Shortly after Google announced its new universal commerce protocol for AI-powered sales agents, a consumer economy watchdog sounded the alarm. In a post now viral on X Viewed nearly 400,000 times, Lindsay Owens wrote on Sunday: “Big/bad news for consumers. Google today announced how it plans to integrate shopping into its AI offerings, including search…
A study by UC Riverside researchers offers a practical solution to one of artificial intelligence’s toughest challenges by enabling AI systems to reason more like humans, without requiring new training data beyond testing questions. In a preprint paper entitled “Test-Time Matching: Unlocking Compositional Reasoning in Multimodal Models”, assistant professor Yinglun Zhu and students introduce a…
The California Attorney General on Wednesday announced an investigation into non-consensual sexually explicit material produced using Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by xAI. The investigation into the Elon Musk-owned company comes amid a broader global backlash against deepfake images that spread on X. Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office cited reports that users asked Grok…
Five9 announced its decision to collaborate with Google Cloud for common customer experience solutions. This follows a series of announcements from the contact center giant earlier this week focused on improving customer experience with AI services. Their latest partnership will see both providers collaborate towards an effective customer solution, enabling enterprise customers to improve their…
Right now, it would seem safe to say that AI assistants are here to stay. Sure, they have their quirks, but they can provide a substantial productivity boost for certain tasks. What is less certain is how we will use these tools in the future. Web interfaces don’t capture the full potential of these assistants,…
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman plans to visit India in mid-February, his first visit to the country in nearly a year, TechCrunch has learned. The visit comes as New Delhi prepares to host a major AI summit that is expected to attract top executives from Meta, Google and Anthropic. India hosts its first major AI event:…
Six months into its big AI turnaround, Meta estimates that 2026 will be the year it begins to reap the rewards. The tech giant has spent billions upon billions on meta-superintelligence labs, poaching top talent from the likes of OpenAI, Apple and more in hopes of revitalizing its failing AI initiatives. The company hopes to…
The AI arms race is expected to continue well beyond 2026. Spending on artificial intelligence (AI) is not expected to slow down anytime soon, much less in 2026. AI hyperscalers have all informed investors that they expect data center spending to increase in 2026. As a result, several companies currently look promising. I think these…
AI chatbots can answer questions and summarize documents, but they are still designed for one user at a time. Now a new startup called Humans& is betting that coordination, not conversation, is the next major frontier in artificial intelligence. Founded by alumni of Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI and Google DeepMind, the three-month-old company just raised…
When artificial intelligence emerged as a marketing tool, I felt threatened. Not by replacement, but by the idea that others might think that AI could replace the basic work we do as communicators. The more I watched professionals rely on AI without critical thought, the clearer it became: artificial intelligence is exactly what the name…