Author: News Room
There’s a particular cruelty to Zhou’s situation that I keep coming back to. The man spent his working days talking to AI — testing it, correcting it, making it smarter — and then watched that same technology hand his employer the excuse to show him the door. His company, a Hangzhou tech firm, replaced him with the large language models he was paid to supervise, offered him a lesser role with a 40% salary cut, and terminated his contract when he refused to swallow it. A court just told them that it was illegal twice. What US companies are doing…
These three Prime Video shows have one thing in common. They are all brilliant, criminally overlooked, and none of them got the audience they deserved. A broken spy who processes trauma through folk songs. A woman who survives a car crash and can’t decide if she’s gifted or unraveling. And a small Ohio town sitting on top of a machine that quietly warps everything around it. Prime Video built something quietly remarkable with all three, and then apparently forgot to tell anyone, but they are still worth a watch. We also have guides to the best new movies to stream, the best…
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has formally clarified how artificial intelligence (AI) fits into Oscar eligibility, stating that AI cannot receive awards for acting or writing. The updated rules, included in the 99th Academy Awards rulebook, reinforce that human contribution remains central to recognition in key creative categories. Human Performance and Authorship Take Priority Under the revised guidelines, only performances carried out by humans can be considered for acting awards. The rule specifies that roles must be credited in the film’s official billing and “demonstrably performed by humans with their consent.” This means that AI-generated or synthetic…
This weekend’s movie recommendation sits somewhere between the quiet and the unbearable. A grief-stricken man digs through ancient earth looking for a door that shouldn’t exist. Two brothers make one bad call that unravels everything. And a man who can’t talk about his grief ends up performing it on a stage instead. Three films, very different in tone, but all circling the same idea – what happens when the thing you’re reaching for pulls you somewhere you can’t come back from? We also have guides to the best new movies to stream, the best movies on Netflix, the best movies…
My inbox is chaos on most days. It’s filled with everything — meeting invites, marketing pitches, product PR, important updates, and a constant stream of things that all feel urgent in the moment. And when it piles up like that, it gets overwhelming fast. I’ll be honest, there are days when I avoid opening emails altogether because it feels like too much to process, and there’s always that nagging worry that I might miss something important buried in the noise. That’s exactly where Gemini has changed things for me. Having it built into my inbox feels like a safety net…
A new study has found that access to and understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) tools are increasingly concentrated among wealthier and more educated individuals, raising concerns about a widening digital divide. The research, based on data from more than 10,000 adults in the United States, shows that people with higher income and education levels are significantly more likely to be aware of, familiar with, and actively use AI technologies. Uneven Awareness And Usage Driving A New Gap The study highlights a clear pattern: individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are less likely to recognize where AI is being used or understand…
Netflix has never been a friend of the multiplex. For most of its existence as a film studio, the streamer has treated theaters as a reluctant pit stop — a brief, begrudging detour before content lands where it was always meant to: on your couch. That’s starting to change, and the company is making the shift in the most attention-grabbing way possible. The streamer announced Friday that Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew will get a proper wide theatrical release on February 12, 2026, with a 45-day exclusivity window before it hits the platform on April 2. For a company that has…
SpaceX has its own ambitious plans for AI data centers in space, while Microsoft has explored the idea by sinking them underwater. However, building AI data centers is expensive and power-intensive. This is why a UK firm wants to build one using street lamp posts in Nigeria, and it has already signed a deal to do it. Warwickshire-based Conflow Power Group has agreed with Nigeria’s Katsina State Government to deploy 50,000 solar-powered smart lamp posts called iLamps across the state (via BBC). Each unit runs on a cylindrical solar panel and battery, powering a low-energy Nvidia chip that draws just…
If you’ve been dreaming of building your own app without writing a single line of code, vibe coding probably sounds like your golden ticket. You describe what you want, AI builds it, and you ship it. However, a new report from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Technology Policy Council says the picture is a lot messier than that. The ACM TechBrief, co-authored by Simson Garfinkel, Chief Scientist at BasisTech, doesn’t dismiss the appeal. Vibe coding apps like Loveable and Google’s Firebase Studio opens up software development to people with no programming background. It also frees experienced developers from repetitive, low-creativity…
Writing an email is already one of the more lifeless parts of modern work, so of course the tech industry decided to automate it. AI was meant to ease workloads by managing “grunt” work—dealing repetitive junk, trimming down inbox overload, and giving people their time back. It really sounded like the right idea. But in reality, we are nowhere close to removing the misery of email. The kind of email you’re already sick of seeing AI lowers the effort required to produce corporate-sounding language. That means every “just following up,” every “circling back,” every “gentle reminder,” and every “happy to…