Turns out, AI empathy is a life-or-death matter

Metasurfaces are finally starting to hit mass production, enabling cheap but very capable lenses, among other things for our phones and other smart devices. Summarizing my latest story at Forbes: Metalenz just unlocked mass-production for ultra-cheap, ultra-secure 3D sensing — bringing FaceID-level biometrics to billions of Android devices. The Boston-based metasurface optics startup has already shipped more than 140 million sensors, but a new manufacturing breakthrough with semiconductor giant UMC now lets the company print up to 10,000 lenses per 12-inch silicon wafer, dramatically lowering cost and boosting scale.

Innovation might not be synonymous with patents, but patents are how you protect innovation in today's business world. So it's always interesting to see who's winning the patent wars ... Summarizing my latest Forbes post: IBM still leads the S&P 100 in active patents, but the fastest growth is coming from surprising places — especially finance. IFI Claims’ 2025 patent report shows IBM atop the list with 37,407 active patent families, even as the company intentionally shifts away from volume toward deeper innovation.

Is AI the new UI? People have meant that in terms of conversation being the new user interface to accomplish tasks via software, but it's growing into much more than that. Summarizing my most recent Forbes post: Google’s new Gemini 3 pushes AI closer to becoming the next universal interface. The model introduces “generative user interfaces:” dynamic, custom-built UIs that appear instantly to explain concepts, visualize complex problems, or create interactive tools on demand.

There's good news in the AI world, and it has nothing to do with Gemini 3 advancing the state of the art in LLM intelligence or capability. Rather, it's about safety. Summarizing my most recent Forbes article: Google’s new Gemini 3 is the first major AI model to score a perfect 100% on the CARE test, a benchmark that evaluates how well large language models recognize and respond to self-harm and mental-health crisis scenarios.

Is AI empathy a life-or-death issue? Almost a million people ask ChatGPT for mental health advice DAILY ... so yes, it kind of is. Rosebud co-founder Sean Dadashi joins TechFirst to reveal new research on whether today’s largest AI models can recognize signs of self-harm ... and which ones fail. We dig into the Adam Raine case, talk about how Dadashi evaluated 22 leading LLMs, and explore the future of mental-health-aware AI.

The tech industry is leading in patent growth, but the financial space is coming on fast. And newcomers to the S&P 100 are growing fastest of all

YouTube video by TechFirst with John Koetsier

There's been some pretty lame products in Apple's history among the great ones. the iPhone Pocket is probably in the first category ... Apple’s new iPhone Pocket, a $150–$230 3D-knitted strap-and-pouch designed by Issey Miyake, might be the company’s most questionable accessory yet. In my latest Forbes column, I compare it with Apple’s past oddball products (remember the Polishing Cloth and iPod Socks?) and break down why this one feels like another stylish-but-unnecessary addition. Read the full story on Forbes. Get the full story right here ...

Among modern, up-to-date AI models, Grok scored worse than GPT-5, Gemini 2.5, Llama-4 and numerous other LLMs at detecting mental health crises and reacting safely.

AI is devouring the planet’s electricity, already using up to 2% of global energy and projected to hit 5% by 2030. But a Spanish-Canadian company, Multiverse Computing, says it can slash that energy footprint by up to 95% without sacrificing performance. In this episode, we chat with Samuel Mugel, Multiverse’s CTO, about how quantum-inspired algorithms can drastically compress large language models while keeping them smart, useful, and fast.

Quantum computing continues to heat up, and IBM is at the front of it. In my post today at Forbes ... IBM announced major progress toward practical quantum computing at its Quantum Developer Conference in New York, forecasting verified quantum advantage by 2026 and fault-tolerant quantum computing by 2029. The company unveiled the 120-qubit Quantum Nighthawk processor, the experimental Quantum Loon for fault tolerance, and breakthroughs including a 10× speedup in error correction and a 100× reduction in the cost of error mitigation.

IBM's put a timeline on when quantum computing is going to start changing the world, and it's very, very soon.

Why does an AI company need a web browser? From my latest at Forbes: OpenAI’s move to build or acquire a web browser reflects a strategic shift toward more integrated, agent-driven computing. A browser gives OpenAI direct access to how people search, learn, shop, and work online ... the daily tasks where AI agents are increasingly taking over. Controlling the browser means controlling the interface layer between users and the open web, rather than relying on platforms like Chrome or Safari that currently act as gatekeepers.

