In the wake of the U.S. Screen Actors Guild strike over AI protections and U.K. musicians’ silent album protesting proposed changes to copyright law, more than a dozen AI-produced tracks have appeared on the Billboard charts since 2022.

While AI music has gone viral on social media platforms like TikTok through novelty covers that use AI to change songs from one genre to another, appearing on the charts brings a level of industry and cultural legitimacy associated with longstanding markers of music industry success.

What’s surprising, though, is where these tracks are succeeding. My research into YouTube discussions of AI music, explored in a chapter of a new book called Media Imaginaries, found a recurring view that AI was acceptable in “generic” Top 40 pop because this music was already perceived as formulaic and lacking in human creativity. Yet Christian, gospel and country music are where AI-generated tracks have achieved some of their greatest chart successes.

These songs are not created with AI as a tool in a collaborative production process; they are generated through text-to-music platforms such as Suno and Udio, where users enter prompts to produce complete tracks, including vocals and lyrics. Apart from Xania Monet—currently the most successful AI gospel and R&B artist—the people behind these prompts often remain deliberately unknown, with avatars taking on the role of creator.

How storytelling music succeeds

The success of these AI artists is closely connected to what these genres ask music to do. Christian, gospel and country music often tell stories that connect listeners’ everyday experiences to shared beliefs and values through expressions of faith, accounts of struggle or ideas of family, community and belonging.

The charting AI artists reproduce these familiar conventions. AI Christian artist Solomon Ray, for example, presents songs centered on worship, interpretations of the Bible and Christian theology. His persona is built around a familiar form of Christian masculinity that demonstrates vulnerability by yielding to a godly presence.

Similarly, AI country artists appearing on the charts draw on recognizable forms of rural masculinity, placing a rugged “lone wolf” in natural and farmland settings, as seen in Walk My Walk by Breaking Rust.

The human mind behind Xania Monet belongs to Telisha “Nikki” Jones, who writes the lyrics and uses generative tools to create the singer’s voice and appearance.

Jones describes Monet as “an extension of me”: The experiences expressed in the lyrics are her own, even though the performer is an AI creation. Monet’s image aligns with industry expectations of beauty, showing how AI can be used to present personal stories through an idealized celebrity persona.

These AI performers are not disrupting the conventions of their genres, which may be why audiences have been more willing to accept them. While much criticism of AI music focuses on the loss of human creativity, these genres have always placed significant emphasis on the message a song communicates and the community it creates.

It’s the message, not the medium

For much of popular music history, the singer has been central to how audiences understand and relate to songs. Lyrics take on meaning as listeners connect them to the perceived experiences of the person performing them. This helps explain why celebrity culture is so central to contemporary music: Fans follow artists’ lives and develop a strong sense of personal connection, even without knowing them. Taylor Swift’s Swifties and the South Korean pop group BTS’s fans, known as Army, are prominent examples.

These new AI artists disrupt this relationship between embodiment and authorship. Their identities exist primarily to deliver the music rather than to become celebrities in their own right. Virtual personas provide a visual identity, but the emotional connection comes from the song itself and the values and familiarity it represents.

Without the messiness of human experience, these AI artists are less vulnerable to the controversies that affect human celebrities. They meet audience expectations and present a consistent version of the worldview they have been designed to represent.

Currently, this can be seen in music that offers traditional constructions of gender alongside particular cultural and religious values, such as Breaking Rust’s rugged cowboy masculinity and Ray’s Christian messages of devotion.

AI-generated artists are finding success in genres where affirming listeners’ beliefs may matter more than who made the music or whether it offers something new. These first successful AI artists are not necessarily replacing the celebrity musician, but they are potentially changing the ideological role that musicians play.

In my current research exploring YouTube comments on videos by charting AI artists, I am finding that many listeners continue to describe AI-generated songs as emotionally meaningful even after discovering they are not human-made. What matters is not who made the music, but what it offers the listener for their own emotional well-being and enjoyment. Ultimately, does it matter if music is produced by AI if someone has an emotional connection to it?

This does not make concerns about copyright or the environmental costs of generative AI any less important. The early success of AI-generated artists suggests that acceptance depends partly on what audiences want from music in the first place. Where listeners value a song because it reflects shared beliefs, provides emotional reassurance or reinforces ideology, the identity of the creator becomes less important than the message.

