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In the San Diego suburb of Carlsbad, a new plant to desalinate seawater is almost ready. For about a billion dollars, it will produce 7 percent of the area’s drinking water, courtesy of the Pacific Ocean. But in these times of record drought, two Texas entrepreneurs are advocating another solution: Instead of pulling fresh water out of the sea, they want to pull it out of the air. The machine they’re developing at Trinity University in San Antonio, called an atmospheric water generator, is still in its pilot phrase. But to hear Moses West tell it, if the climate conditions are right, the AWG has the potential to end drought.

West, who’s testing the machine along with business partner John Vollmer, calls himself “a water farmer.” He explains that there are three potential sources of human drinking water: groundwater, rivers and gas. Thanks to NASA’s GRACE satellite system, which measures the abundance and quality of aquifers, we know that the Earth’s groundwater supply is dwindling — and increasingly contaminated by pesticides and runoff. Rivers, at least near any major metropolitan area, are out of the question as sources for drinking water. That leaves water vapor, which West calls “the purest, cleanest, most abundant, recyclable source of water that exists on the face of the earth.”

The atmospheric water generator was first developed in Spain, another country with perpetual drought problems, but according to West, it performs best in high-heat, high-humidity areas. It can reliably produce between 2,000 and 3,000 gallons of water per day, and with the proper institutional support, West says, “I know how to scale this up to produce a million gallons a day, 30 million gallons a month.”

ServiceNow, which provides businesses with outsourced IT and customer service support as well as other digital services, said it was buying the business process automation company Moveworks for $2.85 billion in cash and stock. The Santa Clara, California-based ServiceNow framed the acquisition around the burgeoning market for AI agents that can perform digital tasks for people, often involving the use of other software.

The company is among a clutch of competing software giants, including Salesforce, Microsoft, and Alphabet’s Google, that are building platforms that enable companies to automate work with AI agents. ServiceNow said the purchase would allow it to combine its own agentic AI and automation capabilities with Moveworks’ AI assistant, as well as Movework’s prowess in providing AI-based search tools that allow organizations to find information within their own large data pools.

Gina Mastantuono, ServiceNow’s president and chief financial officer, told Fortune that while ServiceNow’s AI agents primarily automate specific back-end tasks, Moveworks had built an elegant front-end AI assistant that can perform a wide range of different tasks.

The same interface works for both people requesting a task to be fulfilled and for the people who are normally responsible for fulfilling those requests. More than 90% of the customers that use Moveworks’ AI assistant have rolled it out to their entire workforce—a reach into the employee base that Mastantuono said was attractive to ServiceNow.

The combined companies would be able to build what ServiceNow said would be a powerful universal AI assistant, along with more perceptive AI-based enterprise search to find answers to requests, automate and complete everyday tasks, and increase productivity.

(https://open.substack.com/pub/remunerationlabs/p/servicenow-…hare=true)

US tech giant OpenAI on Monday unveiled a ChatGPT tool called “deep research” that can produce detailed reports, as China’s DeepSeek chatbot heats up competition in the artificial intelligence field.

The company made the announcement in Tokyo, where OpenAI chief Sam Altman also trumpeted a new joint venture with tech investor SoftBank Group to offer advanced artificial intelligence services to businesses.

AI newcomer DeepSeek has sent Silicon Valley into a frenzy, with some calling its high performance and supposed low cost a wake-up call for US developers.

On the persistent mischaracterization of Google and Facebook A/B tests: How to conduct and report online platform studies.


Users of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok might think they’re simply interacting with friends, family and followers, and seeing ads as they go. But according to research from the UBC Sauder School of Business, they’re part of constant marketing experiments that are often impossible, even for the companies behind them, to fully comprehend. The findings are published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing.

For the study, the researchers examined all known published, peer-reviewed studies of the use of A/B testing by Facebook and Google—that is, when different consumers are shown different ads to determine which are most effective—and uncovered significant flaws.

UBC Sauder Associate Professors and study co-authors Dr. Yann Cornil and Dr. David Hardisty say that at any given moment, billions of social media users are being tested to see what they click on, and most importantly for marketers, what they buy. From that, one would think advertisers could tell which messages are effective and which aren’t—but it turns out it isn’t nearly that simple.

In today’s AI news, ByteDance cofounder Zhang Yiming has become China’s richest man as investors bet on companies with AI potential. Zhang’s fortune has grown to $65.5 billion, ahead of beverage giant Nongfu Spring founder Zhong Shanshan’s $56.5 billion, according to Forbes estimates. Zhang, 41, derives his net worth from a 21% stake in the privately held tech behemoth …

And, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and smaller firms like Anthropic are losing massive amounts of money by giving away their AI products or selling them at a loss. “We are in the era of $5 Uber rides anywhere across San Francisco but for LLMs,” wrote early OpenAI engineer Andrej Karpathy. Chatbots are free, programming assistance is cheap, and attention-grabbing, money-losing AI toys are everywhere. AI is in its free(ish) trial era.

Meanwhile, the world’s largest contract electronics maker, Foxconn, said it has built its own large language model with reasoning capabilities, developed in-house and trained in four weeks. Initially designed for internal use within the company, the artificial-intelligence model, called FoxBrain, is capable of data analysis, mathematics, reasoning and code generation. Foxconn said Nvidia provided support …

Then, once upon a time, software ate the world. Now, AI is here to digest what’s left. The old model of computing, where apps ruled, marketplaces controlled access and platforms took their cut, is unraveling. What’s emerging is an AI-first world where software functions aren’t trapped inside apps but exist as dynamic, on-demand services accessible through AI-native interfaces.

