Tesla’s Layoffs Won’t Solve Its Growing Pains
This week has been one of Tesla’s worst. The company has cut 10 percent of its workforce, from sales advisers to engineers—the biggest round of layoffs in the company’s history. Two top executives—vice president of public policy and business development,…
Google Fires 28 Workers for Protesting Cloud Deal With Israel
Google fired twenty-eight employees Wednesday after they participated in protests against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud contract with Israel’s government that also includes Amazon. Workers at both companies have claimed the deal makes advanced technology available to Israel’s security…
Luxury Airbnb High-Rises Are Reshaping Miami’s Skyline
West Eleventh residences, a luxury building in downtown Miami slated to break ground this summer, promises “endless indulgences.” It will feature an entertainment center, food hall, and a resort pool with private lounges—no amenity is spared. But these condos are…
Google Workers Detained By Police for Protesting Cloud Contract with Israel
Nine Google workers were removed by police from company offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, late Tuesday after staging an hours-long sit-in protest against a cloud contract with Israel’s government. The Sunnyvale protest occupied the office of Thomas Kurian,…
Google Workers Protest Cloud Contract With Israel’s Government
Dozens of Google employees began occupying company offices in New York City and Sunnyvale, California, on Tuesday in protest of the company’s $1.2 billion contract providing cloud computing services to the Israeli government. The sit-in, organized by the activist group…
Airchat Is Silicon Valley’s Latest Obsession
Ravikant said most of the funding for Airchat has come from his own fund, as well as from Jeff Fagnan, a founding partner at Accomplice Ventures. “[OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman threw in a check, kind of blindly,” Ravikant said. He…
Crypto FOMO Is Back. So Are the Scams
An analysis performed on behalf of WIRED by crypto auditing company Hacken identified red flags in the token’s underlying code that might in some circumstances betray a scam. Those included the absence of a function that prevents the issuer from…
Welcome to the Age of Technofeudalism
The tech giants have overthrown capitalism. That’s the argument of former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, who became famous trying to defend debt-laden Greece from its German creditors. Varoufakis has never quite regained the notoriety of 2015. But he has…
Tech Leaders Once Cried for AI Regulation. Now the Message Is ‘Slow Down’
The other night I attended a press dinner hosted by an enterprise company called Box. Other guests included the leaders of two data-oriented companies, Datadog and MongoDB. Usually the executives at these soirees are on their best behavior, especially when…
Eric Schmidt Warned Against China’s AI Industry. Emails Show He Also Sought Connections to It
In November 2019, the US government’s National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), an influential body chaired by former Google CEO and executive chairman Eric Schmidt, warned that China was using artificial intelligence to “advance an autocratic agenda.” Just two…
No One Actually Knows How AI Will Affect Jobs
Forget artificial intelligence breaking free of human control and taking over the world. A far more pressing concern is how today’s generative AI tools will transform the labor market. Some experts envisage a world of increased productivity and job satisfaction;…
Sarcophagus Is a Dead Man’s Switch for Your Crypto Wallet
The system, says Hamilton, is designed to be “anti-fragile,” meaning it depends on no party’s good will to achieve its end. Nobody but the originator and recipient have access to the contents of the file, all other parties are financially…
Rent a Yacht in Saint Tropez to Watch Beaty
Yacht in Saint Tropez Saint Tropez is synonymous with celebrity visitors, a yachting culture, and all things luxurious. Rent a yacht to discover secluded coves, beautiful beaches, and stunning coastal landscapes for a truly memorable vacation. Sail along the dazzling…
How to Stop Your Data From Being Used to Train AI
On its help pages, OpenAI says ChatGPT web users without accounts should navigate to Settings and then uncheck Improve the model for everyone. If you have an account and are logged in through a web browser, select ChatGPT, Settings, Data…
Students Are Likely Writing Millions of Papers With AI
Students have submitted more than 22 million papers that may have used generative AI in the past year, new data released by plagiarism detection company Turnitin shows. A year ago, Turnitin rolled out an AI writing detection tool that was…
Beeper Took On Apple’s iMessage Dominance. Now It’s Been Acquired
During the early days of the pandemic, Migicovsky became fixated on fragmented messaging—the generally recognized fact that most people have to use a variety of different apps to keep in touch with their contacts. Migicovsky and Murray started building a…
The Internet Archive Just Backed Up an Entire Caribbean Island
Aruba’s colonial history also meant documents were spread all over the place. “Our collection was scattered,” says Edric Croes, the head of archival conservation and management at the National Archives of Aruba. There were works to be scanned across the…
How I Became a Python Programmer—and Fell Out of Love With the Machine
The difficulty with any new programming language is the sharp learning curve, all that drudgery and bashing your forehead into the keyboard. There was no Codecademy or Stack Overflow in those days. We bought books from the likes of O’Reilly…
OpenAI’s GPT Store Is Triggering Copyright Complaints
For the past few months, Morten Blichfeldt Andersen has spent many hours scouring OpenAI’s GPT Store. Since it launched in January, the marketplace for bespoke bots has filled up with a deep bench of useful and sometimes quirky AI tools….
Crypto Magnate Do Kwon Found Liable for Multibillion-Dollar Fraud
The defense attempted to draw a distinction between the failure of Terraform’s crypto assets, whose risk profile it implied was well understood by investors, and the acts of fraud alleged by the SEC. “Failure doesn’t equal fraud,” David Patton, attorney…
This AI Startup Wants You to Talk to Houses, Cars, and Factories
“The physical world is where we have most of our problems, because it is so complex and fast moving that things are beyond our perception to fully understand,” says Brandon Barbello, a cofounder who is also Archetype’s COO. “We put…
A TikTok Whistleblower Got DC’s Attention. Do His Claims Add Up?
