Singularity Hub

09/12/2025

It took months of effort to understand what the AI was doing. It turned out that the machine had used a counterintuitive trick probably using some esoteric theoretical principles that Russian physicists had identified decades ago.

“It takes a lot to think this far outside of the accepted solution,” Adhikari said. “We really needed the AI.”

Artificial intelligence software is designing novel experimental protocols that improve upon the work of human physicists, although the humans are still “doing a lot of baby-sitting.”

09/11/2025

Bigger than SpaceX, Tiktok's parent company ByteDance, and even public giants like Palantir.

Is it a bubble? If so, is that necessarily a bad thing?

https://www.wired.com/story/openai-valuation-500-billion-skepticism/

09/10/2025

The most widely cited statistic from a new MIT report has been deeply misunderstood. While headlines trumpet that '95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing,' the report actually reveals something far more remarkable: the fastest and most successful enterprise technology adoption in corporate history is happening right under executives’ noses.

The MIT researchers discovered what they call a “shadow AI economy” where workers use personal ChatGPT accounts, Claude subscriptions and other consumer tools to handle significant portions of their jobs.

Corporate systems get described as “brittle, over engineered, or misaligned with actual workflows,” while consumer AI tools win praise for “flexibility, familiarity, and immediate utility.”

https://venturebeat.com/ai/mit-report-misunderstood-shadow-ai-economy-booms-while-headlines-cry-failure/

09/09/2025

Despite the major push to adopt AI tools in the corporate world, fewer than one in ten AI pilot programs have generated real revenue gains. The rest are having no impact on a company’s bottom line.

Is the tech the problem, or do most companies just not know how to use them to their full potential?

https://gizmodo.com/the-ai-report-thats-spooking-wall-street-2000645518

09/08/2025

In 2018, police in California announced they’d caught the Golden State Killer, a man who had eluded capture for decades. They did it by uploading crime-scene DNA to websites like FamilyTreeDNA, where genealogy hobbyists share genetic profiles to find relatives and explore ancestry. Once the police had “matches” to a few relatives of the killer, they built a large family tree from which they plucked the likely suspect.

Scholars of big data have termed this phenomenon 'tyranny of the minority.' One person’s voluntary disclosure can end up exposing the same information about many others.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/22/1122315/i-gave-police-access-to-my-dna/

09/07/2025

Scientists are gearing up for a worldwide race to be the first to spot Planet Nine. Amir Siraj, a graduate student in astrophysics at Princeton University, is leading a team developing an improved technique to look for more evidence, but may have instead found another lost world.

The newly proposed planet, assuming it exists, is predicted to be somewhere between Mercury and Earth in scale, which would likely make it detectable within the next few years.

https://www.404media.co/a-warp-in-our-solar-system-might-be-an-undiscovered-world-planet-y/

09/06/2025

Analysts say this could be the start of a massive effort to help meet the continent’s power demands with renewable energy instead of fossil fuels.

Energy-starved countries on the continent have reluctantly turned to coal and gas for decades. Cheap Chinese solar panels are now finally changing the calculus.

https://www.wired.com/story/african-imports-of-chinese-solar-panels-increase/

09/05/2025

As it tries to unseat Google, OpenAI is relying on search data from an unlikely source: Google. OpenAI has been using Google search results scraped from the web to help power ChatGPT responses, according to two people with knowledge of it.

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-challenging-google-using-search-data

09/04/2025

In a British survey of full-time undergraduates from December, 92% reported using AI in some fashion. These numbers will only rise in the year ahead.

Now professors face their own temptations from AI, which can enable them to get more work done, and faster, just as it does for students. Some admit to using AI-generated recommendation letters and course syllabi.

Is a total redesign of classroom practice the only way out? And if so, who has the time to?

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/08/ai-college-class-of-2026/683901/

09/03/2025

Welcome to the rapidly shifting world of advertising in the era of generative A.I.

Scott Jacqmein, a 52-year-old actor in Dallas, fields one or two texts a week from acquaintances and friends who are pretty sure they have seen him pitching a peculiar range of businesses on TikTok. Mr. Jacqmein’s likeness is one of more than a dozen that TikTok advertisers can choose from to promote their products, but the real people whose likeness they're using do not receive royalties.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/17/business/tiktok-ai-avatars.html

09/02/2025

Waymo's taking on the Big Apple. Is it up for the challenge?

Waymo has been granted a permit to test its autonomous vehicles in New York City, the first such approval granted by the city. The company told TechCrunch it plans to start testing “immediately.”

The timeline: https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/22/waymo-approved-to-start-autonomous-vehicle-testing-in-new-york-city/

09/01/2025

The most transparent estimate yet from a Big Tech company with a popular AI product.

In total, the median prompt—one that falls in the middle of the range of energy demand—consumes 0.24 watt-hours of electricity, the equivalent of running a standard microwave for about one second. The company also provided average estimates for the water consumption and carbon emissions associated with a text prompt to Gemini.

source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/21/1122288/google-gemini-ai-energy/