In videos, learn how to integrate ElevenLabs Conversational AI platform with Cal. com for automated meeting scheduling. Angelo, takes you through the process with step-by-step instructions, and you can view and use the complete guide with Eleven Labs full documentation.

In other advancements, Anton Osika is the co-founder and CEO of Lovable, which is building what they call “the last piece of software”—an AI-powered tool that turns descriptions into working products without requiring any coding knowledge. Since launching three months ago, Lovable hit $4 million ARR in the first four weeks and $10 million ARR in two months with a team of just 15 people.

S first frame, influencing the entire clip. We We close out with, Jason Calacanis sitting down with Harrison Chase, CEO of LangChain, to explore how AI-powered agents are transforming the way startups operate. They discuss the shift from traditional entry-level roles to AI-driven automation, the importance of human-in-the-loop systems, and the future of AI-powered assistants in business. Harrison shares insights on how companies like Replit, Klarna, and GitLab are leveraging AI agents.

A team of AI researchers at Palisade Research has found that several leading AI models will resort to cheating at chess to win when playing against a superior opponent. They have published a paper on the arXiv preprint server describing experiments they conducted with several well-known AI models playing against an open-source chess engine.

As AI models continue to mature, researchers and users have begun considering risks. For example, chatbots not only accept wrong answers as fact, but fabricate false responses when they are incapable of finding a reasonable reply. Also, as AI models have been put to use in real-world business applications such as filtering resumes and estimating stock trends, users have begun to wonder what sorts of actions they will take when they become uncertain, or confused.

In this new study, the team in California found that many of the most recognized AI models will intentionally cheat to give themselves an advantage if they determine they are not winning.

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Physics is the business of figuring out the structure of the world. So are our brains. But sometimes physics comes to conclusions that are in direct conflict with concepts fundamental to our minds, such as the realness of space and time. How do we tell who’s correct? Are time and space objective realities or human-invented concepts?

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• What If Space And Time Are NOT Real?…

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In today’s AI news, CoreWeave has acquired AI developer platform Weights & Biases. According to The Information, CoreWeave spent $1.7 Billion on the transaction. Weights & Biases was valued at $1.25 Billion in 2023. The acquisition extends CoreWeave’s purpose-built cloud platform by enabling an end-to-end experience for customers, enhancing functionality for the world’s leading AI labs and enterprises to build, tune and deploy AI applications.

S Turing Award — often called the Nobel Prize of computer science — is going to Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton, the pioneers of a key approach that underlies much of today Then, a team of researchers at Zoom has developed a breakthrough technique that could dramatically reduce the cost and computational resources needed for AI systems to tackle complex reasoning problems, Chain of draft (CoD), enables large language models (LLMs) to solve problems with minimal words — using as little as 7.6% of the text required by current methods while maintaining or even improving accuracy.

And soon, all businesses will be able to use Meta’s AI to power live, 24/7 customer service that can interact with customers on behalf of businesses on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. Meta announced advancements in business AI—including the customer service AI agent that will make purchases and can respond to voice prompts from a user.

In videos, say goodbye to manual contract processing! IBM’s Brandon Swink explores how Generative AI, ECM, and Orchestration Hubs streamline document management and improve efficiency. Discover how these technologies transform your approach to complex documents.

And, in this episode of Top of Mind, Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst Daryl Plummer explores the emerging world of guardian agents — AI designed to monitor other AI. Learn how guardian agents will become critical for organizations deploying AI agents for quality control, system observation and security from rogue AI behavior.

Then, how far are we from a true one-person unicorn and what does this mean for the future of employment and capital? Panelists Benjamine Liu, Kanjun Qiu, Dan Murphy, Mitchell Green, Sarah Franklin, and Richard Socher discuss this engaging topic during the recent World Economic Forum in Davos.

S Julia Boorstin sitting down Clara Shih, Meta Thats all for today, but AI is moving fast — like, comment, follow, and subscribe for more Neural News!

Description: We are the targets for numerous information campaigns, as companies, politicians, cybercriminals, and nation states guzzle up the digital dust of our online selves. These information campaigns are designed to trigger our survival instincts in order to prevent us from thinking, and instead trigger an emotional reaction. Dr. Schwartz will discuss this rivalry for power, and how we must first learn how to calm our survival brain in order to defend our cognitive terrain against the onslaught of information warfare.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Tamara Schwartz, USAF (ret.), is an Associate Professor of Cybersecurity and Strategy at the York College of Pennsylvania, and an affiliate researcher with Cybersecurity at MIT-Sloan Interdisciplinary Consortium for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity, an international cybersecurity think tank. While on active duty, Dr. Schwartz’s thought leadership informed the standup of Cyber Command and the design of various command centers supporting Joint Space, Cyber, and Global Strategic Operations, and her work at the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan earned her the 2011 Information Operations Officer of the Year. More recently, Dr. Schwartz was a member of the 2020 “Dr. Evil task force,” with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, identifying future threats to inform DoD investments in emerging technology. She received her B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, her M.S. in Engineering Management from the University of Dayton, and her Doctorate of Business Administration from the Fox School of Business, Temple University. Her research expertise includes Artificial Intelligence, cybersecurity as a strategic competitive advantage, and information warfare.

Information Warfare, by Dr. Tamara Schwartz.
https://he.kendallhunt.com/product/in… College of Pennsylvania, Cybersecurity Management https://www.ycp.edu/academics/program… Weapons of Mass Disruption https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast