 |
|
|
|||||
Now that AI can control your web browser, the next frontier might be to take over your entire computer. At least that’s what Seattle-based startup Vercept is trying to do with Vy, a currently free Windows and Mac app that can manipulate your mouse and keyboard to automate tedious or repetitive tasks. You just tell it what you’re trying to do, and then it takes control. Vy first launched as a beta for Macs in May, but has now been rebuilt and is available for Windows as well. My experiments with Vy have yielded mixed results. If you’ve ever yelled at ChatGPT for failing to follow instructions, that frustration becomes magnified when AI is piloting your entire computer — tasks you might want to automate might just be done faster manually. Still, I can see some areas where an AI computer agent could be useful, which is why other companies (including Microsoft) are pursuing the same goal. I spent a lot of time waiting Kiana Ehsani, Vercept’s CEO and co-founder, says Vy is more human-like than the agent features in AI web browsers such as Perplexity Comet and ChatGPT Atlas. While those browsers reportedly work by inspecting the underlying structure of web pages, Vy takes frequent screenshots to analyze what’s happening on your screen. It then executes mouse or keyboard commands to mimic the way you’d control the computer yourself. Ehsani says people are using it to automate Excel work, extract data from the web for sharing into apps like Slack, or figure out how to use new software. “We want to have a model that understands your screen and takes action very similarly to how you do it,” Ehsani says. This ends up taking a while, though, as each individual action requires Vy to take a screenshot and upload it to its servers for analysis. Everything from opening an app to clicking a menu button requires another screenshot and more time waiting for a response — so a routine that takes 10 seconds for a human might take Vy five minutes. Vy has a couple ways to mitigate this. One option is to run tasks in “Background” mode, which lets you keep using your computer while Vy does its work in an invisible browser window. Vy’s capabilities are limited in this mode, though, as it can interact with files and web pages but can’t control other apps. (I had some impish fun getting Vy to fulfill various Microsoft Rewards tasks on my behalfperforming daily Bing searches, filling out various quizzesbut felt guilty about how much compute power must’ve been burned along the way.) The other option is to schedule tasks for when you’re not around. For instance, I set up a daily routine for 7 a.m. that minimizes any open windows on my desktop, opens Obsidian, moves it to the center of the screen, and loads my to-do list. Watching Vy do this in real-time is excruciating, but scheduling it to run before I sit down at my computerthereby forcing me to confront my to-do listis pretty helpful. Ehsani hopes that on-device AI will speed things up in the future. Instead of having to constantly upload screenshots and download instructions, the goal is for Vy to process everything directly on the computer, though it’s unclear when that might happen or how powerful a PC you’d need. It needs a lot of hand-holding Getting Vy to perform tasks on your computer can be a bit like bossing a child around, in that it’s liable to ignore or misinterpret your instructions. A quirk of Obsidian, for instance, is that if you load the app while it’s already running, it will load an entirely new instance of Obsidian with a menu for choosing which notebook vault to open. To keep this from happening in my to-do list scenario, I asked Vy to only click the Obsidian icon on the Windows taskbar, which would load any existing instance of Obsidian instead of launching a new one. But every time I tested the routine, Vy kept ignoring my instructions and would try to click the Obsidian icon on the desktop, thereby opening a new window. I would interrupt the assistant and tell it to focus on clicking the taskbar icon, but it had trouble finding it and kept trying to open the app in other ways. At one point it even clicked the Windows Start menu to launch Obsidian from there. Ultimately I had to edit my workflow with clear instructions to never click the desktop icon, never open the Windows Start menu, and avoid using other methods to open Obsidian outside of the taskbar. I also had to lay out explicit guidance to look for a purple crystal icon that appears next to other icons in the taskbar. All told, I spent about 20 minutes troubleshooting this tiny routine that mostly involved minimizing some windows and clicking a button. Vy does have an alternative “Watch and repeat” tool for creating workflows, in which it records your screen while you perform the desired steps. But this was even less reliable in my experience. When I tried setting up my Obsidian automation this way, Vy didn’t minimize any of my open windows and instead just moved its own app to the middle of the screen. It raises some privacy and security concerns Watching Vy take persistent screenshots of my desktop was also a reminder of how much personal info could wind up on Vercept’s servers. Every time Vy takes a screenshot, it captures everything on your screen, even if it’s unrelated to the task. Until I started asking Vercept about its data retention policies, the company did not publish them on its website. Vercept now says it keeps screenshots for