Well, that actually is a better segue to this next chart I was going to show you than I thought it would be, which is there's some suspicions going around that this whole thing has become a kind of circular money machine, that the hunt for growth, the hunt for justifying share prices and investment and valuations is leading to just money constantly passing hands to create the almost appearance of activity.

Meta's chief artificial intelligence scientist, Yann LeCun, is in early discussions to raise €500mn for a new artificial intelligence start-up, a move that would value the yet-to-launch company at roughly €3bn, according to people familiar with the matter. The venture, called Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI Labs), is expected to be formally announced in January. LeCun, a Turing Award winner and one of the pioneers of modern AI, will serve as executive chair.

Sam Netherwood, co-founder and director of Tomoro, spoke to The Register about the development of Concierge and the project's goals. "Initially, Virgin engaged us," Netherwood said. "We partner quite closely with OpenAI. Virgin also had already entered into an agreement with OpenAI. And so that's how it came together in the first place. And initially we just did a proof-of-concept over about six weeks."

Pinecone recently announced the public preview of Dedicated Read Nodes (DRN), a new capacity mode for its vector database designed to deliver predictable performance and cost at scale for high-throughput applications such as billion-vector semantic search, recommendation systems, and mission-critical AI services. This capability builds on Pinecone's existing serverless on-demand model, offering enterprises provisioned hardware for steady high query volumes without the variability inherent in usage-based pricing.

Providing great service has always mattered. Doing it brilliantly and consistently, is where things become hard, particularly for SMEs juggling growth, limited resources and rising customer expectations. At Moneypenny, we exist to solve that challenge. By combining unrivalled people and smart AI, we represent businesses seamlessly, delivering exceptional conversations that protect reputation and drive growth. That mission has never been more relevant.