Month: April 2023

AI-powered chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google Bard are certainly having a moment—the next generation of conversational software tools promise to do everything from taking over our web searches to producing an endless supply of creative literature to remembering all the world’s knowledge so we don’t have to. ChatGPT, Google Bard, and other bots like

Ben Smith thought that he’d be spending the end of April banking interviews about his book that goes on sale next week. It’s not working out that way. Instead, the celebrated news maven—who slung scoops at Politico, launched BuzzFeed News, covered media for The New York Times, and is now cofounder of the buzzy Semafor news startup—found

Elon Musk caused a stir last week when he told the (recently fired) right-wing provocateur Tucker Carlson that he plans to build “TruthGPT,” a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Musk says the incredibly popular bot displays “woke” bias and that his version will be a “maximum truth-seeking AI”—suggesting only his own political views reflect reality.  Musk is far

LinkedIn influencers use ChatGPT as a brainstorming aid, should you? OpenAI’s chatbot responds in a conversational tone to text prompts, and millions of users continue to experiment with it. The chatbot helps software developers with coding, scientists with research, and students with homework. With a little repetition and exploration, ChatGPT is worth trying out as part of your brainstorming

“It consistently amazes me that in the physical world, when we release products there are really stringent guidelines,” Farid says. “You can’t release a product and hope it doesn’t kill your customer. But with software, we’re like, ‘This doesn’t really work, but let’s see what happens when we release it to billions of people.’” If

Some observers have welcomed the ruling, arguing that regulators have allowed tech companies to amass too much power by scaling through acquisitions. “We feel that there has been over a decade of under-enforcement,” says Max von Thun, Europe director at think tank Open Markets, referring to past decisions to let Facebook merge with WhatsApp and

While all the major Silicon Valley social media firms—from Instagram to TikTok—say they block children from using their apps, these senators say those efforts have failed.  “It’s not working,” Schatz says.“There’s no free speech right to be jammed with an algorithm that makes you upset, and these algorithms are making us increasingly polarized and disparaging

Twitter’s verification system debacle has had more twists than a Stephen King novel—fitting, given that the author has been at the center of yet another storm on the platform. A “legacy” verified user because of his fame as a horror novelist, King likely expected to lose his blue check mark on April 20, the date

Something needs to be done about crypto. In 2022, billions of dollars were lost to crypto bankruptcies and hundreds of millions more to hacks. The mess has spilled over into traditional finance, with the collapse of the two biggest crypto-friendly banks: Silvergate and Signature. And all the while, new scam tokens flood the market. In the US,

Jordi Ribas hasn’t taken a day off since last September. That month, the Microsoft search and AI chief got the keys to GPT-4, a then secret version of OpenAI’s text-generation technology that now powers ChatGPT. As Ribas had with GPT-4’s predecessors, the Barcelona native wrote in Spanish and Catalan to test the AI’s knowledge of cities like

Archival audioclip (Back to the Future): I’m from the future. Lauren Goode: Alright, I’m gonna ask the question that everyone’s wondering about: What is a futurist? Is this a real job? Gideon Lichfield: Well, I mean, I think some people imagine it’s just, you know, a guy who sits around making predictions about the future, and there are

That ban helped set the path for the development of the Chinese metaverse, experts say, since it decoupled virtual spaces from digital assets. “The key difference [in the metaverse] between China and the rest of the world is it’d be heavily regulated in a centralized manner,” says Zhengyuan Bo, a partner at China-focused research firm

There is, Droogan says, an implicit violence in the theory, particularly when it’s filtered through a US perspective. American mainstream media, and Fox in particular, gives platforms to people who use conspiracist terminology—including references to “elites” and “globalists” and nods to the “great reset,” like those made by Vlaardingerbroek—in a way that rarely happens on