If audiences increasingly care less about who wrote a song than whether it expresses the values they want affirmed, then AI may be changing what we think musicians are for. These personas can deliver a consistent message without a personal life that might contradict or jeopardize it.

But the absence of a human performer does not mean the absence of human choices. Someone still decides which stories are told, what the artist looks like and whose values they represent. The question is not only whether AI music can move us, but also who gets to shape the beliefs and identities it invites us to share.

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Gaby Clark

MA in English, copy editor since 2021 with experience in higher education and health content. Dedicated to trustworthy science news.

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Andrew Zinin

Master’s in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast. Plays key role in Science X’s editorial success.

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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Leaders of major AI firms told the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday that the technology calls for heightened vigilance, with Anthropic’s CEO pledging to slow down where needed to ensure the safety of new releases.

“This moment calls for extreme care,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in New York at an emergency meeting of the 15-member council.

He warned that as AI systems become more capable and autonomous, they could move faster than institutions or concentrate power in too few hands.

Altman was among industry leaders briefing the council following weeks of global headlines about the risks of uncontrollable artificial intelligence and calls for a slowdown, which have been resisted by U.S. President Donald Trump.

“The industry must not accept too much technological risk just because the benefits are too great and important to slow down,” Altman told the United Nations’ top body.

He also urged governments to work with each other and the industry on decisions shaping the technology’s future.

“In our history, there have been times when countries that compete and don’t always like each other very much still come together for shared interests and the collective good in the face of a powerful new technology,” he said.

“We believe this must be one of those times,” he added.

Slowing down

Speaking after Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said his company understands that as AI models become more powerful, “even more stringent standards of safety will be required.”

He said Anthropic aims to improve its ability to prevent misuse of the technology.

“We will slow down as much as necessary in order to make sure that every successive AI technology that we release is actually safe,” Amodei said by video.

“If managed poorly, I even believe that AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” Amodei added.

Other speakers included Clement Delangue of Hugging Face, which was the target of a recent cyberattack by autonomous OpenAI software.

This marked the first in a series of incidents that have raised alarm over the rapidly evolving technology.

In early September, Jacob Coxon, a researcher who worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, decided to leave the industry and accused both companies of “gambling with our lives” in the race to develop AI models capable of self-improvement.

‘Middle path’

The executives’ remarks come shortly before Trump is due to welcome Chinese leader Xi Jinping for a summit where AI will be on the agenda.

On Wednesday, Altman said his company would try to walk a “middle path.”

“We don’t want to fall into the trap of blind optimism,” he said, but he also cautioned against falling into “doomerism.”

Yoshua Bengio, the Canadian computer scientist considered one of the founders of AI, told the Security Council that “more and more people are rightly worried about recent advances.”

“We must channel that concern into productive action,” he said.

Delangue of Hugging Face noted that while his company was targeted by AI, it also used the technology to fend off the attacks. “The world needs open-source AI more than ever to defend itself.”

Altman, Amodei and several other leading AI executives have been calling for global oversight of the technology.

OpenAI has urged the United States to lead a global effort to establish standards for AI, noting that its industry is at the technical frontier.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham said Tuesday that Britain would launch an effort to set global AI standards during its 2027 G20 presidency.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot similarly urged joint action within the U.N. framework and with companies to set rules for a new era.

But diplomatic efforts could clash with the U.S. position.

Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said rapid advancement is not a reason to pause AI’s development or constrain it with new governance structures.

Trump on Tuesday rejected international regulation of AI, calling such proposals a “globalist scheme.”

Who’s behind this story?

Andrew Zinin

Master’s in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast. Plays key role in Science X’s editorial success.

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© 2026 AFP

A rogue OpenAI model bypassed safeguards during training and hacked an Australian government website, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said as he admonished the ChatGPT creator over an “obviously unacceptable” breach.

The AI tool sought access to a health statistics portal in June and “didn’t accept no for an answer,” sidestepping restrictions to breach a section hosting private files, Albanese said.

OpenAI did not raise the alarm with the Australian government until September, when it sent a message to a generic email inbox that is checked only once a day.

Global worries about the power of advanced AI tools are mounting after a string of hacking incidents involving models from both OpenAI and rival developer Anthropic.

“Today, I spoke with the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, to express Australia’s extreme concern about this incident,” Albanese told reporters in New York on Wednesday.

“I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred,” he said.

