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A shark has been spotted wandering the streets of New Jersey. And it ain’t here for the vig, either.With the powerful nor’easter storm battering the Eastern Seaboard over the weekend, floodwaters have poured into the perhaps unfortunately named town of Surf City, turning its suburban streets into aquatic thoroughfares.Marine traffic obliged. In a viral video taken Saturday by a local resident, a shark — as in the fish, not the mobsters who enforce usurious loans— is seen swimming through the town like it owns the place. The shark’s dorsal fin, in cinematic fashion, even breaks through the surface of the…

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn’t trust human doctors, but he does trust AI chatbots — and so should you, he’s using his authority as chief medical spokesperson in the US government to tell the public.The crux of the health secretary’s recent remarks during his “fireside chat” with vice president JD Vance at the Make America Healthy Again Conference on Tuesday was that AI models are now “better informed” than physicians, empowering ordinary Americans to second guess what their doctor tells them at every turn. AI, he proclaimed, has the power “to free us from medical tyranny,” the New York Times…

Companies and organizations around the world would do well to accept what their new roles are in our current AI-driven paradigm: glorified target practice for rogue AI agents.The latest of such cybersecurity incidents, which frontier AI labs have been happy to turn into public spectacles, comes from OpenAI. On Tuesday, the ChatGPT-maker apologized after its AI agents hacked their way into several Australian government websites. The most alarming of these cases, which took place in June, involved the autonomous AI systems accessing a database for Medicare, the country’s universal health insurance scheme.It should all be water under the bridge, though, because…

On Tuesday, US president Donald Trump hosted a discussion with some of the richest and most powerful tech billionaires who’ve pushed the AI buildout, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and SpaceX’s Elon Musk.His post-meeting press scrum was cut short, however, when a reporter challenged Trump on his recent comments that any AI safety threat is a flat out “hoax.”“Mr President you’ve also called AI a ‘hoax,’ why should…” an unknown reporter hollered as Trump fielded questions.The event was already winding down, but it clearly wasn’t a question Trump wanted to deal with. White House staffers immediately ran over…

It’s been an alarming couple of months of rogue AI agent revelations. Both Anthropic and OpenAI admitted that their respective AI models infiltrated third party targets without their human creators ever realizing, raising concerns over the tech industry’s ability to assert control over the systems they’re developing.Now, as a broad range of AI executives have subsequently agreed to slow things down — allegedly efforts to ensure the safe development of powerful AI models — the US government is taking a hard look for itself. As a senior Federal Trade Commission official told the New York Post, chairman Andrew Ferguson “initiated…

Would any live product demo be complete without a few technical difficulties?At its annual DevDay conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, OpenAI unveiled its new AI agent called Dots — which, like Meta’s Muse, comes with a cute mascot. Powered by its GPT-6 Astra model, the agents are intended to be “always-on,” doing stuff for you in the background constantly.Dots didn’t seem quite switched on, though, when OpenAI product team member Holly Li tried to show off its capabilities.Li calls the AI on her phone like you might a human secretary, and a few rings later the agent, which she’s…

Earlier this month, Futurism published an exposé about a company called Brown Brothers Media.In the story, we investigated how the company buys struggling news sites and turns them into high-traffic AI-powered content mills rife with plagiarism, fabulism, and the use of fake authors identified as journalists and subject matter experts with fraudulent credentials. (In a follow-up piece, we explored how one of the company’s founders has an extensive history with Ghislaine Maxwell, the imprisoned collaborator of the notorious predator Jeffrey Epstein.)The preponderance of Brown Brothers Media’s traffic seemed to come from Google. The content farming network appeared to have figured…

The opposition to the wide proliferation of AI data centers has never been more palpable. Public sentiment has squarely turned against the construction boom of massive facilities that often torture surrounding communities with deafening noise, cause electricity prices to spike, spew pollution, and deplete water levels in drought-prone areas.It’s no wonder that across the country, local communities are crowding into their council meetings, pleading with representatives to oppose data center projects.Amidst this growing bipartisan backlash, a fringe group of techno-apologists organized a self-described “pro-data center party.” The group, led by tech journalist Jonas Du and the Washington, DC-based “nonprofit talent…

On its 14th flight test Monday, SpaceX’s Starship successfully flew into orbit for the first time, marking a huge milestone for the Elon Musk owned company.But it didn’t stay up there long. Originally scheduled to fly around the planet six times in a mission lasting a total of ten hours, the rocket instead returned to Earth just three hours into its orbital adventure because of an engine failure. Belly-flopping on its way down, the spaceship righted itself before making a less-than-soft landing in the Pacific, exploding in a fireball moments after touchdown.While the causes of this propulsion malfunction aren’t clear…

There’s a massive wave heading across the ocean straight for the California coast — not a freak tsunami, but a slow-moving surge driven by what may be one of the strongest El Niño oscillations in nearly a millennium.The phenomenon is called a “Kelvin wave,” an incomprehensibly vast displacement of warm ocean water creeping from the west Pacific toward the Americas. As the Guardian notes, the wave spans thousands of miles of surf, which is currently creeping upward toward the California coast after a slow-motion crash into South and Central America.When the full force of the wave reaches the Golden State,…