18 Jun 2026
AI’s free-for-all era may be coming to an end—as companies start counting the cost
Welcome to Eye on AI. Beatrice Nolan here. In today’s issue: Business leaders are confronting AI spending. ChatGPT’s market share falls below 50%. Top Google Gemini executive leaves for OpenAI. Americans want legal protection around AI interactions. I’m in Paris this week at one of Europe’s largest tech conferences, VivaTech, where concerns about “sovereign AI” are front and center.
18 Jun 2026
If AI Is Sentient Then So Is ‘Age of Empires II’
In a viral essay about how ludicrous the idea that LLMs are conscious is, science fiction writer Ted Chiang asked us to consider Microsoft Word: “Being open to the possibility that LLMs are conscious is the same as being open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious, or, more precisely, that multiple distinct consciousnesses are dormant in every Word document containing a…
18 Jun 2026
Sports Journalists Asked Microsoft’s Copilot to Predict World Cup Matches, and the Results May Surprise You
AI has wormed its way into every crevice of the 2026 World Cup. It’s dreaming up sloppified soccer jerseys, collating thousands of on-field data points, and even guarding venues in the form of robot surveillance dogs that presumably can’t be bribed with sausage. Yet for all its busywork, AI remains blissfully ignorant on the one metric that matters: who wins and who loses.
18 Jun 2026
Blaming China for Datacenter NIMBYism Is Cope
Last week, congressmembers amplified a claim that Chinese propaganda is driving anti-datacenter sentiment in the United States. And recently OpenAI exposed a Chinese influence operation that used ChatGPT to make anti-datacenter AI slop. Someone in China’s deep state clearly thought it was a good idea to push narratives that throw sand in the gears of America’s domestic AI buildout. But blaming…
18 Jun 2026
Using AI to help physicians diagnose rare genetic diseases affecting children
Even with genomic sequencing, many people with rare diseases never receive a clear genetic diagnosis. Roughly half remain undiagnosed after extensive testing and specialist review. Their medical data may contain clues but finding them can require sifting through thousands to millions of possible genetic variants, fragmented clinical records, and rapidly changing scientific literature. As new…
17 Jun 2026
AI's Catastrophic Risk Isn't Rogue Machines, It's Cognitive Surrender
This post is part of a series of student essays produced in collaboration with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Read more in the series here . In the beginning, the Bible says God created man in His own image. “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground,” Genesis tells us, “and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living…
17 Jun 2026
How AI could help criminals to steal personal data
Over the last few years, an elite group of software companies have been locked in a headlong sprint to see who can develop the most powerful generative AI models. And while the rate of progress has been quite astonishing, some of the consequences are profoundly alarming.
17 Jun 2026
LVMH Announces the Winners of Its 2026 Innovation Awards
LVMH Group has announced the winners of its LVMH Innovation Award, “which recognizes the most innovative and high-potential startups helping to reinvent the luxury industry”, according to the group’s press release. The three winners were named on Wednesday at tech conference Vivatech in Paris.
17 Jun 2026
BRIDGE: benchmarking large language models for understanding real-world clinical practice texts
The BRIDGE benchmark systematically evaluated the performance of 95 large language models (LLMs) on real-world clinical data on tasks spanning the patient care continuum. This benchmark, which is being continuously updated, provides a field reference for improving how LLMs understand clinical texts.
