You're tuned in to Tech Beat. Here are the stories shaping the conversation today.
A new study out this week delivers a sobering finding about AI as a decision-making tool. Researchers found that people who received AI advice were three times less accurate in their answers but twice as confident. That gap between perceived and actual competence is the kind of thing that should give pause to anyone deploying AI in high-stakes environments.
On the geopolitical front, Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for AI development to remain open while also demanding that emergency response systems be built to keep the technology in check. It's a revealing tension — embracing AI as an economic engine while simultaneously acknowledging it carries risks serious enough to warrant a kill switch.
And in a quieter but genuinely meaningful moment for the open web, the last remaining MPEG-four Visual patent has officially expired. That format shaped a decade of digital video, and its patents were a persistent headache for developers and open-source projects alike. With that final claim gone, the codec enters the public domain fully and freely, closing a long chapter in the patent wars over digital media.
Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
