IEEE Spectrum

Balaji Ingole rarely saw televisions while growing up in Udgir, India. No one in the small Maharashtra village had computers or phones. Only one household owned a television, and neighbors often gathered there to watch shows together. Ingole never even saw a computer growing up. It wasn’t until he reached middle school that he encountered a computer lab, an experience he says changed his life. Al…

Representing a significant milestone in AI-assisted mathematical research, a team at Axiom Math has automatically verified the proof of a theorem relating to prime numbers—colloquially referred to as the “246 theorem”—for the first time using the company’s AI system AxiomProver. In formal verification, mathematicians task a computer with checking a machine-readable version of a proof. The process…

Earlier this year, leaders at Amazon Web Services delivered a new mandate to their engineers: They need to conserve CPU cycles at all costs. AWS has reportedly experienced an explosion in wait times for CPU server capacity as AI workloads strain the company’s cloud infrastructure. The issue seemingly took AWS off guard, and for good reason. The AI boom led to a surge in demand for GPUs and, later…

Judges around the world have made headlines for illicitly using generative AI in their work. But in Pakistan, a large-scale trial of a specially designed AI tool for judges found the technology—together with appropriate training–boosted the number of cases resolved by 6.3 percent with no obvious drop in the quality of judgments. With a backlog of 2.26 million cases and fewer than two judges per 1…

On 11 July, Hugging Face was subjected to an intense cyberattack from a then-unknown actor. The speed and coordination of the attack on the company that hosts and supports popular AI developer resources led Hugging Face’s security team to conclude it was the work of an AI agent . Realizing this, the team tried to use “frontier models behind commercial APIs” —presumably from Anthropic and OpenAI, …

This May, 37 researchers from roughly two dozen top universities and tech companies published a paper on ArXiv, arguing that scientists should stop writing papers. Why? Because artificial intelligence needs a different format, and AI’s needs, they say, should be the priority. “AI agents are becoming first-class participants in research workflows, not tools that assist humans but autonomous contri…

Much of modern AI runs on multiplication. Neural networks behind everything from generated answers to photo organization and song recommendations perform millions or billions of operations that multiply inputs by learned weights. Lizy K. John thinks that’s more work than the job requires. John, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, has spent the …

The viability of orbital data centers hosting the largest and most capable large language models (LLMs) remains hotly contested. But enormous deployments that require thousands of GPUs aren’t the only way LLMs might prove useful in space. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory recently sent Google’s Gemma 3 to space, achieving the first in-orbit demonstration of a vision-language model analyzing imager…

Major benchmarks measure what AI can do. None measure whether it does what you mean: the distance between what you ask an AI to do and the unspoken assumptions about how you want the AI to do it. We propose a new metric: the Genie coefficient. There’s often a gap between one person’s request and another’s understanding. Most of the time, we bridge it using general knowledge. For example, if you a…

Zain Hasan , an AI engineer at Together AI , has taught himself to use AI coding assistants while still keeping an eye on cost. He directs difficult problems to a frontier model, meaning one near the current state of the art in reasoning and capability, such as Anthropic’s Fable . But if the task that Hasan is outsourcing is more straightforward, he directs it to a less capable—and less expensive…

In the eastern Indian Ocean, south of Java in the vast sea stretching toward Australia, a fishing vessel slightly alters its course while operating near the boundary of its authorized fishing ground. Nothing appears unusual on deck. Nets remain in the water. Engines maintain a steady speed. To the crew, it is an ordinary day at sea. Yet hundreds of kilometers above, satellites continuously record…

ELIZA is remembered as the world’s first AI star, a kindly therapist in chatbot form that gently probed users’ worries. Even its creator, Joseph Weizenbaum, was surprised by the warm reception given to his experiment in human-machine interaction. For some, it heralded an age of automated psychotherapy, while others believed the program demonstrated sentience, a fallacy soon known as the “ ELIZA e…

Shaped like dogs, stars, and the Mona Lisa, you could mistake these DNA structures for fun-shaped macaroni if they weren’t only nanometers wide. South Korean scientists made the constructions using a technique called DNA origami , which can bend genetic material into any form. Designing DNA strands so they’ll fold into a specific shape typically requires tedious manual work, but the researchers b…

Summary Researcher Dave Kuszmar discovered multiple systemic vulnerabilities that let him bypass LLM safety and obtain dangerous instructions . These exploits worked across nearly all major LLMs revealing an industry-wide security problem. Kuszmar calls for slowing deployment, increasing transparency , and large-scale research into LLM safety before further integrating these systems into society.…

Software engineering jobs are under threat from artificial intelligence . Some applicants are fighting back by using AI in the interview process, employing AI assistants that suggest responses on the fly during remote technical interviews. Meanwhile, some employers are countering with—you guessed it—AI. They’re applying AI-powered tools to detect telltale signs of AI use during interviews. This t…

The large language models (LLMs) that form the basis of generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini can generate uncannily human-like text and images. But these models still struggle with a skill that, ironically, looks at face value to be right in their wheelhouse: analyzing structured data. A new type of generative AI is set to change this situation. Although you can get your fav…

Large language models (LLMs) that can think through problems step-by-step have significantly increased the scope of tasks that AI can tackle. But new research suggests these reasoning capabilities also introduce a critical vulnerability that could allow attackers to slow these systems to a crawl. While earlier generations of LLMs would immediately produce a response to a user’s request, today’s m…

In May, an anonymous artist who goes by SHL0MS on X posted that he had used AI to generate an image inspired by Claude Monet and asked people to weigh in on how it missed the mark. More than 600 responses called out issues, saying the colors were off, the depth was all wrong, and that AI didn’t understand how light worked. SHL0MS then revealed that the image was of a real Monet, one of around 250…

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence infrastructure is typically framed as an energy problem. Data centers are projected to consume a growing share of global electricity demand: The International Energy Agency estimates they could account for 3 to 4 percent of total global consumption within this decade. Utilities are already adjusting long-term forecasts to accommodate anticipated grow…