If anybody is thinking of making an AI version of the Catholic pope, please don’t. That’s the message from the newly-minted Holy Father himself, Pope Leo XIV, who emphatically slapped down the idea of a digital simulacra masquerading as himself. “Someone recently asked authorization to create an artificial me so that anybody could sign on

Morale among employees at Microsoft is circling the drain, as the company has been roiled by constant rounds of layoffs affecting thousands of workers. Some say they’ve noticed a major culture shift this year, with many suffering from a constant fear of being sacked — or replaced by AI as the company embraces the tech. Meanwhile,

OpenAI researchers tried to train the company’s AI to stop “scheming” — a term the company defines as meaning “when an AI behaves one way on the surface while hiding its true goals” — but their efforts backfired in an ominous way. In reality, the team found, they were unintentionally teaching the AI how to more effectively

Mark Zuckerberg’s MetaConnect 2025 keynote on Wednesday quickly turned into a humiliating experience. The company’s demos of its new artificial intelligence-powered smart glasses failed repeatedly, causing Zuckerberg to stammer his way through awkward silences. “This is, uh… it happens,” the CEO stammered after his smart glasses refused to accept a WhatsApp video call on stage.

The world’s first AI government official is going about as well as anyone could expect. Yesterday, the virtual assistant “Diella” made its “inaugural address” to the Albanian parliament. Maybe unsurprisingly, the software — which had been appointed Minister for Public Procurements last week by prime minister Edi Rama — was met with fury by certain

No one could accuse the European Space Agency and its various contractors of moving swiftly when it comes to the development of reusable rockets. However, it appears that Europe is finally making some credible progress. This week, the France-based ArianeGroup aerospace company announced that it had completed the integration of the Themis vehicle, a prototype

The situation with the fiscal year 2026 budget for the United States is, to put it politely, kind of a mess. The White House proposed a budget earlier this year with significant cuts for a number of agencies, including NASA. In the months since then, through the appropriations process, both the House and Senate have

Some time soon, perhaps next year, SpaceX will attempt to fly one of its enormous Starship rockets from low-Earth orbit back to its launch pad in South Texas. A successful return and catch at the launch tower would demonstrate a key capability underpinning Elon Musk’s hopes for a fully reusable rocket. In order for this

As businesses around the world have shifted their digital infrastructure over the last decade from self-hosted servers to the cloud, they’ve benefitted from the standardized, built-in security features of major cloud providers like Microsoft. But with so much riding on these systems, there can be potentially disastrous consequences at a massive scale if something goes

Two things about the Specialized Turbo Vado SL 2 6.0 Carbon are hard to fathom: One is how light and lithe it feels as an e-bike, even with the battery off; the other is how hard it is to recite its full name when other riders ask you about the bike at stop lights and