Artificial intelligence
fromTheregister
4 hours agoAltman: You think AI is inefficient? Try raising a human
AI energy criticisms are exaggerated; humans have consumed vast resources over millennia, making AI energy use comparatively reasonable.
The new battleground in banking is intelligent operations and scalable execution. In 2026, banking is about moving money smarter, faster, and with fewer humans in the middle. Across corporate finance and global retail operations, banks are experimenting with technology and operational design in ways that challenge long-held assumptions about scale, speed, and control. Three recent developments exemplify what's happening in money movement: Goldman Sachs deploying AI agents, Truist automating corporate receivables, and Nubank expanding abroad with a lean digital model.
AppLovin surged to lead the sector after Morgan Stanley raised its price target, maintaining an Overweight rating. That call centers on AppLovin's AXON AI engine, which powers its mobile advertising platform and has been the engine behind a remarkable earnings run. In Q4 2025, AppLovin reported revenue of $1.66 billion, up 66% year over year, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 84%. Investors sold off the stock despite the strong results, but recent defense of its valuation from Wall Street has led to a bounceback.
But now Google is also using AI to generate a list of services a local business offers. The AI-generated service list for Google local business panels was spotted by Joy Hawkins who wrote on X, "Google is now showing AI-generated services on knowledge panels for small businesses. The description is also AI-generated." Here is her screenshot: She also posted a video of it in action: Google is now showing AI-generated services on knowledge panels for small businesses. The description is also AI-generated.
Poetry and artificial intelligence can appear as oppositesone deeply human; the other cold and mechanical. Sasha Stiles sees them as expressions of the same impulse. Poetry, the Kalmyk- American poet argues, is one of our most ancient and enduring technologies, a system of meter and rhyme invented to store vital information. She views AI as its natural heir. Stiles's path to AI began with literature, not code.
Over the past few days, complaints have stacked up from people who say months of conversations with Google's AI chatbot have simply vanished, with Reg readers noting the disappearances seemed to coincide with the rollout of Gemini 3.1. These complaints are echoed on Google's support forums, where one Gemini Pro user said that all their history had gone AWOL on both phone and desktop despite autodelete being set to keep chats for up to 18 months.
ChatGPT, launched in 2022, began making a significant impact on the market by late 2023, according to Synergy Research Group. The company's chief analyst, John Dinsdale, points out that cloud market leaders have experienced accelerated revenue growth over time. Additionally, the emergence of numerous neocloud companies ( see box: What is a neocloud?) has further strengthened the already positive momentum in the market.
How easy is it to imagine a familiar dystopian world in which "AI" takes over the world via conventional means? Science fiction is replete with examples, from the full frontal assault of Terminator to the more nefarious single omnipotent entity using persuasion and an octopus-like ability to control technology-getting rid of enemies by hacking self-driving cars or medical care. What's really in your prescription bottle?
At Meituan, China's platform for local services, especially known for food delivery, I worked on two AI projects. One was a consumer-facing AI assistant that helps users complete various tasks, including ordering food. The other was a merchant-facing AI agent designed to help businesses manage their daily operations, including handling reservations, managing orders, and supporting routine operational tasks. The main difference between how products are built in China and in the US comes down to the market.
AI is transforming how teams work. But it's not just the tools that matter. It's what happens to thinking when those tools do the heavy lifting, and whether managers notice before the gap widens. Across industries, there's a common pattern. AI-supported work looks polished. The reports are clean. The analyses are structured. But when someone asks the team to defend a decision, not summarize one, the room goes quiet. The output is there, but the reasoning isn't owned.
It's no secret that businesses are increasingly concerned about artificial intelligence (AI) privacy and escalating subscription costs. Many entrepreneurs find themselves locked into expensive monthly AI services while worrying about where their sensitive business data ends up. Pansophy is an AI desktop assistant that offers a different approach entirely, and a lifetime subscription is available now for only $59.97 (reg. $199).