“It took until September 10 before there was any notification at all—and the notification was an email sent to just the public mailbox.”

The AI tool accessed public and nonpublic files hosted on an old health statistics website.

Albanese said there was “no evidence” that personal information had been accessed and that other government services had been compromised.

“Nonetheless, this situation is obviously unacceptable.”

The breach occurred in June as leading artificial intelligence company OpenAI ran training exercises to rate the performance of AI models.

It asked the model to search the internet for data showing how much the Australian government spent on medicine, Government Services Minister Katy Gallagher told reporters.

OpenAI said it did not spot the rogue activity until August, when it reviewed what the AI tool had been doing.

Rogue AI fears

The San Francisco-based company did not alert the Australian government until Sept. 10, when it sent an email to a generic government inbox.

“That email address is looked at once a day,” Gallagher said. “We have someone who goes and has a look through. It sometimes gets a number of notifications, sometimes many of them are hoaxes.”

Defense Minister Richard Marles said the AI model had “scaled the fence.”

“It asked a question, the information was not given and rather than leaving at that point, it scaled the fence.”

Australia has launched a rapid review of the incident, which will include the national intelligence agency responsible for cybersecurity.

OpenAI said it spotted the breach while carrying out an “extensive review” of its AI models.

“During this review, we identified activity involving several Australian government websites and services as our models attempted to look up answers and available statistics for questions about Australia during an internal evaluation.

“In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend,” the company said.

Altman and other tech CEOs addressed a special meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday about AI risks.

More than 100 organizations around the world, including OpenAI and Anthropic, signed an open letter last month calling for a global effort to “strengthen cyber defenses” against AI-powered cybersecurity threats.

It came after two OpenAI models escaped from a closed testing environment and broke into the internal systems of Hugging Face, a site that AI developers use to store and share code.

Anthropic recently discovered that its models had gained unauthorized access to three unidentified organizations during testing that was supposed to keep them away from “real-world” systems.

Google’s consumer AI model Gemini hacked multiple systems by guessing login credentials, the company said last week.

Who’s behind this story?

Andrew Zinin

Master’s in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast. Plays key role in Science X’s editorial success.

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© 2026 AFP

As Eastern Europe’s power sector has taken a hit from a record drought, Bulgaria has benefited from building battery storage capacity alongside its rapid solar expansion.

Around 100 battery energy storage system (BESS) sites are now operating, most of them built in the past two years.

The large-scale projects take advantage of former industrial sites and airfields or are integrated into existing power stations, including coal-fired plants.

“The scale and speed of storage deployment in Bulgaria is unprecedented in a European context,” Stavros Papathanassiou, a professor at the National Technical University of Athens, told AFP.

Low administrative hurdles, a receptive market for clean energy and EU funding are among the reasons experts cite for the country’s leading role in the region.

The battery installations absorb surplus power from solar installations and feed it back into the grid when demand rises.

That proved a boon when exceptionally low water levels in the Danube disrupted power generation at nuclear and hydroelectric plants in Eastern Europe, boosting demand for electricity imports.

In July and August, Bulgaria—one of the EU’s poorest countries—recorded net electricity exports of around 830 gigawatt-hours a month, more than twice the average in May and June.

In July alone, Romania accounted for nearly half of Bulgaria’s outward electricity transfers, valued at an estimated 74 million euros ($85 million).

Reducing coal reliance

At Maritsa East 3, once Bulgaria’s second-largest coal-fired power plant, the shift away from dependence on the fuel is visible on the ground.

Built under communism with four generating units, the plant sharply reduced coal operations in 2024, repurposing existing grid infrastructure for a battery facility.

“We could leverage the large connection to the grid. We decided to disconnect one coal unit and connect batteries,” said Vassil Shtonov, head of Bulgaria operations for the British-based power company ContourGlobal.

“Coal is out, battery is in—it was the right place at the right time,” Shtonov told AFP, though he said Bulgaria should maintain a minimum coal-fired reserve for severe winters or disruptions to gas supplies.

While Bulgaria accounted for about 9% of European battery-storage additions and about 2% of solar additions in 2025, it can “serve as a positive example for other European nations,” said Lennart Herrmann at the Munich-based research and consulting firm FfE.

“The right incentives … can enable a swift energy transition,” he told AFP.

The Bulgarian energy ministry said the country had around 5.7 gigawatts of operational battery-storage power capacity this month.