six months unless you delete the underlying chat manually. Either way, it keeps data for up to 30 days for safety purposes. Ehsani says it doesn’t capture screenshots when Vy isn’t actively working on a task, and doesn’t perform any post-processing on screenshot contents. Still, a few people at Vercept have full access to users’ data, including their screenshots. “There is a trade-off here,” Ehsani acknowledges. As with any agentic AI system, Vy risks making users vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, in which an attacker hides malicious instructions in web pages, emails, or calendar invites. Vercept says it has some ways to mitigate thisfor instance, by instructing Vy to watch for signs of malicious behaviorbut no AI system has a foolproof answer to this problem yet. It seems inevitable anyway Despite the potential problems and limitations, AI agents that control your devices are coming. Microsoft already has a mode for its Copilot Windows assistant that can scan what’s on your screen and provide guidance, and it’s testing a “Copilot Actions” feature that can perform tasks on your behalf. Other developers are also pursuing this idea. Github is full of experimental AI control projects, and commercial alternatives include NeuralAgent and Screenpipe. Vercept is notable among tese efforts for having raised a $16 million seed round in January, with backers including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean. Ehsani says the goal is to expand beyond just a single computer. An Android app is also in the works, and she hopes that you’ll eventually be able to give Vy instructions on your phone and have it carry the actions out on your computer, or vice versa. “One of our main visions is getting rid of mouse, keyboard, and touchscreens altogether,” Ehsani says. For now, at least, the natural speed at which humans can click around a desktop gives them the edge.
Category:
E-Commerce
When the Los Angeles wildfires swept through the city earlier this year, experts flocked to the internet to dissect the anatomy of a fire-resistant building. Many of them ended up describing bunker-like architecture with boxy buildings, sparse landscape, and lots of concrete. A new building in Malibu offers a more nuanced approach. Malibu High School, which opened in August, is located in an area that Cal Fire (the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection) recently designated as a very high fire hazard severity zone. This means that the school, which has replaced a nondescript building from the 1950s, had to comply with stringent fire safety regulations. [Photo: Here and Now Agency] The new school is distributed across two connected buildings. It was constructed entirely of noncombustible materials like concrete shear walls and floors, steel columns and beams, and fire-rated glass. It is surrounded by a newly built fire road to allow easy firetruck access, and drought-resistant landscaping. Still, it looks less like a fortified concrete bunker, and more like the kind of airy, low-lying buildings you might find elsewhere in Malibu. “The messages the building sends about your safety is much more like a community center,” says Nathan Bishop, lead architect and principal at local firm Koning Eizenberg Architecture. “It’s about making it feel like a social place to hang out and just be.” [Photo: Here and Now Agency] A balanced approach to fire-resistant architecture Malibu High School, part of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, is nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains. It is located near a ring of coastal shrubs that is notoriously flammable but is also protected by the California Coastal Act as Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area (ESHA.) In 2018, the area was hit by the Woolsey Fire, which destroyed over 1,600 structures, and burned nearly 97,000 acres in Ventura and Los Angeles counties. The former high school building, which stood on the same site, narrowly survived, but according to Bishop, the “shared memory” of Woolsey was present in everyone’s mind. “There are still teachers who haven’t replaced their houses because they burned down,” he said. It’s no surprise, then, that fire resiliency was part of the architects’ mandate from the very beginning, when they won an RFP to redesign the school in 2019. The challenge was ensuring the school didn’t look like a bunker. [Photo: Here and Now Agency] To lighten the visible footprint of the building, the architects positioned solar panels over a canopy so they could cast shadows on the building’s glazed facade. This helped reduce solar gain while allowing the building to have more glass to balance the concrete. The panels, which remain quite visible, help the building achieve its net-zero goals, but they also help communicate the value of sustainability to students. The team used textured concrete that makes the building feel like it is part of the hillside, and copper panels that add some color and texture. They also implemented a dedicated air filtration system for wildfire events. “[The school] is fortified and strong, but not in a defensive way,” says Bishop, noting the school can now serve as a community wildfire shelter. The open design ensured the building feels like it belongs on the rugged hillside of Malibu. The surrounding drought-resistant landscape, by San Diego-based Spurlock Landscape Architects, further anchors the school