Despite not holding a senior position, Goziker claims that his main job at TikTok was “overseeing” Project Texas to ensure the social media app’s plan to secure US user data would be effective. The goal was to implement a set…
To Build a Better AI Supercomputer, Let There Be Light
GlobalFoundries, a company that makes chips for others, including AMD and General Motors, previously announced a partnership with Lightmatter. Harris says his company is “working with the largest semiconductor companies in the world as well as the hyperscalers,” referring to…
The Deaths of Effective Altruism
My real hope is for the young people I know who truly want to work for a better world. They’re craving to do something meaningful, like poverty relief or pandemic preparation or AI safety. That’s so admirable, and they’re so…
He Emptied an Entire Crypto Exchange Onto a Thumb Drive. Then He Disappeared
Faruk was born in February 1994, the youngest of three. He was inseparable from his brother, Güven, and sister, Serap. They grew up camping, playing video games, and cooking together. Friends always pointed out their shared sense of humor. His…
Here’s How Generative AI Depicts Queer People
Another potential strategy to diversify the output from AI models is for developers to add guardrails and modify user prompts, nudging the software toward inclusivity. OpenAI appears to have taken this approach. When I asked Dall-E 3 via ChatGPT to…
Apple Store Employees Say Coworkers Were Disciplined for Supporting Palestinians
Nearly 300 current and former Apple employees have published an open letter alleging that several retail and corporate employees of the company have been disciplined or “wrongfully terminated” for expressing support for Palestinian people through pins, bracelets, or keffiyeh. The…
The Science of Crypto Forensics Survives a Court Battle—for Now
On March 12, Russian-Swedish national Roman Sterlingov was found guilty of money laundering conspiracy and other violations by a federal jury in Washington, DC, for having operated Bitcoin Fog, a service criminals used to launder what authorities claim was hundreds…
TikTok Shop’s Era of Super Subsidies Is Ending
The days of buying ultracheap stuff on TikTok Shop may be winding down. Starting today, the fees TikTok charges sellers increase from 2 percent to 6 percent of the price of each order. They will creep up to 8 percent…
The White House Puts New Guardrails on Government Use of AI
The US government issued new rules Thursday requiring more caution and transparency from federal agencies using artificial intelligence, saying they are needed to protect the public as AI rapidly advances. But the new policy also has provisions to encourage AI…
Bug Zappers Are Swarming on Amazon
Call it a bug zapper, not a feature. Data from Fakespot, a service owned by Mozilla that helps consumers spot fake reviews and scams on shopping sites, shows a bizarre rise in the number of listings for bug zappers on…
OpenAI Can Re-Create Human Voices—but Won’t Release the Tech Yet
Voice synthesis has come a long way since 1978’s Speak & Spell toy, which once wowed people with its state-of-the-art ability to read words aloud using an electronic voice. Now, using deep-learning AI models, software can create not only realistic-sounding…
How to Resist the Temptation of AI When Writing
Your local public library is a great source of free information, journals, and databases (even ones that generally require a subscription and include embargoed research). For example, your search should include everything from health databases (Sage Journals, Scopus, PubMed) to…
Screen Time for Kids Is Fine! Unless It's Not
Two new books offer radically different approaches to how people should think about smartphones and social media.
Here’s Proof the AI Boom Is Real: More People Are Tapping ChatGPT at Work
Ever since the rollout of ChatGPT in November 2022, many people in science, business, and media have been obsessed with AI. A cursory look at my own published work during that period fingers me as among the guilty. My defense…
Oregon’s Breakthrough Right-to-Repair Bill Is Now Law
Oregon governor Tina Kotek yesterday signed the state’s Right to Repair Act, which will push manufacturers to provide more repair options for their products than any other state so far. The law, like those passed in New York, California, and…
FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried Sentenced to 25 Years in Prison
A US federal judge in the Southern District of New York has sentenced Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, to 25 years in prison. Last November, at the end of a month-long trial, Bankman-Fried—known colloquially as SBF—was found…
The Baltimore Bridge Collapse Is About to Get Even Messier
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, the global supply chain and US coastal infrastructure collided in the worst possible way. An enormous container ship, the Dali, slammed into a support of the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore, crumpling…
Inside the Creation of DBRX, the World’s Most Powerful Open Source AI Model
This past Monday, about a dozen engineers and executives at data science and AI company Databricks gathered in conference rooms connected via Zoom to learn if they had succeeded in building a top artificial intelligence language model. The team had…
A Deepfake Nude Generator Reveals a Chilling Look at Its Victims
In 2023, Newman says, NCMEC received about 4,700 reports that “somehow connect to generative AI technology.” “Pathetic Bros” People who want to create and save deepfake nude images on the site are asked to log in using either a Coinbase,…
Meta Kills a Crucial Transparency Tool At the Worst Possible Time
Earlier this month, Meta announced that it would be shutting down CrowdTangle, the social media monitoring and transparency tool that has allowed journalists and researchers to track the spread of mis- and disinformation. It will cease to function on August…
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Here Comes the Flood of Plug-In Hybrids
Last week, the Biden administration made it official: American cars are really going electric. The US Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule, long in the works, that will require automakers selling in the United States to dramatically boost the number…
The EU Targets Apple, Meta, and Alphabet for Investigations Under New Tech Law
Apple is among three tech giants being investigated for failing to comply with the European Union’s new competition rules, in another blow to the embattled smartphone maker. Apple was the primary focus of an EU press conference on Monday morning….
The Apple Antitrust Case and the ‘Stigma’ of the Green Bubble
Legal experts say this social stigma argument will need much stronger support to hold up in court, because it doesn’t fit with traditional definitions of antitrust. “What is Apple actually precluding here? It’s almost like a coolness factor when a…
Large Language Models’ Emergent Abilities Are a Mirage
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Two years ago, in a project called the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark, or BIG-bench, 450 researchers compiled a list of 204 tasks designed to test the capabilities of large…
Reddit Stock Surges on Its First Day of Trading
A big concern ahead of the public listing was that Reddit, the platform that gave birth to the memestocks of 2021, could also suffer the wild price swings caused by large numbers of investors coordinating their strategy over social media,…
One Man’s Army of Streaming Bots Reveals a Whole Industry’s Problem
A man in Denmark was sentenced to 18 months in prison today for using fake accounts to trick music streaming services into paying him 2 million Danish kroner ($290,000) in royalties. The unusual case reveals a weak spot in the…
4 Internal Apple Emails That Helped the DOJ Build Its Case
Apple uses the dominance of the iPhone to illegally suppress competition in ways that harm consumers, the US Department of Justice alleged in a lawsuit filed Thursday. Apple has denied it acts illegally, with spokesperson Fred Sainz saying that the…
Photography Is No Longer Evidence of Anything
For weeks now, the world has been awash in conspiracy theories spurred by weird artifacts in a photographic image of the missing Princess of Wales that she eventually admitted had been edited. Some of them got pretty crazy, ranging from…
The Antitrust Case Against Apple Argues It Has a Stranglehold on the Future
The US Department of Justice had long been expected to file an antitrust lawsuit against Apple. But when the suit arrived Thursday, it came with surprising ferocity. In a press conference, attorney general Merrick Garland noted that Apple controlled more…
The US Is Suing Apple in an iPhone Antitrust Blockbuster
The US Department of Justice, along with more than a dozen state attorneys general, has filed a lawsuit against Apple that takes direct aim at the iPhone and the company’s lucrative iOS ecosystem. Claiming that Apple had established an “iPhone…
Here’s Proof You Can Train an AI Model Without Slurping Copyrighted Content
In 2023, OpenAI told the UK parliament that it was “impossible” to train leading AI models without using copyrighted materials. It’s a popular stance in the AI world, where OpenAI and other leading players have used materials slurped up online…
8 Google Employees Invented Modern AI. Here’s the Inside Story
The last two weeks before the deadline were frantic. Though officially some of the team still had desks in Building 1945, they mostly worked in 1965 because it had a better espresso machine in the micro-kitchen. “People weren’t sleeping,” says…
Apple’s MM1 AI Model Shows a Sleeping Giant Is Waking Up
While the tech industry went gaga for generative artificial intelligence, one giant has held back: Apple. The company has yet to introduce so much as an AI-generated emoji, and according to a New York Times report today and earlier reporting…
Kids’ Cartoons Get a Free Pass From YouTube’s Deepfake Disclosure Rules
YouTube has updated its rulebook for the era of deepfakes. Starting today, anyone uploading video to the platform must disclose certain uses of synthetic media, including generative AI, so viewers know what they’re seeing isn’t real. YouTube says it applies…
Reddit IPO Filings Reveal the Company’s Hopes—and Fears
The amount of time Reddit reports that users spend with its service hasn’t significantly budged either. In September 2021, the company said that US users on average engaged for 28 minutes a day. It ticked up to 30 minutes that…
Why Is the Slack Hold Music So Haunted and So Good?