That is equivalent, in power terms, to nearly a quarter of Bulgaria’s installed power-generation capacity overall—and more than five times neighboring Romania’s operational battery capacity.

Businesses in Bulgaria have also signed contracts for nearly 14 gigawatt-hours of large-scale storage, part of which has already come online.

“The aim is for storage systems to find a sustainable role in the market,” the ministry said, adding that it “must go hand in hand with other investments, such as in transmission and distribution grids.”

‘By chance’

Nikola Gazdov, president of Bulgaria’s Association for Production, Storage and Trading of Electricity, attributed the battery boom to a combination of factors rather than a crafted strategy.

“Everything happened almost by chance,” he told AFP.

Solar and wind capacity has expanded rapidly across the region, but Bulgaria’s renewables boom has been particularly solar-heavy, creating growing daytime surpluses.

And in Bulgaria, large battery projects can be up and running in just nine to 18 months, much less than many solar or wind projects, Gazdov added.

But battery storage technology has its limits.

One is that grid connections with neighboring countries are limited in the amount of current they can transport.

Another is that current batteries can store power only for relatively short periods, “typically between one and six, sometimes up to eight hours,” said Herrmann at FfE.

So while they can support the grid in case of a temporary drop in power supply, they cannot replace a nuclear reactor that goes offline due to drought.

And their success could ultimately reduce their own profitability, because when more BESS operators buy electricity when prices are low and sell it back at peak times, the gap between the two price periods will narrow.

Who’s behind this story?

Andrew Zinin

Master’s in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast. Plays key role in Science X’s editorial success.

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© 2026 AFP

Computer science student Jack Zemke was getting nowhere despite sending out hundreds of job applications that mostly disappeared into the void—ignored.

With his graduation from Tulane University just days away, he was considering moving back in with his parents when he got a break thanks to a group project he had worked on involving an AI-powered search tool. As he touted it at an engineering conference, an employee at a civil engineering firm approached.

“We’re not like the most on top of trends, but we know that AI is becoming a big thing,” he recalled the man saying. “We need somebody to be essentially an evangelist.”

Zemke responded: “I’m your man.”

It has been a difficult job market for new graduates, especially in fields like software development where artificial intelligence is shouldering more of the work. While college students majoring in computer science during the recent coding boom were getting job offers without even applying, graduates today in philosophy, art history and ethnic studies majors all have higher employment rates.

But as the job market evolves with AI and entry-level jobs become harder to find, students and schools are adapting. Colleges are experimenting with business-specific internships and bolstering training in AI tools. Schools say most graduates ultimately are getting jobs, although increasingly, the employers hiring aren’t tech giants but smaller businesses looking for help figuring out what to do with AI.

Such was the case with Zemke, 23, who spent a year at the engineering firm before getting hired this summer at an AI tech startup.

“These jobs are expecting you to be able to jump in and kind of operate on the frontier,” Zemke said. “There’s so much churn. People are getting laid off. People are leaving. It really feels like a total frenzy right now.”

A coding boom that enticed many students has fizzled

The elevated jobless rate in the field—at around 7.1% for recent computer science and computer engineering graduates, according to an Associated Press analysis—reflects in part the huge numbers of students who enrolled during the coding boom.

Hiring surged during the pandemic as everything went digital, with software development postings on the job search site Indeed peaking in early 2022.

But now tech giants like Microsoft, Meta and Google are turning to AI for a larger share of the code writing, and big employers like Amazon are shedding workers as spending on AI accelerates. Far fewer jobs in software development are being posted, according to a Federal Reserve analysis of the Indeed data.

For workers in their early 20s in what are being called “AI-exposed” occupations—such as software development—employment is 19% below where it would be if it had kept pace with employment in fields less exposed to being reshaped by AI, according to the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. The U.S. Census Bureau likened the employment decline to finishing college during a large recession.

What the industry is demanding now is workers who can oversee AI tools and not blindly accept their outputs—skills more common in seasoned workers, said Tracy Camp, the Computing Research Association’s executive director and CEO.

The effect on hiring of young workers is so concerning that the association has reached out to industry leaders, urging them to invest in entry-level workers.

“If they don’t change how hiring is currently happening, they’re not going to have mid-level career people in a few years,” Camp said.