with a coastal landscape that doubles as a fuel modification zone. This is meant to reduce the risk of wildfire by thinning or replacing combustible vegetation. The landscape architects used California-native plants like aloe vera and agave interspersed with locally sourced rock mulch. They laid out the plants so they would grow from low succulents closer to the building to larger canopies on the outer perimeter. Since many buildings catch fire from what is closest to them, the areas nearest to the building are mostly hardscape. (The January 2025 wildfires didn’t reach as far north as the high school, which was therefore spared.) [Photo: Here and Now Agency] Rethinking the American high school By the time Koning Eizenberg Architecture got involved in 2020, Malibu High School had been seeing enrollment issues for years. (The school enrolled about 440 students in 2021, compared to nearly 1,000 in 2017.) To compete with nearby private schools, where enrollment issues haven’t been as stark, the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District wanted to rethink not just the building but also the way high schoolers studied inside it. Instead of organizing the school by academic departments, the high school follows a more distributed model where “everything is everywhere,” as Bishop puts it. Science labs abut art studios and teacher rooms are scattered around the campus instead of concentrated in a single building. The distributed model allowed the architects to abolish the archetypal silos that have become high school movie tropesscience geeks hang out here; jocks hang out thereand foster more encounters between different disciplines. [Photo: Here and Now Agency] “There is something about rethinking the story of the American high school, and the social fabric of the American high school,” says Bishop. Before they moved into the new building, high schoolers shared the old building with local middle schoolers, where they studied in nondescript classrooms. Now, each classroom is adjacent to an outdoor space, creating a “fuzzy edge that lets the life of the building spill out,” says Bishop. Students in marine biology class go down to the beach to collect samples. Those in pottery class bring their wheels into the courtyard. Meanwhile, the preserved ESHA acts as a learning lab, where students can learn about ecology. Instead of cutting off the building from its surroundings, the architects carefully integrated it within the landscape, proof that students can learn from nature instead of turning their back on it.
Category:
E-Commerce
“Parasocial” is the Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year. That feeling that you and Harry Styles would instantly become friends if you ever bumped into each other? Yes, thats parasocial. The term dates back to 1956, coined by sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl to describe how TV watchers formed para-social relationships with those on their screen. The word has taken on even greater meaning in the age of social media, where we have unparalleled access to the lives of influencers, online personalities, and celebrities via phones. Take Taylor Swift and Travis Kelces engagement. The news triggered mass hysteria online, with many displaying genuine raw emotion for a couple theyve never even met. Or British singer Lily Allen, whose latest album West End Girl details a breakup and sparked a parasocial interest in her love life, according to the Cambridge Dictionary. Its not just celebrities. This year, the dictionary noted a surge in those looking up the word after the Youtube star IShowSpeed blocked an obsessive fan, identified as his “number 1 parasocial. A number of popular female streamers have spoken publicly about dealing with stalking, some resorting to hiring security while navigating online fame. Oftentimes these parasocial relationships are built unintentionally. After spending so many hours consuming content from influencers and content creators, its only natural that fans feel a sense of kinship and emotional attachment, even if its one-sided. So strong are some of these parasocial ties, a 2024 study revealed that parasocial relationships with YouTubers more effectively filled emotional needs than relationships with “real” acquaintances or colleagues. However, it can bleed into something darker. Add artificial intelligence into the mix and things get even more complex. Many confide in AI tools like ChatGPT as they would friends or romantic partners. By September of 2025, the Cambridge Dictionary definition of parasocial was updated to include the possibility of a relationship with an artificial intelligence. Colin McIntosh, Cambridge Dictionarys chief editor, said the word captures the zeitgeist of 2025, as the publics fascination with celebrities and their lifestyles continues to reach new heights. He noted in a statement: Its interesting from a language point of view because it has made the transition from an academic term to one used by ordinary people in their social media posts. The other words shortlisted this year were pseudonymization, which spiked in interest this year in relation to discussions around protecting personal data. Also memeify as it relates to internet culture. The dictionary added 6,000 new words this year, including internet neologisms like delulu, skibidi and tradwife. Looking ahead, words to watch include glazing, vibey, bias, breathwork, and doomspending.”
