On a Monday afternoon in March, I watched a pixel-art avatar prowl the corridors of a virtual office campus looking for a buddy. With dark brown hair and stubbled chin, the sprite was a representation of me—an AI agent instructed to converse with other people’s agents to see if we might vibe in real life. It jumped into its first interaction: “I’m Joel, by the way.”Running the simulation were three London-based developers: Tomáš Hrdlička and siblings Joon Sang and Uri Lee. The thesis behind their project, Pixel Societies, is that personalized AI agents could help to match real people with…
The company isn’t exactly breaking new ground. The idea of a chatbot standing in for a human is fairly common. As is the idea of cashing in on it. For instance, Manhattan psychologist Becky Kennedy has built a parenting advice business that features a chatbot named Gigi trained on her…
An unknown technical problem caused a number of robotaxis owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu to freeze on Tuesday in the middle of traffic, trapping some passengers in the vehicles for more than an hour.In Wuhan, a city in central China where Baidu has deployed hundreds of its Apollo…
Luis von Ahn could have retired to a beach somewhere years ago. Best known as the CEO of the learning app Duolingo, von Ahn in the 2000s invented the captcha, those infuriating little online tests that force people to prove they’re not robots. But after selling his creation to Google…
Under a new state regulation, venture capital firms operating in California were supposed to submit demographic data about their portfolio companies, including the gender and race of startup founders they backed. But amid public criticism from some tech leaders, the California agency administering the new requirement suspended it just before…
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned Tuesday that it plans to begin attacking more than a dozen American companies across the Middle East on Wednesday in retaliation for the killing of Iranian citizens in the ongoing war with the US and Israel. The list of companies includes Apple, Google, IBM,…
OpenAI announced Thursday that it had acquired the online business talk show TBPN for an undisclosed sum. The move comes as OpenAI struggles with its public image, which has taken a significant hit in recent months.Since launching in 2024, TBPN has risen in popularity among Silicon Valley circles by offering…
The world’s top AI research conference, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems—better known as NeurIPS—became the latest organization this week to become embroiled in a growing clash between geopolitics and global scientific collaboration. The conference’s organizers announced and then quickly reversed controversial new restrictions for international participants after Chinese…
Cursor announced Thursday the launch of Cursor 3, a new product interface that allows users to spin up AI coding agents to complete tasks on their behalf. The product, which was developed under the code name Glass, is Cursor’s response to agentic coding tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s…
In a recent experiment, researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz asked Google’s artificial intelligence model Gemini 3 to help clear up space on a computer system. This involved deleting a bunch of stuff—including a smaller AI model stored on the machine.But Gemini did not want to see the…
Apple is allergic to nostalgia. In 2008, when the Macintosh was about to turn 25, I mentioned it to Steve Jobs and he instantly shut down the discussion. “If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed,” he told me icily. “You have to look forward.” Now that Apple’s…
This week on Uncanny Valley, hosts Brian Barrett and Zoë Schiffer discuss the highlights from Nvidia’s annual developer conference, and why Tesla recently got in trouble with some of its most loyal fans online. Plus, Meta’s initial decision to shut down Horizon Worlds VR on the Quest headset signals the…
Kalshi has been temporarily banned in Nevada, marking the latest escalation in the widening regulatory war over prediction markets. The First Judicial District Court of Nevada issued a 14-day restraining order, effective immediately, barring the company from “offering a derivatives exchange and prediction market which offers event-based contracts relating to…
Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour posted a video on Wednesday of six men decked out in business casual doing push-ups on the sidewalk. “This is how Kalshi Q1 board meeting ended,” he wrote on X. The board members are laughing and smiling in the video after their impromptu cardio session, and…
In case you missed Monday’s NYT Mini, you can find the answers here:How to Play the NYT MiniThe NYT Mini is a quick and dirty version of the newspaper’s larger and long-running crossword. Most days, there are between three and five clues in each direction on a five by five…
Spotlight
Nvidia will spend $26 billion over the next five years to build…
I’ve spent the past few days asking AI companies to convince me…
Mick Mulvaney wants to be clear: He really likes gambling. “You’re talking…
“Pursuant to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, apps…