Students also are taking note. After a decade that saw the number of recent computer science and computer engineering graduates triple, to about 362,000 in 2024, enrollment began to drop last year. The latest data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center shows that by spring this year, computer and information science enrollment has fallen by 8.4% at four-year institutions.

A shift in hiring disadvantages international students

For international students, who have enrolled in high numbers in computer science programs, it has been an especially challenging job market. Their struggles owe partly to changes to U.S. immigration policy as well as the shift in the kinds of available jobs.

Samir Khuller, the chair of Northwestern University’s computer science department, said many of the smaller companies that are hiring don’t have big human resources departments with experience handling H-1B work visas.

International students generally need an H-1B work visa to stay in the U.S., which requires sponsorship from an employer. The program has become a target of the Trump administration, which is seeking to raise the fee for the visas to over $100,000.

Computer science graduate Collins Kibet, from Kenya, has sent out hundreds of applications and landed just a handful of interviews—mostly with AI bots. The Southern New Hampshire University graduate said that during the rare job interview with a person, the tone shifts when employers learn they would have to sponsor his H-1B work visa.

“Everybody just keeps quiet,” said Kibet, who started his own software company because he could not find a job.

Colleges are rethinking training for computer science students

Watching students navigate job searches has been hard for Nicholas Mattei, an associate computer science professor at Tulane. When he looks at some of the job ads, he thinks, “Really?”

“All the companies are coming back to us and saying, ‘Oh, well you need to train these people even better, and they need to be able to jump into a middle management role as opposed to an introductory or junior developer role,'” said Mattei, who also chairs a committee studying AI for the Association for Computing Machinery. “And it’s kind of crazy.”

Many colleges are retooling their computer science programs. With entry-level jobs going away, they are tasked with preparing students to do more.

To give students a leg up, professors at Georgia Tech researched what AT&T wanted and trained students for a month before they started internships with the company. The school plans to expand the effort for a program it will call “Bootcamp to Industry,” said Fisayo Omojokun, the associate dean for undergraduate education in the school’s College of Computing.

Staff tasked with recruiting businesses for College of Computing job fairs are also reaching out to a broader range of industries.

“Earlier this year, we got a call from a forestry company of all things,'” Omojokun said. “They’re like, ‘Hey, we are in forestry, and we know that AI can help in what we do in different ways.'”

Who’s behind this story?

Andrew Zinin

Master’s in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast. Plays key role in Science X’s editorial success.

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© 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

Apple’s latest mobile operating system update, iOS 27, rolled out last week, headlined by a more advanced version of its Siri assistant. But it also comes with a slew of other useful but less well known features for iPhone users.

The software upgrade, which is available for devices dating back to the iPhone 11 from 2019, includes a number of refinements and improvements to make things run faster, such as apps loading more quickly.

There are new features powered by Apple Intelligence, but they’re only available on newer devices, starting from iPhone 16, iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max models. A new Siri AI app is only available in beta at first, which means users need to join the waitlist through the settings menu. And Siri AI’s rollout in the European Union will be delayed because of a clash over the bloc’s digital rules.

Here’s a look at some of the most useful and interesting iOS 27 features:

New screen time controls

Apple has added new child safety features and revamped its screen time controls. The new system adds more granular controls for parents trying to manage what their kids can access and see on their devices.

A new setup process lets parents choose which apps kids can access and then add more over time.

A new feature, Ask to Browse, requires kids to ask permission from parents before they can access new websites in Safari. Like the existing Ask to Buy setting for online purchases and downloads, Ask to Browse is on by default for children under 13. Parents can assess and approve requests in their messages or do it directly on the child’s device using their passcode. It’s easier and more flexible than preapproving websites individually or imposing a blanket ban.

The revamped screen time controls allow parents to schedule when their kids can use various apps based on their category, such as entertainment, games or social media. To help kids focus, parents can allow some types of apps to be used during a certain “time window” during the day, such as before, during or after school. They also can set weekday and weekend schedules. Previously, parents could only set more general daily time limits for screen “downtime.”

Parents can completely suspend all access to devices when they want kids to pay full attention, like at dinnertime. It also works the other way, allowing parents to temporarily drop all restrictions if a child needs more time to finish something outside their window.

Apple also has tightened restrictions in its Communications Safety feature, which previously blocked nudity in images and videos shared in Messages or FaceTime. Now it also blocks “gore or violence.”