When Danny Simmons finished his first Slack Huddle, the same thing happened to him as did me: He didn’t hang up, the music faded in, and he went hunting for the source. Only he wasn’t looking for a random auto-playing…
Ageism Haunts Some Tech Workers in the Race to Get Hired
The US economy is showing remarkable health, but in the tech industry, layoffs keep coming. For those out of work, finding a new position can become a full-time job. And in tech—a sector notoriously always looking for the next hot,…
Can Reddit Survive Its Own IPO?
Alyssa Videlock was 11 years old when she started searching for people like her on the internet. What she found, back in the early 2000s, was not at all what she’d hoped for. “Being trans online was not really a…
Y Combinator’s Chief Startup Whisperer Is Demoting Himself
When Michael Seibel lost his position at the startup incubator Y Combinator, he didn’t find out in typical tech industry fashion, which might entail an email calling him to a Zoom meeting where the bad news would be delivered. He…
The FCC Now Says Broadband Speed Should Be at Least 100 Mbps
The Federal Communications Commission this week voted to raise its internet speed benchmark for the first time since January 2015, concluding that modern broadband service should provide at least 100 Mbps download speeds and 20 Mbps upload speeds. An FCC…
Reddit’s Sale of User Data for AI Training Draws FTC Inquiry
Reddit said ahead of its IPO next week that licensing user posts to Google and others for AI projects could bring in $203 million of revenue over the next few years. The community-driven platform was forced to disclose Friday that…
Regulators Need AI Expertise. They Can’t Afford It
ChatGPT caught regulators by surprise when it set off a new AI race. As companies have rushed to develop and release ever more powerful models, lawmakers and regulators around the world have sought to catch up and rein in development….
Forget Chatbots. AI Agents Are the Future
This week a startup called Cognition AI caused a bit of a stir by releasing a demo showing an artificial intelligence program called Devin performing work usually done by well-paid software engineers. Chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini can generate code,…
Craig Wright Is Not Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto, Judge Declares
The allegations of forgery are founded on a series of reports compiled by an expert in forensic document analysis nominated by COPA, who analyzed the various materials on which Wright’s claim depends. The reports identified hundreds of alleged instances of…
There Are Dark Corners of the Internet. Then There's 764
A global network of violent predators is hiding in plain sight, targeting children on major platforms, grooming them, and extorting them to commit horrific acts of abuse.
Google DeepMind’s Latest AI Agent Learned to Play ‘Goat Simulator 3’
“SIMA takes one step further and shows stronger generalization to new games,” he says. “The number of environments is still very small, but I think SIMA is on the right track. A New Way to Play SIMA shows DeepMind putting…
What’s Behind the Bitcoin Price Surge? Vibes, Mostly
The latest surge in the price of bitcoin is increasing the clamor around it, says Dal Bianco, drawing in yet more speculators and creating a “self-reinforcing cycle.” Likewise, when collective confidence in the prospect of further price growth falters, she…
Your Kid May Already Be Watching AI-Generated Videos on YouTube
Neither Yes! Neo nor Super Crazy Kids responded to WIRED’s request for comment. Few Limits Yes! Neo, Super Crazy Kids, and other similar channels share a common look—they feature 3D animation in a style similar to Cocomelon, YouTube’s most popular…
Why Elon Musk Had to Open Source Grok, His Answer to ChatGPT
After suing OpenAI this month, alleging the company has become too closed, Elon Musk says he will release his “truth-seeking” answer to ChatGPT, the chatbot Grok, for anyone to download and use. “This week, @xAI will open source Grok,” Musk…
The Quest to Give AI Chatbots a Hand—and an Arm
Peter Chen, CEO of the robot software company Covariant, sits in front of a chatbot interface resembling the one used to communicate with ChatGPT. “Show me the tote in front of you,” he types. In reply, a video feed appears,…
The Influencers Getting Paid to Promote Designer Knockoffs From China
In December, Pandabuy announced on its official Discord server that more than 15,000 influencers joined its affiliate marketing program last year, thanking them for their “dedicated efforts” with two emojis of Pepe the Frog clutching a red heart. That’s a…
Selective Forgetting Can Help AI Learn Better
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. A team of computer scientists has created a nimbler, more flexible type of machine learning model. The trick: It must periodically forget what it knows. And while this new approach…
This Senator Wants to Know What Meta and TikTok Are Doing About Parent-Run Girl Influencer Accounts
In January, the CEOs of X, TikTok, Meta, Snap, and Discord testified in front of a congressional committee about child exploitation on their platforms. “Mr. Zuckerberg, you and the companies before us, I know you don’t mean it to be…
Florida Middle Schoolers Arrested for Allegedly Creating Deepfake Nudes of Classmates
Two teenage boys from Miami, Florida, were arrested in December for allegedly creating and sharing AI-generated nude images of male and female classmates without consent, according to police reports obtained by WIRED via public record request. The arrest reports say…
Sam Altman Back on OpenAI’s Board After He Is Cleared by Investigation
In its investigation, which involved reviewing more than 30,000 documents and interviewing dozens of people, WilmerHale found that the four board members had accurately portrayed their reasoning when they fired Altman citing his lack of candor with the board. The…
Apple Could Be the First Target of Europe’s Tough New Tech Law
Europe changed the rules of the internet this week when the Digital Markets Act took effect, holding the biggest tech companies to tough new standards. Now the world is waiting to see which giant will be first to fall foul…
The Fear That Inspired Elon Musk and Sam Altman to Create OpenAI
