When a robotics pioneer who has spent decades building humanoid machines recommends that you stand at least nine feet away from any full-sized walking robot, you should probably listen. “My advice to people is to not come closer than 3 meters to a full-size walking robot,” Rodney Brooks writes in a technical essay titled “Why Today’s Humanoids Won’t Learn Dexterity” published on his blog last week. “Until someone comes up…

Scammers have been abusing unsecured cellular routers used in industrial settings to blast SMS-based phishing messages in campaigns that have been ongoing since 2023, researchers said. The routers, manufactured by China-based Milesight IoT Co., Ltd., are rugged Internet of Things devices that use cellular networks to connect traffic lights, electric power meters, and other sorts of remote industrial devices to central hubs. They come equipped with SIM cards that work…

Streaming is overtaking broadcast, cable, and satellite. But amid all the cord cutting lies a much smaller, yet intriguing, practice: going back to cable. Cord reviving is when cord cutters, or people who previously abandoned traditional TV services in favor of streaming, decide to go back to traditional pay-TV services, like cable. There’s no doubt that this happens far less frequently than cord cutting. But TiVo’s Q2 2025 Video Trends…

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced Sora 2, its second-generation video-synthesis AI model that can now generate videos in various styles with synchronized dialogue and sound effects, which is a first for the company. OpenAI also launched a new iOS social app that allows users to insert themselves into AI-generated videos through what OpenAI calls “cameos.” OpenAI showcased the new model in an AI-generated video that features a photorealistic version of OpenAI…

Google’s products and services have been flooded with AI features over the past couple of years, but smart home has been largely spared until now. The company’s plans to replace Assistant are moving forward with a big Google Home reset. We’ve been told over and over that generative AI will do incredible things when given enough data, and here’s the test. There’s a new Home app with Gemini intelligence throughout…

Amazon’s voice assistant is hanging on by a thread. And that thread is generative AI—or, in Amazon’s case, Alexa+. Amazon hasn’t had a problem getting people to buy cheap, Alexa-powered gadgets. However, the Alexa in millions of homes today doesn’t make Amazon money. It’s largely used for simple tasks unrelated to commerce, like setting timers and checking the weather. As a result, Amazon’s Devices business has reportedly been siphoning money,…

In the age of cloud computing, protections baked into chips from Intel, AMD, and others are essential for ensuring confidential data and sensitive operations can’t be viewed or manipulated by attackers who manage to compromise servers running inside a data center. In many cases, these protections—which work by storing certain data and processes inside encrypted enclaves known as TEEs (Trusted Execution Enclaves)—are essential for safeguarding secrets stored in the cloud…

Ever wonder why ChatGPT slows down during long conversations? The culprit is a fundamental mathematical challenge: Processing long sequences of text requires massive computational resources, even with the efficiency tricks that companies have already deployed. While US tech giants can afford to throw more hardware at the problem, Chinese AI company DeepSeek, which is cut off from a steady supply of some advanced AI chips by export restrictions, has extra…

With a new set of Microsoft 365 features, knowledge workers will be able to generate complex Word documents or Excel spreadsheets using only text prompts to Microsoft’s chatbot. Two distinct products were announced, each using different models and accessed from within different tools—though the similar names Microsoft chose make it confusing to parse what’s what. Driven by OpenAI’s GPT-5 large language model, Agent Mode is built into Word and Excel,…

On Monday, Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 4.5, a new AI language model the company calls its “most capable model to date,” with improved coding and computer use capabilities. The company also revealed Claude Code 2.0, a command-line AI agent for developers, and the Claude Agent SDK, which is a tool developers can use to build their own AI coding agents. Anthropic says it has witnessed Sonnet 4.5 working continuously on…