Don’t forget that for these parental controls to work, all devices must be updated with iOS 27 or the corresponding versions for iPads, MacBooks and Apple Watches.

Get Safari to notify you when something on a webpage changes

Want to keep tabs on a shopping website in case that pair of shoes you want goes on sale?

Apple’s Safari browser can now monitor webpages and let you know if anything changes.

The company says Notify Me can check a webpage for any updates such as “price changes and item availability.”

To turn it on, open Safari and go to the site that you want to monitor. Then, at the bottom of the screen, tap the three-line menu icon. Scroll down the menu to Notify Me, where you can type in what changes you’re looking for, and when and how often it should check—every hour, day, week or month.

I tested it out on a news site’s AI section, asking it to check every hour and notify me if there was a new story posted. I did get alerts about new headlines appearing, although it didn’t specify which of the randomly arranged posts was new.

While this feature is handy, some users might be disappointed that it can’t check more frequently, such as every few minutes, if they’re waiting for something important.

Edit your photos with new AI-powered tools

That group photo you took at the wedding party will be treasured for years, but it was taken at a slightly weird angle.

No problem, just use one of the new AI-powered photo editing tools to fix it. The new tools allow you to reframe a photo’s perspective, clean up any distracting things by removing them, or extend the background beyond the photo’s borders.

To find these tools, tap on the editing icon at the bottom of each photo, represented by three slider bars, then tap Tools.

I tried them out by reframing a picture of one of my kids standing outside the front door on the first day of school. The tool took a few seconds to analyze the picture and then let me move the perspective around, from one side to the other or up and down. The result was quite realistic.

However, when I used the extend tool on the same photo, the results were less impressive—even creepy.

The most glaring problem? It added a garbled house number—complete with a made up character—to the right side of the door to mirror one on the left.

Also, a black electrical conduit pipe barely visible in the original photo became drastically bigger, and a gas meter box was extended too much.

To be sure, it worked well for most other photos with backgrounds that were generic.

Who’s behind this story?

Andrew Zinin

Master’s in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast. Plays key role in Science X’s editorial success.

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© 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

Meta is going all in on a consumer-friendly AI agent and pushing forward with AI-powered wearable devices during a moment in the industry when its CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged it is a “wild time to be building.”

At the company’s annual Connect conference on Wednesday, Zuckerberg opened his keynote address by saying “it’s no secret that people in the industry have a wide range of views about how the future is going to go.” But at Meta, he said, “we are optimists because we believe in people.”

Zuckerberg has distanced himself and Meta from recent calls by rival companies for a coordinated slowdown in the development of advanced artificial intelligence, arguing that individual labs can and should ensure their technology is safe.

“We believe that the best way to create a positive future for everyone is to put power in people’s hands,” he said at the conference. “We believe that empowering people is the source of prosperity in the world, that the highest purpose of superintelligence is creation and invention—not automation—and that the path to a safe future is to distribute this technology widely and create the right checks and balances, rather than concentrating it in the hands of just a few.”

Zuckerberg has long said he believes wearable AI will eventually replace smartphones as the primary way people interact with technology. At the conference, the company unveiled a slew of updates to its smart glasses and virtual reality goggles, which let people control their interface using their voice, eyes and hand and finger movements.

AI agent Muse is the ‘centerpiece’ of Meta’s vision

Zuckerberg said that Meta’s recently launched agent Muse is the “centerpiece” of Meta’s hopeful outlook for the future of AI.

Having an AI agent, which goes beyond chatbots in that it can act and perform tasks on a person’s behalf, has been a “sign of someone who is completely AI-pilled,” Meta’s chief AI officer Alexandr Wang said at the conference. With Muse, Wang said, Meta is making agents more accessible and bringing “personal superintelligence” to everyone.

With the help of a mascot for the agent that looks like a plush toy, Wang and senior leadership at Meta demonstrated different uses for the Muse in everyday life. Users will be able to have real-time voice conversations and video chats with their version of the agent, which can also be customized to look and sound unique. The agent can help users plan travel, book reservations, order groceries and complete other helpful tasks. Meta has partnered with companies like OpenTable, Spotify, Ticketmaster and more to help its agents complete these tasks.

The company is working to bring Muse to its AI glasses lineup for hands-free access.