Elon Musk last week sued two of his OpenAI cofounders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, accusing them of “flagrant breaches” of the trio’s original agreement that the company would develop artificial intelligence openly and without chasing profits. Late on Tuesday,…
Google Used a Black, Deaf Worker to Tout Its Diversity. Now She’s Suing for Discrimination
Hall says when she has access to an interpreter, they are rotated throughout the week, forcing her to repeatedly explain some technical concepts. “Google is going the cheap route,” Hall claims, saying her interpreters in university were more literate in…
5 Years After San Francisco Banned Face Recognition, Voters Ask for More Surveillance
San Francisco made history in 2019 when its Board of Supervisors voted to ban city agencies including the police department from using face recognition. About two dozen other US cities have since followed suit. But on Tuesday, San Francisco voters…
For Bitcoin Mines in Texas, the Honeymoon Is Over
Others argue the state’s strategy of paying Bitcoin miners not to mine when the grid is under heavy load is nonsensical. “The most important thing a regulator can do is match assets and liabilities—match supply and demand,” says Ed Hirs,…
How to Turn Off Facebook’s Two-Factor Authentication Change
Meta changed how two-factor authentication works for Facebook and Instagram last year. You might have received notifications about this, but it was easy to miss in the platform’s sea of red alerts. OK, so what’s different? “Any devices you’ve frequently…
6 Months After New York Banned Airbnb, New Jersey Is Doing Great
More than 95 percent of the group’s members say they have no intention of becoming long-term landlords, says Lindsay. Instead, he argues, they are now faced with rising housing costs and no immediate way to offset them. The law “has…
Apple Fined $2 Billion as Europe Sides With Spotify
Apple has a Spotify problem—and it just cost the iPhone maker a $2 billion fine from the European Commission. For years, the two companies have been at war as the streaming service lured users away from Apple’s iTunes and accused…
JavaScript Runs the World—Maybe Even Literally
Lex Fridman has done many long interviews on his popular podcast. Even so, the episode with the legendary programmer John Carmack has an unhinged director’s-cut feel to it. Over five hours, Carmack dishes on everything from vector operations to Doom….
Here Come the AI Worms
As generative AI systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini become more advanced, they are increasingly being put to work. Startups and tech companies are building AI agents and ecosystems on top of the systems that can complete boring chores…
Elon Musk Sues OpenAI and Sam Altman for ‘Flagrant Breaches’ of Contract
“Let’s remember that Elon Musk has multiple competing AI efforts, but notably [he founded] xAI, a competing AI company,” says David Shrier, professor of practice, AI and innovation at London’s Imperial College Business School. He adds that the lawsuit may…
The Mind-Blowing Experience of a Chatbot That Answers Instantly
If all that is true—and there’s no way to tell right now—Groq might well pose a threat to the dominance of Nvidia. Ross is careful when discussing this. “Let’s be clear—they’re Goliath, and we’re David,” he says. “It would be…
The Wild Claim at the Heart of Elon Musk’s OpenAI Lawsuit
Elon Musk started the week by posting testily on X about his struggles to set up a new laptop running Windows. He ended it by filing a lawsuit accusing OpenAI of recklessly developing human-level AI and handing it over to…
Waymo Will Bring Autonomous Taxis to Los Angeles—Its Biggest Challenge Yet
Paid autonomous vehicle service is coming to Los Angeles, thanks to a decision by California regulators today to allow Alphabet subsidiary Waymo to operate in the city. Under the new ruling, Waymo is also permitted to launch service in a…
Elon Musk’s Lawsuit Against a Group That Found Hate Speech on X Isn’t Going Well
Soon after Elon Musk took control of Twitter, now called X, the platform faced a massive problem: Advertisers were fleeing. But that, the company alleges, was someone else’s fault. On Thursday that argument went before a federal judge, who seemed…
Google’s Deal With Stack Overflow Is the Latest Proof That AI Giants Will Pay for Data
Last year Stack Overflow became one of the first websites to announce it would charge AI giants for access to content used to train chatbots. Now the popular Q&A service for coders has signed up its first customer—Google—in what CEO…
Tesla EV Charging Open to Ford Drivers 2024
Every six months, the automotive research company JD Power surveys some 5,000 US electric vehicle owners about their experiences driving their battery-powered cars. The latest edition of this survey, out this week, found that EV’s perennial bugbear is still bugbear-ing….
Amazon Just Got Banned From the EU Parliament
Amazon has become the second company ever to have its lobbyists banned from the European Parliament, amid accusations that the company does not take the institution seriously. The ban, which means the 14 Amazon employees who had access to the…
RIP Apple Car. This Is Why It Died
All these firms seek to capitalize on what Apple recognized a decade ago: The software and connectivity now built into new autos gave tech incumbents a jump on traditional auto-builders. But those advantages haven’t always proven out. Project Titan had…
An AT&T Outage Is Wreaking Havoc on US Cellular Networks
It started around 3:30 in the morning on the East Coast, reports flooding in about an AT&T service outage. Customers complained across Reddit and X and logged their issues on Downdetector, a site that, well, detects when services go down….
He Helped Expose Wirecard’s Fraud. Now His Startup Tries to Make Whistleblowing Safer
In September 2017, Singapore-based lawyer Pav Gill took a job at Wirecard, a high-flying German payments business worth tens of billions of euros. Not long after he started, he heard from a colleague that an executive at Wirecard Asia, the…
The US Supreme Court Holds the Future of the Internet in Its Hands
The US Supreme Court seems torn over whether to trigger a radical transformation of the internet. The nation’s highest court heard arguments Monday over state laws in Florida and Texas that restrict how platforms like Facebook and YouTube moderate speech….
