Using AI

Watch almost any promotional clip for a humanoid robot and one shot keeps turning up: a neat stack of folded laundry. LG Electronics showed off the trick early this year, and a run of home-humanoid makers soon followed — Figure AI, Sunday Robotics, 1X, Weave Robotics. Tesla got there first, releasing footage of its Optimus robot straightening a shirt back in January 2024. It looks a little odd, spending tens of millions of dollars to build a robot and then showing it off by folding shirts and trousers. There's a reason, though. What comes easily to human hands is brutal for a machine. A piece of laundry is crumpled differently every time, its front and back jumbled, and its shape shifts the instant you touch it. ...

For years the worry in classrooms was plagiarism. Now it's almost the reverse: proving that a person, not a machine, did the writing. Schools and publishers have reached for a new class of software — AI detectors — that promise to spot text made by tools like ChatGPT. The catch is that these programs are shaky, their own makers admit it, and people keep leaning on them anyway. Start with where this came from. Anti-plagiarism software predates ChatGPT by a long stretch. Programs such as Turnitin check a submission against a huge library of web pages, journal articles and past work, hunting for sentences and phrases that line up too neatly. Turnitin even hands back a percentage meant to show how much of a student's text matches other sources. That figure was always slippery — a high score could mean deliberate copying or an innocent coincidence — and the false alarms pushed some teachers to quietly drop it. ...

When the internet stutters at home, most of us reach over and power-cycle the router. The technology LG Uplus said it demonstrated on the 9th hands that chore to the machine instead. Before anyone notices a slowdown, AI inside the router reads the situation and quietly sets it right. The core idea is self-healing. By the company's account, the demonstration confirmed the feasibility of an intelligent home network in which AI spots warning signs and responds while a customer is still one step away from feeling any drop in quality. The work was carried out on Wi-Fi 8, the next-generation wireless standard. ...

GitHub pushed out another weekly batch of Copilot changes, and they land in three places at once: the desktop app, the command-line tool, and VS Code, now at version 1.132. Read through the list and a single theme keeps surfacing. Most of these additions exist so you can step sideways — ask something unrelated, open a second line of work — and come back to your main task with its context intact. ...

Apple's new voice assistant, Siri AI, arrived as a public beta last month; the full debut comes this fall. Hands-on write-ups are already piling up in overseas communities, and first impressions run mostly warm. Two things in particular draw praise: digging up information stored on your device — something the old Siri couldn't do — and making sense of whatever is on your screen right now. What people keep circling back to, though, isn't a spot on some leaderboard. The story isn't that Siri finally out-muscled a do-everything chatbot like ChatGPT. It's that Siri's whole job as a voice assistant has shifted. That shift is deliberate on Apple's part. Rather than raise Siri as a general-purpose AI going toe to toe with ChatGPT, the company shaped it into a personal assistant that knows your iPhone better than anything else does. Bloomberg drew the same line, summing the two up this way: "ChatGPT is strong in conversation and productivity; Siri AI is strong in device control and understanding personal context." Reviews across the press and on Reddit settle in roughly the same place. ...

Alibaba's Qwen research group has a new flagship, and it is not chasing better conversation. Overnight, the team pulled the wraps off Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model that reads and generates across text and images. The pitch aims straight at the corner of the market everyone is fighting over right now: models that can write software on their own and grind through enterprise work that unfolds over days, not seconds. ...

Generative AI is rewriting the grammar of cyberattacks. The work of preparing and launching one gets faster, while the cost of pulling it off keeps dropping. A security seminar that Korea EDS held for employees of the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA) took that shift head-on. Korea EDS — a company specializing in digital business platform services, led by chief executive Kim Hyung-won — said on the 2nd that it had run a seminar titled "Cyber Threats in the AI Era and Information Security Response Strategy" for KOTRA staff. KOTRA hosted the event; Korea EDS, which handles KOTRA's integrated operations project, ran it on the ground. The aim was twofold: to share the attack types growing more sophisticated as generative AI spreads, and to lift employees' own ability to stand up to them. ...

A rap track called "Rubberz" has muscled its way to No. 58 on Billboard's Hot 100. Its performer, Fenix Flexin — known until now as half of the Los Angeles duo Shoreline Mafia — is enjoying his first real solo hit. There's just one snag. A lot of listeners think a machine made it. Fenix denies that. He also hasn't done much to put the question to rest, and the doubt has only grown. The Verge, after digging in, landed on a careful line: no one can say with total certainty, but the weight of the evidence leans toward yes. What makes the case worth your time isn't the gossip. It's the checklist. Nearly every red flag people raise about "Rubberz" doubles as a lesson in how to catch AI-made music. Here is what to listen and look for. ...

OpenAI has quietly rolled out a new set of AI models — and it did so in front of regulators first. The name is "Astra." Reportedly, it's a next-generation lineup built to chew through long, demanding tasks efficiently, and the company has entered the final stretch before a formal launch. The account comes from the tech outlet The Information, which reported it on July 31 (local time). Per that report, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman traveled to Washington, D.C., and gave a closed-door demo of a few of Astra's headline features to leading policymakers and officials from regulatory bodies. ...

Apple is nudging toward a future where leaning on its AI could cost you extra. On the company's earnings call Thursday, CEO Tim Cook floated the idea that the heaviest users of Apple Intelligence, plus the revamped Siri, might pay to raise their limits — most likely through iCloud Plus. Cook kept the wording loose but the intent was easy to read. He said he expects people to reach for Apple Intelligence and a new Siri "a lot," then added that "we will have some kind of upgrade possibilities on iCloud Plus where people can buy up the stack." Translated: if you want more AI, there may be a paid rung to climb. ...