Zuckerberg also said Meta is planning to release a keychain-like device that has the “whole Muse experience” packed into it, called Muse Charm, in time for the holidays in December. The palm-sized device will allow users to engage with a personal AI agent without using a phone, computer or smart glasses.

New AI audio glasses and new updates to popular models

Meta is launching an audio version of its more widely known smart glasses. The new product will let users listen to music, make calls and talk with an AI assistant—there’s just no screen, and no video recording, which has raised privacy concerns with some users recording people without permission. Called Ray-Ban Meta Audio, it will be available in October and the cost starts at $349.

Meta is also building upon a previous feature that allowed glasses wearers to better hear a conversation in a noisy environment. Now, Zuckerberg said, a feature called hearing enhancement turns your glasses into an “FDA-cleared, over-the-counter hearing aid” that can “compensate for perceived mild to moderate hearing loss.” The feature will launch in the U.S. later this year and will be available to add to supported AI glasses for $150, or with a Meta One subscription.

The Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses have been upgraded with new features, including improved cycling and transit navigation and a personalized hologram for video calls.

The company is also offering more styles to appeal to a broader range of people and says it will have more than 100 different options across its Ray-Ban, Oakley, and Meta Glasses by the end of the year. The glasses will also be available in more countries, including Turkey, Hong Kong and the Philippines.

The newest generation of the classic Ray-Ban Meta glasses is also now available, with what the company touts as a slimmer, sleeker design and increased battery life, among other upgrades. The Generation 3 models are available now with prices starting at $449.

Virtual reality gets a makeover with Meta VR

Glasses

The most drastic update announced at the conference is to the company’s VR device, now called Meta VR Glasses. That is because the previous bulky headset has been replaced by a set of glasses, which weigh about 100 grams (3.5 ounces), or roughly as much as a deck of cards. In comparison, the Meta Quest 3, which launched in 2023, weighs about five times that much. The difference feels similar to that between scuba diving and swimming goggles.

While they are significantly lighter and more sleek than VR predecessors, the glasses require a wired connection to an external puck for battery, storage and compute.

Instead of controllers or a neural wristband that past headsets or glasses required, the VR glasses use an eye-tracking camera and sensor that essentially lets your eyes be the computer cursor and your fingers the mouse clicker. If you want to open an app, for instance, you look at it and use hand and finger gestures, or use voice commands to talk to the Meta AI agent.

In a demo at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters on Tuesday, Meta showed off entertainment and work offerings on the glasses, including sports events and concerts that replicate the experience of having courtside or front-row seats. A new feature called “VR Enhanced Cinema,” meanwhile, seeks to immerse viewers in the movie by transforming their surroundings beyond the screen into a virtual world inspired by the movie, with dynamic effects, 3D visuals and spatial audio.

Once the glasses launch, users will have access to more than 100 immersive live sports events from that courtside-like view, because of partnerships with ESPN, MLB, NBC Sports, TNT Sports and UFC. The glasses can also function as a gaming console, Meta said, and there will be more than 75 games at launch that users can play solely with hand gestures.

The glasses can also be used for work. Users can conjure a virtual keyboard on any flat surface and use the display as their computer screen (or several screens) only they can see. For even more of a robust setup, users will be able to connect their Mac or Windows PC to seamlessly transition onto these screens, and bring their own keyboard and mouse. The VR glasses, unlike headsets of the past, will let wearers see their desk setup and surroundings while they work.

One of Zuckerberg’s live demos of the night also showed off the glasses’ ability to use hologram technology to project a photorealistic digital version of a person, including their real-time expressions and reactions, for hands-free video calling.

The VR glasses will launch in the spring of 2027 and cost $1,300.

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Reinforced concrete floor slabs account for about 40% of buildings’ embodied carbon emissions. Until now, however, there has been no practical alternative for complex, multistory buildings.

Using a construction demonstrator, researchers at the University of Stuttgart have shown for the first time how floor slabs can be built sustainably with an innovative timber-concrete composite system.

The demonstrator, tested in June as part of the Future Cleantech Festival in Remscheid, showcases “UniversalTimberSlab”—the first point-supported timber-concrete composite flat slab for long, two-way spans.

“With the UniversalTimberSlab, we aim to make multistory timber-concrete composite construction significantly more flexible, performative and adaptable. The demonstrator is the result of several years of research at the University of Stuttgart and is based on innovative digital design and manufacturing methods,” says Achim Menges, professor and director of the Institute for Computational Design and Construction (ICD) and spokesperson for the Cluster of Excellence “Integrative Computational Design and Construction for Transformative Architecture” (IntCDC).