How a Small Iowa Newspaper’s Website Became an AI-Generated Clickbait Factory
In his spare time, Tony Eastin likes to dabble in the stock market. One day last year, he Googled a pharmaceutical company that seemed like a promising investment. One of the first search results Google served up on its news…
Reddit’s IPO Filing Is Missing Something: Cofounder Alexis Ohanian
Advance, the owner of Condé, owns 30 percent of Reddit with other investors, board members, and employees holding the rest. Among them, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, an early user and investor in Reddit, has 8.7 percent of the company, according…
Google Tweaked Search to Comply With EU Rules. Yelp Says It Makes Results Even More Unfair
The experiments found that about 73 percent of about 500 people using that new design clicked results that kept them inside Google’s ecosystem—an increase over the 55 percent who did so when the design Google is phasing out in Europe…
My Quest to Fix a Crashing Roku App Provides a Warning About AI
Two words in this statement popped out to me like a flying dinosaur in a mixed-reality headset: when possible. When I flagged this in a subsequent call, Roku reassured me that a fix for my issue will happen. In the…
Bitcoin Royalty Descends on the Satoshi Nakamoto Trial
Bitcoin was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto, an enigmatic figure about whom almost nothing is known. Fifteen years ago, Satoshi brought the idea of an electronic cash system into being with the help of a small cast of oddballs. This week,…
Reddit Is Letting Power Users In on Its IPO. Not Everyone’s Buying
Reddit didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment for this story. Unwanted Offer Reddit’s investment offer to users is known as the Directed Share Program. “Because you have helped make Reddit what it is today, you now have the…
There's No AI Without Nvidia. Meet the CEO Powering the Future
Tech companies can’t get enough of this tech company. Earnings are off the charts. WIRED probes the mind of its CEO, Jensen Huang.
Intel’s CEO Says AI Is the Key to the Company’s Comeback
When veteran engineer and executive Pat Gelsinger returned to Intel as CEO in 2021, the once-great chipmaker was in a slump. After failing to adapt to the mobile era and then missing several steps in cutting-edge microprocessor manufacturing, it was…
Tech Job Interviews Are Out of Control
Bock says the shift is partly due to mass layoffs; employers are more able to flex their muscles in a tighter labor market. But there’s also a broader psychological shift. “After years of tech workers being pampered, of ‘bring your…
Intel’s AI Reboot Is the Future of US Chipmaking
Gina Raimondo, the US secretary of commerce, spoke at Intel’s event today and compared the US government’s current focus on revitalizing its chip industry to the space race of the 1960s. “The fact that we are so overly dependent on…
When My Country Invaded Ukraine, I Faced a Choice: Give Me Propaganda or Give Me Death
A month later, the world saw images of mass graves in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, dead limbs sticking out of the sand. Outside our building one morning, on an old brick wall that was previously empty, was a fresh…
Help, My Friend Got Me a Dumb AI-Generated Present
“An artist friend of mine got me an AI-generated painting as a gift. I can see she tried to personalize the concept, and it’s nicely framed, but part of me still feels a little cheated. Is that fair?” —No Returns…
This Tiny Website Is Google’s First Line of Defense in the Patent Wars
A trio of Google engineers recently came up with a futuristic way to help anyone who stumbles through presentations on video calls. They propose that when algorithms detect a speaker’s pulse racing or “umms” lengthening, a generative AI bot that…
Wie viel kostet ein LED-Schild?
kostet ein LED-Schild Es gibt mehrere Faktoren, die die Kosten eines LED-Bildschirms beeinflussen. Dazu gehören die Kosten pro Quadratmeter des LED-Bildschirms, der elektronischen Steuerung, der Stromversorgung sowie des Gehäuses und der Trägerstruktur. Auch die Installationskosten können den Preis des LED-Bildschirms…
Google’s AI Boss Says Scale Only Gets You So Far
In an interview with WIRED, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says the biggest breakthroughs in AI are yet to come—and will take more than just chips.
OpenAI Gives ChatGPT a Memory
OpenAI says ChatGPT’s Memory is opt-in by default, which means a user has to actively turn it off. The Memory can be wiped at any point, either in settings or by simply instructing the bot to wipe it. Once the…
The Puzzling Testimony of Craig Wright, Self-Styled Inventor of Bitcoin
Among various acts of alleged forgery, Hough charged that Wright backdated documents to make them seem like precursors to the original 2008 Bitcoin white paper; manipulated email communications in support of his claim to be Nakamoto; inserted material post-factum into…
Google’s Flagship Gemini AI Model Gets a Major Upgrade
Alphabet’s Gemini AI model has been public for only two months, but the company is already releasing an upgrade. Gemini Pro 1.5, launching with limited availability today, is more powerful than its predecessor and can handle huge amounts of text,…
Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up
After months of resisting, Air Canada was forced to give a partial refund to a grieving passenger who was misled by an airline chatbot inaccurately explaining the airline’s bereavement travel policy. On the day Jake Moffatt’s grandmother died, Moffat immediately…
Some People Actually Kind of Love Deepfakes
A month ago, the consulting company Accenture presented a potential client an unusual and attention-grabbing pitch for a new project. Instead of the usual slide deck, the client saw deepfakes of several real employees standing on a virtual stage, offering…
Sierra Says Conversational AI Will Kill Apps and Websites
I might have inadvertently insulted Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor when I interviewed them about their new AI startup last week. Their new company, Sierra, is developing AI-powered agents to “elevate the customer experience” for big companies. Among its original…
OpenAI’s Sora Turns AI Prompts Into Photorealistic Videos
We already know that OpenAI’s chatbots can pass the bar exam without going to law school. Now, just in time for the Oscars, a new OpenAI app called Sora hopes to master cinema without going to film school. For now…
ChatGPT vs. Gemini: Which AI Chatbot Subscription Is Right for You?
The problem with testing AI chatbot subscriptions like Google’s Gemini Advanced and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus is their generality. The same tool is used for disparate applications; the same software service that developers in San Francisco are using to build their…
Kara Swisher Is Sick of Tech People, So She Wrote a Book About Them
In her new memoir, Burn Book, Kara Swisher cites a 2014 profile that dubbed her “Silicon Valley’s Most Feared and Well-Liked Journalist.” She might prefer to downplay the first and emphasize the second. Some people would switch that around. But…
Leading Lab-Grown Meat Company Upside Foods Just Paused a Major Expansion
It has been a rocky year for plans for large-scale cultivated-meat production. In May 2022, another Californian startup, Eat Just, announced its plans to build up to 10 large bioreactors, each with a 250,000-liter capacity, with the bioreactor firm ABEC….
