The AI Hype Index: AI-designed antibiotics show promise

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry.

Using AI to improve our health and well-being is one of the areas scientists and researchers are most excited about. The last month has seen an interesting leap forward: The technology has been put to work designing new antibiotics to fight hard-to-treat conditions, and OpenAI and Anthropic have both introduced new limiting features to curb potentially harmful conversations on their platforms. 

Unfortunately, not all the news has been positive. Doctors who overrely on AI to help them spot cancerous tumors found their detection skills dropped once they lost access to the tool, and a man fell ill after ChatGPT recommended he replace the salt in his diet with dangerous sodium bromide. These are yet more warning signs of how careful we have to be when it comes to using AI to make important decisions for our physical and mental states.

The AI Hype Index: The White House’s war on “woke AI”

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry.

The Trump administration recently declared war on so-called “woke AI,” issuing an executive order aimed at preventing companies whose models exhibit a liberal bias from landing federal contracts. Simultaneously, the Pentagon inked a deal with Elon Musk’s xAI just days after its chatbot, Grok, spouted harmful antisemitic stereotypes on X, while the White House has partnered with an anti-DEI nonprofit to create AI slop videos of the Founding Fathers. What comes next is anyone’s guess.

The AI Hype Index: AI-powered toys are coming

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry.

AI agents might be the toast of the AI industry, but they’re still not that reliable. That’s why Yoshua Bengio, one of the world’s leading AI experts, is creating his own nonprofit dedicated to guarding against deceptive agents. Not only can they mislead you, but new research suggests that the weaker an AI model powering an agent is, the less likely it is to be able to negotiate you a good deal online. Elsewhere, OpenAI has inked a deal with toymaker Mattel to develop “age-appropriate” AI-infused products. What could possibly go wrong?

The AI Hype Index: College students are hooked on ChatGPT

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry.

Large language models confidently present their responses as accurate and reliable, even when they’re neither of those things. That’s why we’ve recently seen chatbots supercharge vulnerable people’s delusions, make citation mistakes in an important legal battle between music publishers and Anthropic, and (in the case of xAI’s Grok) rant irrationally about “white genocide.”

But it’s not all bad news—AI could also finally lead to a better battery life for your iPhone and solve tricky real-world problems that humans have been struggling to crack, if Google DeepMind’s new model is any indication. And perhaps most exciting of all, it could combine with brain implants to help people communicate when they have lost the ability to speak.

The AI Hype Index: AI agent cyberattacks, racing robots, and musical models

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry.

AI agents are the AI industry’s hypiest new product—intelligent assistants capable of completing tasks without human supervision. But while they can be theoretically useful—Simular AI’s S2 agent, for example, intelligently switches between models depending on what it’s been told to do—they could also be weaponized to execute cyberattacks. Elsewhere, OpenAI is reported to be throwing its hat into the social media arena, and AI models are getting more adept at making music. Oh, and if the results of the first half-marathon pitting humans against humanoid robots are anything to go by, we won’t have to worry about the robot uprising any time soon.

The AI Hype Index: DeepSeek mania, Israel’s spying tool, and cheating at chess

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry.

While AI models are certainly capable of creating interesting and sometimes entertaining material, their output isn’t necessarily useful. Google DeepMind is hoping that its new robotics model could make machines more receptive to verbal commands, paving the way for us to simply speak orders to them aloud. Elsewhere, the Chinese startup Monica has created Manus, which it claims is the very first general AI agent to complete truly useful tasks. And burnt-out coders are allowing AI to take the wheel entirely in a new practice dubbed “vibe coding.”

The AI Hype Index: Robot pets, simulated humans, and Apple’s AI text summaries

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry.

More than 70 countries went to the polls in 2024. The good news is that this year of global elections turned out to be largely free from any major deepfake campaigns or AI manipulation. Instead we saw lots of AI slop: buff Trump, Elon as ultra-Chad, California as catastrophic wasteland. While some worry that development of large language models is slowing down, you wouldn’t know it from the steady drumbeat of new products, features, and services rolling out from itty-bitty startups and massive incumbents alike. So what’s for real and what’s just a lot of hallucinatory nonsense?