These Robots Are Making Meals for a Nonprofit in San Francisco’s Tenderloin

These potato-salad-slinging AI chefs aren’t taking anyone’s jobs. Not yet, anyway. They’re just here as volunteers. Project Open Handa nonprofit founded in 1985 by local grandmother and HIV-awareness advocate Ruth Brinkerprepares and packages meals to meet the diverse nutritional requirements of people who need them. The effort began in response to the AIDS crisis, but … Read more

Even If You Hate AI, You Will Use Google AI Search

It’s been 17 years since I sat in on the iconic weekly search quality meeting in the Ouagadougou conference room at Google’s Mountain View campus. That Thursday morning, around three dozen engineers, product managers, and executives sat at a table or sprawled on the floor to discuss why certain search queries or categories didn’t yield … Read more

The Gulf’s AI Boom Has an Undersea Cable Problem

The Gulf’s AI The ambitions depend on something surprisingly fragile: a handful of undersea cables running through some of the world’s most volatile waterways. Countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE have spent billions building AI infrastructure, attracting hyperscalers and positioning themselves as future exporters of compute capacity. But as the region shifts from oil … Read more

Can OpenAI’s ‘Master of Disaster’ Fix AI’s Reputation Crisis?

Three months ago, OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman told me his concerns about a mounting public relations crisis facing artificial intelligence companies: Despite the popularity of tools like ChatGPT, an increasingly large share of the population said they viewed AI negatively. Since then, the backlash has only intensified. College commencement speakers are now getting booed for … Read more

Meta Is in Crisis, Google Search’s Makeover, and AI Gets Booed by Graduates

Leah FeigerYes, definitely. Brian Barrett: Delightful. OpenClaw, a little agent that can just run autonomously, has access to all your stuff. Gemini Spark is Google’s answer to OpenClaw. It’s the same sort of autonomous assistant that can do all the things, but because it’s Google, it has access to everything that you do on Google … Read more

I Cloned Myself With Gemini’s AI Avatar Tool. The Result Was Unnervingly Me

It’s a beautiful, balmy afternoon at Dolores Park in San Francisco, and I’m singing a birthday song to a prehistoric dinosaur. A cupcake with a pink candle magically appears in my empty hand as I finish my serenade. When I blow out the flame, a calm look of contentment washes over the CGI-esque creature. While … Read more

SpaceX Listed Grok’s ‘Spicy’ Mode as a Risk in Its IPO Filing

SpaceX warned investors that AI features such as Grok’s “Spicy” and “Unhinged” modes, which allow the chatbot to generate raunchy image or voice responses with fewer safety filters, could expose the company to regulatory scrutiny and reputational damages, according to a filing submitted Wednesday as part of the company’s planned initial public offering. As of … Read more

Google Search Goes Agentic—and Doesn’t Need You Anymore

AI agents are everywhere. Every briefing I’ve attended for software companies over the past year has involved some mention of agents—using generative AI tools to automate digital tasks. Despite breakout moments at the start of 2026, like the plucky OpenClaw agent that early adopters used to manage their online life, most people are not yet … Read more

Demis Hassabis Thinks AI Job Cuts Are Dumb

Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, is keen to talk about the coding skills of his company’s newest model, Gemini 3.5 Flash. The model has been trained to perform complex agentic coding tasks: translate large code bases from one language to another; find and fix bugs lurking deep in knotty code; and even write … Read more