June 18, 2025

Puzzle Corner

Ready for a fresh set of puzzles? Click here for the July/August 2025 Puzzle Corner, brought to you by guest editor Ed Faulkner ’03. Send problems, solutions (by August 1), and comments to puzzlecorner@technologyreview.com. Editor emeritus Allan Gottlieb ’67 launched Puzzle Corner in 1966. Find back issues through 2022 at cs.nyu.edu/~gottlieb/tr and more recent back issues at technologyreview.com/puzzle-corner.

Marjorie Taylor Greene picked a fight with Grok

May 23, 2025
Last week, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok experienced a “bug” that made it tell users about the “white genocide” conspiracy theory in South Africa, even when prompted with questions that had nothing to do with the topic… and soon after, Grok expressed skepticism over the Holocaust death toll, which it chalked up to a “programming […]

OpenAI upgrades the AI model powering its Operator agent

May 23, 2025
OpenAI is updating the AI model powering Operator, its AI agent that can autonomously browse the web and use certain software within a cloud-hosted virtual machine. Soon, Operator will use a model based on o3, one of the latest in OpenAI’s o series of “reasoning” models. Previously, Operator relied on a custom version of GPT-4o. […]

Microsoft says its Aurora AI can accurately predict air quality, typhoons, and more

May 23, 2025
One of Microsoft’s latest AI models can accurately predict air quality, hurricanes, typhoons, and other weather-related phenomena, the company claims. In a paper published in the journal Nature and an accompanying blog post this week, Microsoft detailed Aurora, which the tech giant says can forecast atmospheric events with greater precision and speed than traditional meteorological […]