This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through December 20)

Future

What Will Your Life Look Like in 2035?Words by Robert Booth and Dan Milmo. Illustrations by Jay Cover | The Guardian

“When AIs become consistently more capable than humans, life could change in strange ways. It could happen in the next few years, or a little longer. If and when it comes, our domestic routines—trips to the doctor, farming, work, and justice systems—could all look very different. Here we take a look at how the era of artificial general intelligence might feel.”

Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI Built an AI Coding Agent and Uses It to Improve the Agent ItselfBenj Edwards | Ars Technica

“In interviews with Ars Technica this week, OpenAI employees revealed the extent to which the company now relies on its own AI coding agent, Codex, to build and improve the development tool. ‘I think the vast majority of Codex is built by Codex, so it’s almost entirely just being used to improve itself,’ said Alexander Embiricos, product lead for Codex at OpenAI, in a conversation on Tuesday.”

Artificial Intelligence

AI Coding Is Now Everywhere. But Not Everyone Is Convinced.Edd Gent | MIT Technology Review ($)

“Depending who you ask, AI-powered coding is either giving software developers an unprecedented productivity boost or churning out masses of poorly designed code that saps their attention and sets software projects up for serious long term-maintenance problems. The problem is right now, it’s not easy to know which is true.”

Biotechnology

A Brain-Computer Interface Company Is Getting Into Organ PreservationEmily Mullin | Wired ($)

“The technology is used to preserve organs for transplant and as a life-support measure for patients when the heart and lungs stop working, but it’s clunky and costly. Science wants to make a smaller, more portable system that could provide long-term support.”

Robotics

Scientists Built an AI Co-Pilot for Prosthetic Bionic HandsJacek Krywko | Ars Technica

“The main issue with bionic hands that drives users away from them, George explains, is that they’re difficult to control. ‘Our goal was making such bionic arms more intuitive, so that users could go about their tasks without having to think about it,’ George says. To make this happen, his team came up with an AI bionic hand co-pilot.”

Future

A Faster-Than-Light Spaceship Would Actually Look a Lot Like Star Trek’s EnterpriseJesus Diaz | Fast Company

“Inside [the USS Enterprise’s twin] nacelles, the show’s creators imagined, lay the secret that made those trips possible: a warp drive that could crease spacetime itself, folding the universe in front of the ship while unfurling it behind, allowing faster-than-light travel not through speed but through geometry. For decades, physicists dismissed it as beautiful nonsense—a prop master’s fever dream. But now the math has caught up to the dream.”

Artificial Intelligence

The Great AI Hype Correction of 2025Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review ($)

“AI is really good! Look at Nano Banana Pro, the new image generation model from Google DeepMind that can turn a book chapter into an infographic, and much more. It’s just there—for free—on your phone. And yet you can’t help but wonder: When the wow factor is gone, what’s left? How will we view this technology a year or five from now? Will we think it was worth the colossal costs, both financial and environmental?”

Scientists Thought Saturn’s Moon Titan Hid a Secret Ocean. They Were WrongEllyn Lapointe | Gizmodo

“Rather, its 6-mile-thick (10-kilometer-thick) crust of ice gives way to a layer of slush interspersed with pockets and channels of meltwater near the moon’s rocky core. The shocking findings could completely change the way scientists search for signs of life inside this icy world.”

Tech

How OpenAI’s Organizational Problems Hurt ChatGPTStephanie Palazzolo, Sri Muppidi, and Amir Efrati | The Information ($)

“The change in the way ChatGPT users have reacted to new models powering the chatbot shows how the goals of OpenAI’s core AI research division, which develops its technology, don’t always serve the needs of ChatGPT, which drives most of the company’s revenue.”

Tech

CoreWeave’s Staggering Fall From Market Grace Highlights AI Bubble FearsRobbie Whelan | The Wall Street Journal ($)

“CoreWeave, the largest of a new breed of companies driving the artificial-intelligence boom, has watched $33 billion of value vaporize in six weeks. The share-price plunge of 46% comes as investors worry about a possible AI bubble, the fallout from a failed merger, and public criticism from high-profile short seller Jim Chanos, known for predicting the collapse of Enron.”

Tech

It’s the Great AGI RebrandHayden Field | The Verge

“‘Rizz’ lost its luster when grandparents started asking about its meaning. Teachers who dressed up as ‘6-7’ on Halloween drove a nail into the coffin of Gen Alpha’s rallying cry. And tech CEOs who once trumpeted the quest for ‘artificial general intelligence,’ or AGI, are jumping ship for any other term they can find.”