The World’s Most Important Industry Has a New Captain—and She’s Piloting It Into the 21st Century
Around us at Zephyros, kids and silverware clamor and motorbikes cough, but Marina’s voice is barely above a whisper. “When the hippopotamuses quarrel, then the frogs get stepped on,” she says of geopolitical conflicts, including the war in Ukraine. She’s…
Apple Pulls Popular Movie Piracy App Kimi From the App Store
Watching pirated movies on your iPhone just got a little harder. After climbing the charts of Apple’s App Store, the trendy Kimi app, with its collection of bootlegged movies, has just disappeared. Pretending to be a spot-the-difference vision-testing game, the…
Gemini Advanced Is a Central Part of Google’s Subscription Future
Google got to where it is mostly by offering free services stuffed with ads, but it has increasingly experimented with a different business model: selling subscriptions for extra perks. Its first subscription offering, debuted in 2006, provided additional photo storage…
How to Get Gemini Advanced, Google’s Subscription-Only AI Chatbot
Google just upgraded its AI chatbot. Access to the new Gemini Advanced chatbot is available right now through a monthly subscription to Google One, the company’s cloud backup service. With today’s release, there’s a new tier of Google One service…
Developers Are in Open Revolt Over Apple’s New App Store Rules
A battle for control is taking place inside iPhones across Europe. While Apple introduced new rules that ostensibly loosen its control over the App Store, local developers are seething at the new system, which they say entrenches the power Apple…
Google Prepares for a Future Where Search Isn’t King
Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai still loves the web. He wakes up every morning and reads Techmeme, a news aggregator resplendent with links, accessible only via the web. The web is dynamic and resilient, he says, and can still—with help from…
Google Rebrands Its AI Chatbot as Gemini to Take On ChatGPT
When OpenAI’s ChatGPT opened a new era in tech, the industry’s former AI champ, Google, responded by reorganizing its labs and launching a profusion of sometimes overlapping AI services. This included the Bard chatbot, workplace helper Duet AI, and a…
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber Says She Won’t ‘Enshittify the Network With Ads’
Our goal is to combine both approaches—to run a moderation service that tries to provide a baseline and to also have an open ecosystem where anyone who wants to innovate can come in and start building. I think this is…
Here’s the Thing AI Just Can’t Do
Google says its powerful new chatbot Gemini can supercharge your creativity. But who is really providing the creative spark?
Meet the Pranksters Behind Goody-2, the World’s ‘Most Responsible’ AI Chatbot
Goody-2 also highlights how although corporate talk of responsible AI and deflection by chatbots have become more common, serious safety problems with large language models and generative AI systems remain unsolved. The recent outbreak of Taylor Swift deepfakes on Twitter…
London Underground Is Testing Real-Time AI Surveillance Tools to Spot Crime
In response to WIRED’s Freedom of Information request, the TfL says it used existing CCTV images, AI algorithms, and “numerous detection models” to detect patterns of behavior. “By providing station staff with insights and notifications on customer movement and behaviour…
AI Tools Like GitHub Copilot Are Rewiring Coders’ Brains. Yours May Be Next
Many people—like, say, journalists—are understandably antsy about what generative artificial intelligence might mean for the future of their profession. It doesn’t help that expert prognostications on the matter offer a confusing cocktail of wide-eyed excitement, trenchant skepticism, and dystopian despair….
LinkedIn’s New AI Chatbot Wants to Help You Find Your Next Job
LinkedIn is rolling out new features that give premium users looking for a job some artificial-intelligence-powered assistance. The tools use generative AI to advise people whether they may be a good fit for open jobs listed on the platform and…
Amazon’s Cloud Boss Likens Generative AI Hype to the Dotcom Bubble
As CEO of Amazon’s dominant cloud computing platform AWS, Adam Selipsky is one of the most powerful people in computing at a time when the industry is racing to adopt generative artificial intelligence. Although a fan of the technology, he…
Meta Will Crack Down on AI-Generated Fakes—but Leave Plenty Undetected
Meta, like other leading tech companies, has spent the past year promising to speed up deployment of generative artificial intelligence. Today it acknowledged it must also respond to the technology’s hazards, announcing an expanded policy of tagging AI-generated images posted…
The Trial Over Bitcoin’s True Creator Is in Session
For eight years, Craig Wright has claimed to be the elusive Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. On Monday, in the swelling heat of a UK courtroom, a trial began that will finally settle the question. Wright, flanked by his legal team,…
‘Over Time the Trust Will Come’: An Exclusive Interview With TikTok’s CEO
TikTok has irreversibly bent our culture’s trajectory, but that doesn’t guarantee it’ll be around to reap the benefits. (India banned the app long ago, and it’s under growing scrutiny in a handful of other countries.) It has walked the political…
Craig Wright Claims He’s Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto. Can He Prove It in Court?
Satoshi Nakamoto is the founding father of cryptocurrency—and a mystery. In October 2008, Nakamoto gave Bitcoin to the world. Then they disappeared. To this day, nobody knows who Nakamoto is. Amongst the speculation, one man stepped forward: Craig Wright, an…
Google Filing Reveals It Slashed Spending on Acquisitions in 2023
Pennies were pinched in Mountain View last year. For much of its existence as a public company, Google had made a headline-grabbing acquisition at least once a year as it used the profits from its surging ads business to bet…
After 20 Years of Facebook, Lawmakers Are Still Trying to Fix It
It’s been 20 years since Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg released a program called Thefacebook to his college community, launching a company that would capture over 3 billion users, flirt with a trillion-dollar valuation, and make so much money that it’s…
You Can’t Buy Lab-Grown Meat Even If You Wanted To
“The restaurant dinners we held at China Chilcano in Washington, DC, last summer went extremely well,” wrote Eat Just’s director of global communications, Carrie Kabat, in an emailed statement to WIRED. “We plan to resume these dinners this year.” Good…
FTX Says It Expects to Repay Customers in Full. Some Are Suing for More
A group of former customers of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX are rebelling against a proposed plan that would return the entirety of the money they lost. In a lawsuit filed this week, the customers argue they are due a whole…
The Mystery of the $400 Million FTX Heist May Have Been Solved
When more than $400 million worth of crypto was mysteriously pulled out of the coffers of what was once the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, on the very day that it declared bankruptcy in November of 2022, many initially suspected…
I Tested a Next-Gen AI Assistant. It Will Blow You Away
The most famous virtual valets around today—Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant—are a lot less impressive than the latest AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT or Google Bard. When the fruits of the recent generative AI boom get properly integrated into those legacy…
Linda Yaccarino Says X Needs More Moderators After All
When Elon Musk took over Twitter, since rebranded as X, his favorite letter of the alphabet, he went on a firing spree. Chief among those ejected were people working on trust and safety, the work of keeping bad content, from…