Category:
E-Commerce
At this falls prestigious New York World Spirits Competition, a wheated bourbon thats widely available for about $30 claimed the title of Best Overall Bourbon. The blind-tasting competition drew a crowded field of bourbons that included bottles that are typically impossible to findor exorbitantly marked up on shelves. Among more than 100 contenders, including bourbon heavyweights like Blantons Gold Edition and W.L. Weller Full Proof, the reasonably priced Green River Wheated Bourbon landed the top title. Green River Wheated is an approachable 90 proof (45% ABV) and a blend of 4- to 6-year-old barrels. The judging panel described it as a richly textured bourbon, opening with aromas of peppery spice followed by a palate of grains, oats, and creamy butterscotch layered with hints of oak. This all leads to a smooth, long finish where grain fades into soft honey, spice, and warm barrel notes. As a fan of the bourbonand every Green River bottle Ive sampledI agree with the panels assessment, but add that theres also a tropical fruit note that brings a brighter layer of flavor to contrast with the darker oak tones. Green River Wheated also claimed the Wheated category over fellow finalist Weller Full Proof. The Weller line of wheated bourbons has grown famous over the past decade as the next best thing to Pappy Van Winkle. Both brands are produced by Buffalo Trace and blended from the same base whiskey. Though theres a lot of hype surrounding Weller from the Pappy association, its a fantastic family of whiskeys in its own right. For the younger, cheaper Green River to best not just its Weller equivalent, Special Reserve, but the 114-proof bruiser of the family is quite an achievement. What is wheated bourbon? All bourbon is at least 50% corn. Most have a portion of rye and a smaller helping of malted barley. Wheated bourbon swaps out the spicier rye grain for wheat, which brings a sweeter character. Green River Wheated, for example, is 70% corn, 21% wheat, and 9% malted barley. If youve tried more than a few bourbons in your life, youve tried a wheated brand. Makers Mark is about 16% wheat and an excellent example of the sweet fruit notes the gentle grain brings. Theres also a more rounded balance to these bourbons, as wheat replaces the sharper character of rye. This balance is a major factor in what helps the Van Winkle (and Weller) line stand out. What does Green River Wheated bourbon taste like? When I sip a dram of Green River Wheated, the predominant flavors I get are honey and caramel over a smooth vanilla oak backbone with that bright fruit note. Its subtle, but makes this bourbon stand apart from its peers as not merely tasty and smooth, but as complex and interesting as a much older bourbon. At 90 proof, Id sip it neat but wouldnt judge you for adding a few ice cubesthis can stand up to a bit of water. However, if you prefer a higher-proof bourbon, theres a strong, older version, albeit not under the Green River family. The Seelbachs Private Reserve Wheated Bourbon is a house label for the online spirits retailer. That doesnt sound impressive unless you know that its founder, Blake Riber, has one of the best palates in the industry for selecting and blending whiskeys. His Seelbachs Wheated is a 107-proof combination of not-quite 5-year-old and 7-year-old barrels of Green River Wheated. The younger whiskey brings that bright fruit, while the older adds depth. Either are excellent buys, but with the holidays approaching, the Green River Wheated jumped out at me as an easy gift for the bourbon fans in your life, or in your office. If they havent heard of Green River, all the better. You get to share how this underdog of a bourbon recently beat the best at a major international spirits competition. Matthew Allyn This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
Category:
E-Commerce
Ed Zitron peels off his green button-up shirt to reveal the gray tee beneath. Now properly uniformed, two cans of Diet Coke queued up before him, hes ready to record this weeks episode of his podcast, Better Offline, at audio behemoth iHeartMedias midtown Manhattan studio. The topic on this July afternoon, as usual, is artificial intelligence. One of Zitrons guests, screenwriter, director, and producer Brian Koppelman, talks about paying $200 a month for ChatGPT Pro. When Koppelman earnestly asks, Do you not think AI is mind-bogglingly great at times? Zitrons answerNo!comes so quickly it seems to spring directly from his cerebral cortex. It would have been startling if hed responded any other way. As AI has become the tech industrys principal obsession, Zitronwho runs a public