AI

There’s still a standby line to get into the Senate Judiciary crime and counterterrorism subcommittee’s hearing about “Flock’s Nationwide AI Surveillance Network.” Chair Josh Hawley (R-MO) invited the CEOs of Flock and its peers, Axon, Motorola Solutions, and Verkada, but said they declined.

After launching its upgraded voice mode on desktop, OpenAI is bringing ChatGPT Voice’s agentic capabilities to its mobile app. With the update, you use your voice to ask ChatGPT to perform tasks across connected apps — like checking your email or summarizing a file in Google Drive — from your phone or CarPlay.

This builds on the feature introduced in May which allows users to build a custom video feed based on AI prompt descriptions of your interests, moods, or favorite topics. The expansion means you can create and save more than one custom feed to your home screen, with YouTube saying it’ll be available for users in the US on web, mobile, and TVs “soon.”

YouTube is expanding its likeness detection tool to include not just facial matches, but vocal matches too. At the company’s Made on YouTube event on Wednesday, executives teased the upcoming expansion that will allow creators to monitor potential synthetic soundalikes posted to the platform.

A new report from the Pew Research Center adds more data points to the thing everyone seems to know by now: data centers are pretty unpopular. Negative marks are up in every category Pew surveyed, with only 4% of respondents thinking that data centers “have a mostly good impact” across the board.

The AI agent can “manage your inbox, clean up your calendar, or talk through existing files/chat/tasks – all hands-free,” the company says. Some Tesla owners posted videos using Grok Bot to order Starbucks for them. The AI bot is only available to SuperGrok Heavy subscribers, who pay $300 a month for access. Bloomberg just reported that Grok Bot topped 400,000 weekly users roughly a month after launching.

Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to stop granting permits to data centers while the state finishes an audit of the facilities that want to connect to its electric grid. Last week, Abbott also told state regulators to “impose legal consequences” on data centers that don’t disclose information about water usage.

The two models come packaged with GPT-6 Astra’s advancements in professional work, accuracy, coding, computer use, and alignment, but with higher usage limits and lower costs, according to OpenAI.

In a post on X, Williams criticized people for sharing a fake AI video that depicts her father Robin Williams pushing conspiracy theories, and said the clip is “not even particularly convincing.” It’s the latest of several condemnations the Williams family has made against AI fakery of the late actor.

20 countries — including Canada, Germany, UAE and Singapore — endorsed stronger checks on advanced models. The European Commission also signed.

This episode of the BBC’s Towards Tomorrow explores whether humans and robots can coexist. It features an introduction from Isaac Asimov, in which he wonders whether the line between the two will become meaningless and “humanity itself will die out as humanity, and sort of melt into this machine culture.”

Reality Check is a simple game where you get 10 seconds per image, 60 seconds total, to identify which images are AI and which are real—it’s not easy. I went on pure gut instinct and only got 18 of 26 right.

First, it was the Gulf of Mexico. Then the Kennedy Center. Then Lake Ontario. And let’s not forget about the Department of Defense. Now the president is trying to leave his mark on artificial intelligence. The only real surprise is that American Intelligence wasn’t on his short list.

It’s been a poorly kept secret that the company was working towards building its own wet lab. It was hiring biologists and even bought startup Coefficient Bio in April. Now it’s confirmed to TechCrunch that a lab is up and operating in the Bay Area.

Norwood was on Piers Morgan Uncensored to discuss its AI slop movie, Misaligned. There’s a painful lag between questions and answers, and it routinely fails to answer the actual question. But the most surreal moment comes when Norwood glitches mid-answer and starts speaking Cantonese.

“Best-case scenario, the men handling this technology are completely incompetent. Worst-case scenario, we are all being led into a disaster.” Eventually, the woman was escorted from the building, but not before disrupting the company’s celebration of flooding the world with awful AI-generated fliers.