Google Splits Up a Key AI Ethics Watchdog
When Google CEO Sundar Pichai emailed his workers the company priorities for 2024 this month, developing AI responsibly was top of the list. Some employees now wonder whether Google can live up to that goal. The small team that has…
Hulu Shows Jarring Anti-Hamas Ad Likely Generated With AI
Hulu ran an anti-Hamas ad that appears to be made using artificial intelligence to show an idealized version of Gaza—claiming this paradise destination could exist if not for Hamas. The 30-second spot, opening like a tourism ad, shows palm trees…
Most Top News Sites Block AI Bots. Right-Wing Media Welcomes Them
“A process called reinforcement learning from human feedback is used right now in every state-of-the-art model,” to fine-tune its responses, Baum says. Most AI companies aim to create systems that appear neutral. If the humans steering the AI see an…
US Lawmakers Tell DOJ to Quit Blindly Funding ‘Predictive’ Police Tools
The United States Department of Justice has failed to convince a group of US lawmakers that state and local police agencies aren’t awarded federal grants to buy AI-based “policing” tools known to be inaccurate, if not prone to exacerbating biases…
We Tried a Dating App That Lets a Chatbot Break the Ice for You. It Got Weird
More than a decade of dating apps has shown the process can be excruciating. A new app is trying to make dating less exhausting by using artificial intelligence to help people skip the earliest, often cringey stages of chatting with…
A Last-Ditch Plan to Save the Crypto Industry
The book traces the following thesis: At first, the internet was open, but limited. Private companies brought interactivity to the web and grew fat on the proceeds, but that made it difficult for users to leave their networks and for…
Researchers Say the Deepfake Biden Robocall Was Likely Made With Tools From AI Startup ElevenLabs
This is not the first time that researchers have suspected ElevenLabs tools were used for political propaganda. Last September, NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation, claimed that TikTok accounts sharing conspiracy theories using AI-generated voices, including a clone of…
How Beloved Indie Blog ‘The Hairpin’ Turned Into an AI Clickbait Farm
What a heinous month for the media. Almost every day, a publication announces layoffs or shuts down. Sports Illustrated just let go almost all of its staff after weathering an embarrassing scandal about AI-generated articles. It’s unclear what the desiccated…
OpenAI and Other Tech Giants Will Have to Warn the US Government When They Start New AI Projects
When OpenAI’s ChatGPT took the world by storm last year, it caught many power brokers in both Silicon Valley and Washington, DC, by surprise. The US government should now get advance warning of future AI breakthroughs involving large language models,…
Apple Isn’t Ready to Release Its Grip on the App Store
“Especially for the big app developers with loads of downloads, who are the ones that really Apple make all their money from, that will rack up to a very high cost very quickly,” says Max von Thun, Europe director at…
Robot Car Crash Investigation Concludes GM’s Cruise Didn’t Disclose Key Information
A law firm hired by the General Motors’ self-driving subsidiary Cruise to investigate the company’s response to a gruesome San Francisco crash last year found that the company failed to fully disclose disturbing details to regulators, the tech company said…
Elon Musk Says a Cheaper Tesla Model Is Coming in 2025 as Chinese Competition Intensifies
A cheaper model of Tesla electric vehicle is coming late next year, CEO Elon Musk told investors today. If it launches on Musk’s ambitious timeline, it might arrive in time to help Tesla parry the growing might of Chinese EV…
OpenAI Quietly Scrapped a Promise to Disclose Key Documents to the Public
WIRED’s request for the documents promised in OpenAI’s IRS filings fell to the counsel for its nonprofit to decide on. Their denial and new policy of withholding those documents extends an existing trend of dwindling openness at a project founded…
Chinese Startup 01.AI Is Winning the Open Source AI Race
Delange said that open source language models are improving rapidly and can be better than OpenAI’s market-leading GPT-4 for some specialized tasks. But he noted that many of the best open source models have come from outside the US, saying…
Google Circle to Search and AI-Powered Multi-Search Coming to Mobile
In recent years Google has used the word “helpful” to describe new features added to its search product, its voice assistant, its generative AI tool Bard, even its Pixel earbuds. A keyword-search for the word “helpful” in Google’s own corporate…
Apple Turned Its Epic Defeat Into Another App Store Victory
The revisions provide developers “a meaningful opportunity” to do business outside of Apple’s billing system “while also enabling users to make an informed choice” about where to transact, attorneys for the company say in a court filing. The arrangement is…
Cable Firms to FTC: We Shouldn’t Have to Let Users Cancel Service With a Click
Lobbyists for cable companies and advertisers yesterday expressed their displeasure with a proposed “click-to-cancel” regulation that aims to make it easier for consumers to cancel services. Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan has said that changes are needed because “some…
How to Opt Out of Comcast’s Xfinity Storing Your Sensitive Data
Your internet service provider could have a good idea of who you’re planning to vote for in the 2024 election as well as the gender of the last person you slept with—and it’s saving that information for later. Major internet…
Apple Shares the Secret of Why the 40-Year-Old Mac Still Rules
On January 24, Apple’s Macintosh computer turns 40. Normally that number is an inexorable milestone of middle age. Indeed, in the last reported sales year, Macintosh sales dipped below $30 billion, more than a 25 percent drop from the previous…
The One Part of Apple Vision Pro That Apple Doesn’t Want You to See
Joanna Stern of The Wall Street Journal. Courtesy of Joanna Stern If Vision Pro is mostly meant to be used from a couch cushion or desk chair, the external battery pack may not factor in as much. As I pointed…
ChatGPT’s Hunger for Energy Could Trigger a GPU Revolution
The cost of making further progress in artificial intelligence is becoming as startling as a hallucination by ChatGPT. Demand for the graphics chips known as GPUs needed for large-scale AI training has driven prices of the crucial components through the…
An AI Executive Turns AI Crusader to Stand Up for Artists
Ed Newton-Rex says generative AI has an ethics problem. He ought to know, because he used to be part of the fast-growing industry. Newton-Rex was TikTok’s head AI designer and then an executive at Stability AI until he quit in…
Why Tech Workers Are Ditching Big Cities for Boise
The past year has brought a reckoning in the tech job industry across the US, upending career trajectories for recent grads. When they chose majors like computer science four years ago, they expected to follow those before them into a…
Lawmakers Are Out for Blood After a Hack of the SEC’s X Account Causes Bitcoin Chaos
X said an “unidentified individual” had used a phone number tied to the SEC’s account to seize control. The account “did not have two-factor authentication enabled” at the time of the hack, X said. In a cosigned letter, Republican senators…
OpenAI’s New App Store Could Turn ChatGPT Into an Everything App
ChatGPT also functions as a kind of translator or helper for GPT apps. When WIRED asked the AllTrails GPT to suggest a two-hour hike in Berkeley, California, ChatGPT responded by asking how strenuous the hike should be and if the…
The White House Just Announced a $623 Million EV-Charging Bonanza