relations firm that represents technology companieshas developed an unexpected side hustle as one of its highest- profile naysayers. Ive tried all of these different things, and I still cant tell you with clarity what it is thats so amazing with these products, he tells me. Countless people in and around the tech industry share Zitrons dim view of generative AIs usefulness, the billions of dollars that companies are pouring into the technology, and its voracious appetite for computing resources. But his take-no-prisoners punditry sets him apart from other noted gadflies such as cognitive scientist Gary Marcus. On Better Offline and in his email newsletter, Wheres Your Ed At, hes particularly unsparing in his appraisal of CEOs such as Metas Mark Zuckerberg (a monster), OpenAIs Sam Altman (a con man), and Microsofts Satya Nadella (either a liar or a specific kind of idiot). Zitron says that his work is motivated by [seeing] these bastards and what theyre doing, how much money theyre making doing it, and how shameless they are. He has his own name for the pursuit of growth above all other goals, regardless of its impact on customers and society at large: the rot economy. He believes the current AI boom will end in disaster. When its very obvious the money isnt there, theres going to be a big, horrible correction with tech stocksa harmful one, he declares, referring to the fallout should AI companies not ever be profitable. I say this with a degree of trepidation, because its not going to be fun. Zitrons influence in the AI conversation is palpable and still expanding. On Bluesky, where he has 169,700 followers, attorney and activist Will Stancil recently wrote, People love to say Im begging you to read something by an actual expert and they mean, specifically, Ed Zitron. Produced by Cool Zone Media, an iHeartMedia subsidiary specializing in podcasts of a progressive bent, Better Offline is regularly among the 15 most popular tech shows on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. A bustling Reddit forum spun off from the podcast attracts 74,000 people a week with links to news stories about AI and caustic, sometimes darkly funny conversations about them. Wheres Your Ed Atits name riffs on Wheres Your Head At, a 2001 song by U.K. electronic music duo Basement Jaxxhas more than 80,000 readers, about 3,000 of whom receive bonus newsletters available exclusively to subscribers who pay $70 per year and up, an option Zitron added last June. His book on tech dysfunction, Why Everything Stopped Working, is due out in late 2026 or early 2027. Yet as prolific as Zitron is, he doesnt feel remotely tapped out. As things get more brittle and chaotic, he says, theres only going to be more things for me to rifle through and explain to people. Zitron didnt set out to build a mini media empire around AI doomerism. The West Londonborn tech enthusiast, a onetime video game journalist, founded his company EZPR in New York in 2012 and went on to write two books about public relations. When he sent out his first Wheres Your Ed At newsletters, in 2019, he focused on personal interests such as gaming, his Peloton, and the NFL draft. And then he didnt get around to publishing again for a year and a half. Late in 2020, he caught COVID. Suddenly in need of activities to fill his time, he found his newsletter a welcome distraction. If Im not writing, I havent really thought through anything, he explains. So I just started writing every day. Increasingly, he turned his attention to the tech industrys ills, leading to the February 2023 piece in which he coined the term the rot economy. It quickly went viral. Over time, Zitron has found a voice that comes off as entirely uncensored. He runs his newsletters by an editorfellow Brit and tech-skeptic newsletter author Matt Hughesbut you wouldnt know it from their style and substance. One particularly operatic recent example, last Julys The Haters Guide to the AI Bubble, marshals 14,500 words of facts, figures, and spicy commentary (Salesforces claims for its Agentforce AI are a blatant fucking lie) to argue that tech giants and startups alike are wasting billions pushing products built on vibes and blind faith. He also turned The Haters Guide into a four-part Better Offline series, where his accent and dramatic flair only heighten its impact. On Reddit, one fan called him the David Attenborough of AI critique. Zitron says that his supremely pissed-off persona isnt just a schtick. Its just never come easily to me to pretend to be anything other than what I am, he stresses. His friend and fellow tech critic Molly White, author of the crypto-busting