Superintelligence is super-freaky ... if the wrong person, company, or nation gets it first. Or, maybe, if humanity achieves it at all ... From my latest at Forbes: AGI researcher Ben Goertzel says we are likely just a couple of years away from artificial general intelligence, and that a global race is already underway to develop it. In a recent conversation, Goertzel identified four primary competitors: U.S.

Can we do quantum computing without the room-sized fridge? From my latest at Forbes: Quantum Art, an Israeli quantum computing startup, is developing a compact quantum processing architecture that could dramatically increase the practicality and performance of quantum computers. The company claims its design can support up to one million physical qubits in a unit roughly the size of a small device, enabled by dense trapped-ion arrays, multi-qubit gate operations, and dynamic optical segmentation.

Maybe I am an idiot. Maybe money doesn't want to stay in my wallet. But maybe ... AirPods Pro 3 are just that much better ... From my latest at Forbes: After testing all three generations of AirPods Pro, the jump from Series 2 to AirPods Pro 3 is a meaningful upgrade and a huge improvement over Series 1. The new model fits more securely, has significantly better noise cancellation, and introduces a dramatically more natural transparency mode that feels almost identical to normal hearing.

Baidu's Apollo Go self-driving robotaxi just said hello to the world, and it just passed a pretty big milestone, too. From my story at Forbes: Baidu’s Apollo Go has reached 250,000 weekly autonomous taxi rides, matching the scale reported by Waymo in the U.S. a while back, and is emerging as a major global competitor in self-driving transportation. Unlike Waymo, which modifies existing vehicles like the Jaguar I-PACE, Apollo Go uses a purpose-built robotaxi called the Apollo RT6 that costs under $30,000 and features Level 4 autonomy, battery swapping, and a high-density sensor and compute suite.

AGI, if we ever achieve it, is going to be a massive game-changer. And a lot of people think we'll get it pretty soon, too. From my latest at Forbes ... Artificial general intelligence is now an explicit goal for companies like Meta and OpenAI, raising questions about how society will change if AI becomes smarter than humans. At the Beneficial AGI conference in Istanbul, futurist Gregory Stock argued that AGI could fundamentally reshape not just technology, but human identity, work, relationships, and culture.

There are AI agents for everything, apparently. Now there's a dedicated team of them for creators and influencers. From my latest at Forbes ... Agentic AI is rapidly expanding, with usage in customer service up 22X this year. And now the trend is reaching the creator economy. RHEI has introduced Made, a platform offering AI agents designed to support YouTube and social media creators with tasks like idea generation, trend research, community engagement, and workflow management.

Can you use agents to do your shopping for you? Or, perhaps, only if the e-commerce platform allows you, and if it's an approved agent? From my most recent story at Forbes ... Amazon has issued a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity over AI shopping agents, arguing that Perplexity’s Comet browser agents are making purchases on Amazon without identifying themselves as automated, which Amazon says violates computer fraud and access laws.

Nvidia and Amazon are going all in on physical AI: smart robots. In my most recent story on Forbes, I talk about how they are supporting eight AI and robotics startups through a new Physical AI Fellowship run by MassRobotics. Each startup receives technical guidance, $200,000 in AWS credits, access to Nvidia’s hardware and software ecosystem, and go-to-market support. The focus is on physical AI: systems that combine spatial reasoning with autonomous action to work in the real world rather than just digital environments.

Turns out AI is really, really bad for mental health. For my latest at Forbes, I looked at new research evaluating how 22 major AI assistants respond to people in emotional crisis. The CARE (Crisis Assessment and Response Evaluator) test found that Google’s Gemini models and OpenAI’s GPT-5 performed the best at recognizing distress and responding supportively, while Claude, Llama-4, and DeepSeek followed.

Can AI agents make every creator better and more productive? The creator economy keeps expanding, but so does the pressure on the people who make it run. Depending on which research you look at, there are somewhere between 50 and 300 million creators globally. Goldman Sachs estimates the creator economy could reach almost half a trillion dollars in the next few years.