Along the way, I've done what I think a lot of AI power users eventually wind up doing: I've gone into the personalization and settings and told the chatbot to be neutral, direct, and just-the-facts. I don't want a chatbot that tells me "That is a brilliant idea!" every time I explore a tweak to my business strategy. They're not all brilliant, I assure you. And I don't want a lecture about how if I truly have shoulder issues I should see a "real" physical therapist. I'm an adult. I'm not outsourcing my judgment to a robot.
After years of computer saying no, and giving us all migraines and premature grey hair, I'm starting to worry that computer or rather AI large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini are taking too much of a fancy to playing nice and saying yes. I confess to using both of these programs, but I've noticed that, well, it's as if they're trying to please, with statements like You're absolutely right, Jeff, and That's pretty much right.
What is the point of AI alarmism if the people warning the world aren't changing course? A series of warnings from artificial intelligence (AI) industry insiders shows how the debate around AI drives extreme news cycles, swinging between hype and alarm. The result is media coverage that overlooks the intricacies of this technology and its impact on everyday life. We examine the real risks, what's being overstated, and what major tech companies stand to gain from all the fearmongering.
If that feels familiar, that's because we have been here before. In November 2022 ChatGPT made investors question even whether companies like Google had a future. In January 2025, China's DeepSeek challenged the entire American approach to AI, which relied on costly cutting-edge hardware. The stocks of AI-powerhouses like NVIDIA took a beating. To say that both Google and NVIDIA have been doing fine since then would be an understatement.
When I took my side hustle full-time, I needed a website and accidentally fell into the world of building with AI. After trying an old website builder and failing, I hired a designer and an engineer part-time to do it. They were a bit slow, so while I was waiting, I tried using a suggested AI tool to build my website.
EC-Council, creator of the world-renowned Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) credential and a global leader in applied cybersecurity education, today launched its Enterprise AI Credential Suite, with four new role-based AI certifications debuting alongside Certified CISO v4, an overhauled executive cyber leadership program. The dual launch is the largest single expansion of EC-Council's portfolio in its 25-year history. It addresses a structural gap that no single tool, platform, or policy can solve alone: AI is scaling faster than the workforce trained to run, secure, and govern it.
We are living through one of the most disorienting periods in recorded history. The AI race is accelerating toward ever faster, ever more sophisticated automation and optimization. Agentic AI systems are moving from research labs into workplaces, healthcare, and governance. Geopolitical tensions are restructuring alliances faster than institutions can adapt. And planetary systems are signaling, with increasing urgency, that our current trajectory is unsustainable. Amid all this, it is dangerously easy to lose sight of a foundational question: What are we actually optimizing for?
Indus serves as a chat interface for its newly announced Sarvam 105B model, the company's 105-billion-parameter large language model. The app's launch comes two days after Bengaluru-based Sarvam unveiled its 105B and 30B models at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi earlier this week. At the summit, the startup also outlined enterprise initiatives and hardware plans and announced partnerships with companies including HMD to bring AI to Nokia feature phones and Bosch for AI-enabled automotive applications.
Alphabet has capitalized on the AI boom by enhancing its search engine results and online ad placements, but that's far from the only way Google's parent company used this technology to surpass Apple's profits. While search and online ads are still important, Google Cloud has emerged as a substantial catalyst. Google Cloud acts as the digital foundation for many businesses, especially enterprises that want to scale their AI capabilities.
Nvidia rival Cerebras Systems' dinner plate-sized accelerators will power a new supercomputing cluster in India capable of 8 exaFLOPS of AI compute. The installation, announced in New Delhi during the AI Impact Summit this week, is part of a collaboration between the United Arab Emirates' Mohamed Bin Zayed University of AI (MBZUAI) and India's Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
Major RAM makers Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have shifted their production to focus on High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) needed for AI. This has led to shortages of standard DRAM and NAND chips used in smartphones, laptops, and medical devices. Driving hardware prices up. Due to the memory shortage, building non-AI electronics is becoming expensive. By early 2026, prices for standard computer memory and storage drives (SSDs) had surged