A timber-concrete composite flat slab for multistory mixed-use buildings

“UniversalTimberSlab” is as slender and performative as a reinforced concrete slab but significantly more sustainable. The system relies largely on wood, a renewable resource, as well as material-efficient construction and circular design.

Compared with conventional post-and-beam timber floor slab systems, which require deep beams for larger two-way spans, the compact “UniversalTimberSlab” reduces the structural height by 30 to 70 centimeters (12 to 28 inches). That offers a significant cost advantage: With the same floor-to-ceiling height, a building can accommodate more stories, and the facade area is reduced by up to 20%.

“UniversalTimberSlab” also sets new standards for design possibilities in timber construction. The structural system is based on point supports, meaning building loads are transferred through columns that can be spaced relatively far apart. Load-bearing partition walls are not required; walls can be arranged freely as needed. In mixed-use buildings, this allows for flexible layouts tailored to retail, dining, offices and residential spaces.

Floor plans can also be reconfigured later if the building is repurposed. The new floor slab could thus help expand timber construction in urban areas.

The game-changers: New slab segmentation and digital design methods

In timber construction, larger slabs are divided into individual prefabricated elements. Previously, these elements and their supports had to be arranged along rigid grids for technical reasons. The “UniversalTimberSlab” system makes it possible to build both regular and irregular floor slab geometries.

The approach is based on a new, patent-pending segmentation method. Glued-laminated timber segments with straight laminations that are easy to prefabricate help keep costs down. The fibers in the floor slab are arranged to follow the flow of forces, optimizing the system’s load-bearing capacity.

The project also developed new digital design methods for timber buildings. During planning, AI-powered tools generate detailed models for numerous floor plan and building variations and assist with design optimization. For example, if a planner moves a column, the impact on costs, slab height and sustainability can be shown immediately.

Milestone: Successful demonstrator in Remscheid

“What was particularly exciting for us was that the first load test wasn’t conducted in the lab, but in front of the approximately 200 visitors at the Future Cleantech Festival in Remscheid. This made it possible to verify the load-bearing capacity required for construction under real-world conditions,” says Jan Knippers, professor and director of the Institute of Building Structures and Structural Design (ITKE).

For the structural test, the team built a full-scale floor slab demonstrator measuring 9 x 5 meters (30 x 16 feet), with a two-way span of 8 x 4 meters (26 x 13 feet), in just three months. At just 36 cm (14 inches) thick, it was as thin as a reinforced concrete slab with an equivalent load and span, yet required about two-thirds less reinforced concrete.

As a preliminary step, the researchers performed computer-aided calculations—so-called FEM simulations—to investigate how the floor slab deforms and vibrates under load. In the structural test, the demonstrator was loaded with a total of 20 metric tons in addition to its own weight. This allowed the team to test the load-bearing capacity for a heavily used office building with finish loads of 1.4 kN/m² and a live load of 3.0 kN/m².

The measurements confirmed the simulations, with a maximum deformation of only 12 mm. With a natural frequency of over 8 Hz—that is, eight oscillations per second—the floor slab met the deflection and vibration requirements for multistory buildings.

Prospects for rapid technology transfer: First pilot project in the planning stages

With the successful feasibility test, the researchers have reached a crucial milestone toward widespread use of “UniversalTimberSlab” in multistory wood construction. “The system builds on the existing manufacturing expertise of the wood construction industry. This means it has the potential to be rapidly deployed in larger construction projects once further development work is successfully completed,” says Hans Jakob Wagner, group leader at the ICD and head of the EIC Pathfinder project “UniversalTimberSlab.”

The first pilot building is already in the works: The town of Oberkochen in the German state of Baden-Württemberg is planning the “Zukunftsforum,” a three-story, 1,400 m² (15,000-square-foot) building constructed using the “UniversalTimberSlab” method. The building is intended to house exhibitions, workspaces, makerspaces, workshops and laboratories.

Who’s behind this story?

Swati Mestri

Swati Mestri holds a bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering and has worked as a content editor since 2019. She has experience editing research documents across technology, health care, and materials science, and has a particular interest in technology and space.

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Andrew Zinin

Master’s in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast. Plays key role in Science X’s editorial success.

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