Hollywood, a notoriously labor-intensive creative industry, is experiencing every conceivable emotion over generative A.I.: fear and loathing, curiosity, cautious optimism, even some twinges of genuine excitement. After all, not every tech entrepreneur is waxing poetic about replacing human moviemaking. Some, like Fable Studio C.E.O. Edward Saatchi, whom I interviewed last month, want to expand the entertainment universe with new forms of personalized content. Others are looking at how A.I. can...

Dr. Danielle Perszyk, a cognitive scientist at Amazon’s AGI Labs, can’t help but feel anxious every time she opens her computer, where she is greeted by all the usual pop-up nonsense: email alerts, Slack messages, social media updates, “productivity” app notifications. Of course, her frustration with these distractions was hardly evident in the 45 minutes we spent chatting about her research. But it’s certainly one of the factors driving her interest in A.I. “I think that part of the solution is...

When OpenAI launched its highly anticipated GPT-5 model last week, the company almost certainly didn’t anticipate the public reaction, which ranged from ambivalence to downright hostility—a rare setback for showman impresario C.E.O. Sam Altman. Over the past few days, social media has been inundated with viral posts chronicling the unfortunate screw-ups of Altman’s self-described, pocket-sized “Ph.D.-level” intelligence system —struggling with basic math, drawing wildly inaccurate maps of the wo...

Five years ago, after the National Transportation Safety Board found Uber partially responsible for a fatal crash involving a self-driving car and a pedestrian in Arizona, the company temporarily shelved its fantasy of outfitting its fleet of vehicles with self-driving robotaxis. Now, the company is preparing to try again. Last week, Uber announced a partnership with Lucid, an electric vehicle maker, and Nuro, a self-driving tech company, to deploy some 20,000 self-driving vehicles, built explic...

Last week, after a tumultuous few days, a provision in Trump’s sprawling, 900-page Big Beautiful Bill Act barring states from regulating A.I. for the next five to 10 years was stripped out. The yanking of the so-called A.I. moratorium was, to put it mildly, a shocking twist—not least because its removal was supported by 99 senators. Adam Thierer, the think tank analyst who first proposed a federal moratorium on state A.I. laws, called the volte-face a “major turning point in U.S. technology poli...