newsletter Citation Needed, agrees. Hes very passionate about the stuff that he is writing about, she says. I think it sort of consumes him and his attention. Yet the full story of his relationship with AI is more complex. Along with savaging the technology in newsletters and on podcasts, he pitches its benefits to media outlets (including Fast Company) on behalf of EZPRs clients. Startups that hes repped range from technical assessment platform CodeSignal to Nomi, which touts its chatbots ability to serve as a virtual companion, girlfriend, or boyfriend. Zitron rejects the idea that his two jobsAI basher and AI promoterpresent any fundamental tension or conflict of interest. At EZPR, he says, What Iadvocate for are companies with real purpose that do things their customers like, that build sustainable businessesbased on actualuse cases. Does his growing fame as a writer and podcaster benefit his PR firm? He allows that it helpsjournalists recognize his name and are more likely to open his emailsbut considers that a side effect. The point, he says, is to speak his mind on a topic he cares deeply about. Evidence is mounting that some of the initial exuberance over generative AI was, in fact, irrational. A recent MIT study reported that 95% of enterprise pilot programs involving the technology hadnt shown a return on investment; another from Bain says that even by 2030 the tech industry might be $800 billion short of finding enough new revenue to fund the computing resources necessary to keep up with demand for AI. Speaking with reporters in August, OpenAIs Altman admitted the existence of a bubble. Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? he asked. My opinion is yes. Nonetheless, he added that OpenAI intends to invest trillions in additional data center infrastructure. That same month, OpenAI released a new version of ChatGPT built atop GPT-5, the latest update to its large language model. Once widely anticipated as a giant leap forward, it landed with a thud once users tried it and deemed it less than transformative. To Zitron, it was a classic example of the companys puffery exceeding its product road map. Two years ago, people were talking about GPT-5 like it was going to be AI Jesus, he says. I feel that OpenAI likely had to get something out the door. Arguing that Altmans stated plans for OpenAIsuch as building 250 gigawatts of data center capacity in eight yearsare impossible, Zitron continues to press the case that the company will run out of venture funding before reaching self-sufficiency. OpenAI is not building the AI industry, as this is capacity for one company that burns billions of dollars and has absolutely no path to profitability, he wrote in an October newsletter. This is a giant, selfish waste of money and time, one that will collapse the second that somebodys confidence wavers. OpenAIs failure, he contends, could take out other companies such as cloud-computing provider CoreWeave. It would also inflict serious damage on giants such as SoftBank, which led OpenAIs $40 billion investment round last March, and Nvidia, whose chips power most of the worlds generative AI. Citing one VCs estimate that AI funding could dry up within six quarters, Zitron has said the industry could face total collapse in early 2027. Even as the industry braces for a correction, Zitrons prediction that it will effectively cease to exist makes him an outlier. I just dont think that Ed makes a strong case that this is going to happen, says Timothy B. Lee, author of the newsletter Understanding AI. You dont need to buy Altmans utopian vision of intelligence too cheap to meter to accept the possibility that AI has a future. OpenAI going under would mean it never found a way to operate at a profit, regardless of any technological efficiencies, price adjustments, or new markets yet to come. In his newsletter and on his podcast, Zitron projects an air of ferocious certitude. In person, he is willing to toy with the notion that his prognostications might not pan out. Characterizing himself as a brokenhearted romantic when it comes to tech, he says hed welcome being proven wrongand would write about it. Itll be really annoying, and I really dont think itll happen, he emphasizes. But the only way to do this [work] honestly is to be prepared for that, to be willing for that to happen. As a commentator, Zitrons stock-in-trade is the gusto with which he dismantles assessments of AI he considers invalid. Now the only question is whether hell get to say he told us soor end up being his own ripest target.
Category:
E-Commerce
Sites : [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] next »