Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Last fall, Salesforce debuted an AI agent so remarkably human-like it seemed like a vision from the future. In a sleek demo, the company showed how luxury retailer Saks Fifth Avenue was using Salesforce's new flagship AI software Agentforce to create "Sophie," a charming, patient customer service representative. A Salesforce executive dialed a Saks hotline, the chipper-voiced Sophie picked up, and then deftly recommended a sweater based on his order history and talked through shipping options.

AI can be used both for and against the public interest within democracies. It is already being used in the governing of nations around the world, and there is no escaping its continued use in the future by leaders, policy makers, and legal enforcers. How we wire AI into democracy today will determine if it becomes a tool of oppression or empowerment.

MIT Sloan School of Management recently retracted a study that claimed that the majority of ransomware attacks today are driven by artificial intelligence. This was reported by The Register. The report (note: Wayback Machine) attracted attention by stating that around 80% of attacks in 2024 would use AI techniques. After strong criticism from security researchers, MIT decided to remove the document from its website and announced that a revised version is in the works.

In late 2025, a series of multi-billion-dollar deals in the artificial intelligence sector is causing déjà vu among industry veterans. Money, computer chips, and cloud credits are rotating in a closed loop among a handful of companies: Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft, Oracle, AMD, CoreWeave, xAI, and a few others. This has fueled a trillion-dollar AI boom or bubble built on intertwined investments and contracts.

The underlying issue is a technological design constraint: You can either create something highly personalized or something that scales to hundreds of people simultaneously, but rarely both. A seismic change is afoot that will dwarf the previous chasm, like the shift from black and white film to color cinema. Multimodal AI is poised to eliminate the joint scaling and personalization limitation, enabling truly multidimensional, adaptive experiences where each person experiences something completely unique, all generated in real time.

In a Tuesday post on its Engineering blog, four Grab staffers explained that the company needs to accurately extract information from ID cards, driver's licenses, and registration certificates for compliance chores like know-your-customer checks. Grab tried Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems, but its chosen tech "struggled with the variety of document templates it had to process." It's 2025, so the org investigated whether large language models could solve its problem.

Amazon SageMaker AI is a fully managed ML service. With SageMaker AI, data scientists and developers can quickly and confidently build, train, and deploy ML models into a production-ready hosted environment. It provides a UI experience for running ML workflows that makes SageMaker AI ML tools available across multiple integrated development environments (IDEs). Within a few steps, you can deploy a model into a secure and scalable environment from the SageMaker AI console.

This announcement comes just hours after Microsoft announced a $9.7 billion deal for AI cloud capacity with IREN, an Australian data center business. Earlier today, OpenAI announced that it had struck a $38 billion cloud computing deal with Amazon to buy cloud services over the next seven years. The AI company also allegedly inked a $300 billion deal with Oracle for cloud compute in September too.

We are the last generation to remember a world before generative AI. Our children won't know what it was like to write an essay without wondering if a machine could do it better, or to make a decision without algorithmic guidance whispering in their ear. This makes us accountable for something unprecedented: designing the mental infrastructure in which future minds will develop.

Google's parent company, Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced a 16% hike in third-quarter revenues, with growth throughout its digital advertising and cloud computing units set to finance the company's emphasis on developing its artificial intelligence infrastructure. Sales soared to a record $102.3 billion for the quarter, beating analyst expectations and fueling investor optimism for the stock's long-term prospects. Net income grew 33% over the same period last year to hit around $35 billion.

Google says it has pulled AI model Gemma from its AI Studio platform after a Republican senator complained the model, designed for developers, "fabricated serious criminal allegations" about her.

Back in 2021 and 2022, Meta bet big on virtual reality and the metaverse, rebranding from Facebook and committing tens of billions to Reality Labs. The division racked up losses exceeding $10 billion annually, with products like Horizon Worlds failing to gain traction. Investors worried about the lack of monetization strategies, leading to stock volatility and questions about resource allocation away from proven ad revenue streams. The metaverse hype faded, leaving Meta to refocus on efficiency amid economic pressures.

Its imperfections are human, visible, and correctable. You can see who edited what, when, and why. Grokipedia is its antithesis. It replaces deliberation with automation, transparency with opacity, and pluralism with personality. Its "editors" are algorithms trained under Musk's direction, generating rewritten entries that emphasize his favorite narratives and downplay those he disputes. It is a masterclass in how not to make an encyclopedia, a warning against confusing speed with wisdom.

The technology landscape has shifted beneath our feet. For the past decade, "API-first" was the mantra that guided architectural decisions across the industry. Build robust APIs, enable integrations, create ecosystems, this was the playbook. But in 2025, as AI capabilities become increasingly sophisticated and accessible, CTOs and technology leaders face a new question: should we be AI-first instead? This isn't just a technical question. It's a strategic one that will define competitive positioning, development velocity, and product differentiation for years to come

Large language models often fail to distinguish between factual knowledge and personal belief, and are especially poor at recognizing when a belief is false. A peer-reviewed study argues that, unless LLMs can more reliably distinguish between facts and beliefs and say whether they are true or false, they will struggle to respond to inquiries reliably and are likely to continue to spread misinformation.

If Musk's recent responses on X are any indication, it would appear that Tesla's AI8 will be used by the CEO's other companies, and its applications would literally extend out of this world. Tesla's AI8 could extend beyond vehicles Musk's update came on the heels of his recent comments, where he revealed that Tesla was not just working on its AI5 and AI6 chips. The company is also designing AI7 and AI8. This comment caught a lot of attention, with some wondering why Tesla feels the need to design an AI8 chip when AI4 seems on track to be a good fit for autonomous driving.

Where the altruistic utopian designs of Buckminster Fuller provided an ideal for the first wave of Silicon Valley pioneers (a group including computer scientist and philosopher Jaron Lanier and Wired editor Kevin Kelly), later entrepreneurs have hewn closer to the principles of brilliant scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla, who believed, as he told Liberty magazine in 1935, that "we suffer the derangement of our civilization because we have not yet completely adjusted ourselves to the machine age."

Once a fringe curiosity, the deepfake economy has grown to become a $7.5 billion market, with some predictions projecting that it will hit $38.5 billion by 2032. Deepfakes are now everywhere, and the stock market is not the only part of the economy that is vulnerable to their impact. Those responsible for the creation of deepfakes are also targeting individual businesses, sometimes with the goal of extracting money and sometimes simply to cause damage.