As the number of electric vehicles on American roads grows, so too does the affliction of range anxiety. Drivers of conventional cars enjoy the support of a massive, well-established network of fuel stations. EV owners depend on chargers that are…
How to Launch a Custom Chatbot on OpenAI’s GPT Store
Get ready to share your custom chatbot with the whole world. Well, at least with other ChatGPT Plus subscribers. OpenAI recently launched its GPT Store, after it delayed the project following the chaos of CEO Sam Altman’s firing and reinstatement…
Child Abusers Are Getting Better at Using Crypto to Cover Their Tracks
For those who trade in child sexual exploitation images and videos in the darkest recesses of the internet, cryptocurrency has been both a powerful tool and a treacherous one. Bitcoin, for instance, has allowed denizens of that criminal underground to…
Toyota’s Robots Are Learning to Do Housework—By Copying Humans
As someone who quite enjoys the Zen of tidying up, I was only too happy to grab a dustpan and brush and sweep up some beans spilled on a tabletop while visiting the Toyota Research Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts last…
Why Crypto Idealogues Won’t Touch Bitcoin ETFs
Bitcoin devotees are declaring a historic victory after US regulators approved a new, more accessible way for people to invest in the crypto asset after a decade of resistance. Yet they won’t go anywhere near it themselves. On January 10,…
Your Medical Data Is Code Blue
Until last November, I had never heard of Perry Johnson and Associates. But they had heard of me. In fact, without my knowledge, they had information about me that even my closest friends and relatives might not know. Because the…
The Boeing 737 Max Crisis Reignites Arguments Over Infant Safety on Planes
As terrible as that tradeoff is, it’s worth noting that the risk of death on a commercial airliner to anyone, lap-held infants included, remains vanishingly low—so let the pangs of guilt subside if you’ve flown holding your baby on your…
No, the Great Tech Layoffs of 2023 Aren’t Happening Again
So far, 2024 is off to a start that looks a lot like 2023—with a week full of job cuts from tech companies. Duolingo cut 10 percent of its contractors earlier this week, citing artificial intelligence as part of the…
The Real Problem With the Boeing 737 Max
Spirit AeroSystems, the Wichita-based aerospace manufacturer that manufactured the door plug that blew out on the Alaska Airlines flight, declined to comment on the incident. However, in a statement published on its website, Spirit says its “primary focus is the…
Bitcoin ETFs Have Arrived. Here’s Who Stands to Get Rich
US regulators have approved a new breed of financial product that will give people a way to invest in bitcoin through their brokerage for the first time, as if it were a regular stock. A selection of financial institutions, including…
Congress Wants Tech Companies to Pay Up for AI Training Data
Do AI companies need to pay for the training data that powers their generative AI systems? The question is hotly contested in Silicon Valley and in a wave of lawsuits levied against tech behemoths like Meta, Google, and OpenAI. In…
Rumble Is Part of an ‘Active and Ongoing’ SEC Investigation
In May 2021, the site was reportedly valued at an estimated $500 million. In September 2022, Rumble became a publicly traded company listed on the Nasdaq as part of a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) deal. Its valuation currently exceeds…
Cruise Was Asked to Ground Robotaxis on Halloween to Keep Kids Safe
Jeff Farrah, CEO of lobbying group the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, which counts Waymo, Cruise, and other self-driving developers in its membership, says keeping motor vehicle regulation authority firmly in states’ hands is consistent with how vehicles have been regulated…
In Defense of AI Hallucinations
No one knows whether artificial intelligence will be a boon or curse in the far future. But right now, there’s almost universal discomfort and contempt for one habit of these chatbots and agents: hallucinations, those made-up facts that appear in…
The Man Who Made Robots Dance Now Wants Them to Think for Themselves
Some robots, including from Boston Dynamics, are already doing warehouse work. Do you expect to see that humanoid workforce growing in the coming years? Warehouse work is one of the great applications at the moment because there’s such a need…
Forget Growth. Optimize for Resilience
Fleming believed that growth has natural limits. Things grow to maturity—kids into adults, saplings into trees, startups into full-fledged companies—but growth beyond that point is, in his words, a “pathology” and an “affliction.” The bigger and more productive an economy…
Sex, Drugs, and AI Mickey Mouse
On January 1, Mike Neville gave Midjourney the following prompt: “Steamboat Willie drawn in a vintage Disney style, black and white. He is dripping all over with white gel.” There’s no polite way to describe what this prompt conjured from…
AI May Not Steal Your Job, but It Could Stop You Getting Hired
If you’ve worried that candidate-screening algorithms could be standing between you and your dream job, reading Hilke Schellmann’s The Algorithm won’t ease your mind. The investigative reporter and NYU journalism professor’s new book demystifies how HR departments use automation software…
The Most Dangerous People on the Internet in 2023
In 2023, the world has felt like it was balanced on a precipice. A United States presidential election looms, with a resurgent candidate that threatens to bring with him all the chaos of 2016 and 2020. Artificial intelligence developed so…
Generative AI Learned Nothing From Web 2.0
If 2022 was the year the generative AI boom started, 2023 was the year of the generative AI panic. Just over 12 months since OpenAI released ChatGPT and set a record for the fastest-growing consumer product, it appears to have…
My Surprisingly Unbiased Week With Elon Musk’s ‘Politically Biased’ Chatbot
Musk has appeared to acknowledge the problem. This week, when an X user asked if xAI would be working to reduce Grok’s political bias, he replied, “Yes.” But tuning a chatbot to express views that satisfy his followers might prove…
OpenAI’s Ilya Sutskever Has a Plan for Keeping Super-Intelligent AI in Check
OpenAI was founded on a promise to build artificial intelligence that benefits all of humanity—even when that AI becomes considerably smarter than its creators. Since the debut of ChatGPT last year and during the company’s recent governance crisis, its commercial…
How to Use OpenAI’s ChatGPT to Create Your Own Custom GPT
I was never afraid to train an AI chatbot on my writing, because OpenAI had already broken the seal. CEO Sam Altman announced the “GPT” feature at OpenAI’s first developer day in November, prior to the company’s five days of…
The Obscure Google Deal That Defines America’s Broken Privacy Protections
Joseph Jerome, who left privacy advocacy to work on Meta’s augmented reality data policies for two years before being laid off in May, says he grew to appreciate how consent decrees force companies to work on privacy. They add “checks…
What Happens When Facebook Heats Your Home
For Big Tech, there are few better places to experiment with data center heating than in the Nordics. This idea works best when data centers can be connected to preexisting district heating systems, where a group of buildings share a…
Blood, Guns, and Broken Scooters: Inside the Chaotic Rise and Fall of Bird
In a minivan with the rear seats ripped out, John is chasing one of his 250 electric scooters down a California highway. He finds it 10 miles away, hiding in a bush—a run-and-dump tactic that he says thieves use to…
Apple’s Tight Grip on iMessage Spurs Fresh Calls for an Antitrust Probe
The US Department of Justice has got mail: A coalition of more than a dozen tech advocacy groups wrote to the agency today calling on it to launch an investigation into allegedly anticompetitive behavior by Apple. The letter says that…