For almost two decades after it opened in 1913, Michigan’s Central Station was a major stop on the nation’s interurban rail network. Then the private car took over the US, and Detroit declined. By the 1970’s, auto jobs were leaving the state and the country and local corruption was soaring.  At the turn of the century,

“Medical knowledge and practices change and evolve over time, and there’s no telling where in the timeline of medicine ChatGPT pulls its information from when stating a typical treatment,” she says. “Is that information recent or is it dated?” Users also need to beware how ChatGPT-style bots can present fabricated, or “hallucinated,” information in a superficially fluent

In his memo announcing the closure of BuzzFeed’s news operations, CEO Jonah Peretti acknowledged a grave mistake: He hadn’t worked out that Facebook wasn’t his friend. Peretti, of course, put it differently. He had, he admitted, been “slow to accept that big platforms wouldn’t provide the distribution or financial support required to support premium, free journalism

I woke up one day last year and realized I no longer listened to music. Instead I just listened to sludge—a blur of indistinguishable songs that imitated my music taste. My sludge addiction sprang from Spotify’s algorithmically curated playlists, which promised to help me focus or find music tailored to my tastes. The app’s design

Large language models can generate strings of text based on word patterns learned from the web pages, books, and other bodies of text in their training data. Besides ChatGPT, the programs make up the guts of search chatbots such as Microsoft Bing chat and Google’s Bard, and they underlie a growing number of applications that produce professional and creative

The Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank that tracks public opinion, released a report today on how workers feel about AI.  The technology has become an increasingly common workplace fixture over the past few years. And its role is likely to grow as AI becomes more capable, thanks to advances such as the large language models, like

Vishal Misra loves cricket and computer science. Years ago, the Columbia University professor cofounded Cricinfo, a collaborative website for sports fans to stay updated on match statistics. (It’s now part of ESPN.) In 2021, he created a search tool using GPT-3 that enables cricket lovers to sift through Cricinfo’s substantial database with conversational queries. So, what does

Thirteen months ago, Linktree, the link-in-bio company that allows creators to collect links to different platforms in a single, easily digestible page, announced its latest funding round. The $110 million of investment from financial backers including Index Ventures and Coatue Management put Linktree in a pretty enviable position: It was valued at $1.3 billion. Just over

Gideon: What? What did he even mean by that? Lauren: Yeah, it’s a good question. I mean, here’s just one example. One of the things he said to me right out the gate was that he thinks in just 30 years we’ll all be part cyborg—that we’re gonna be paying for things through some kind

The AI landscape has started to move very, very fast: consumer-facing tools such as Midjourney and ChatGPT are now able to produce incredible image and text results in seconds based on natural language prompts, and we’re seeing them get deployed everywhere from web search to children’s books. However, these AI applications are being turned to

The recent wave of generative artificial intelligence services, from ChatGPT to Midjourney, are designed to be simple to use: The idea is that anyone can produce text or images using natural, non-technical language. There’s a low barrier to entry. That said, there’s still a lot to learn about how to get the most out of

Sébastien Bubeck, a machine learning researcher at Microsoft, woke up one night last September thinking about artificial intelligence—and unicorns.  Bubeck had recently gotten early access to GPT-4, a powerful text generation algorithm from OpenAI and an upgrade to the machine learning model at the heart of the wildly popular chatbot ChatGPT. Bubeck was part of a team working to integrate

Asked to comment on the plans, Binance’s West & East Africa director Nadeem Anjarwalla said in a statement: ​​​​​​“As we continue to support blockchain adoption across the African continent, Binance is keen to collaborate with the Nigeria Export Processing Zones Authority [the regulator overseeing the Lekki Free Zone] to establish a virtual free zone with

Within weeks of Covid-19 shutting down the world in 2020, teams at archrivals Apple and Google partnered on a rare joint project. They developed a way to log people’s proximity using Bluetooth chips in iPhones and Android phones, enabling the creation of apps that let someone who tested positive for the virus to anonymously notify fellow users whom

The stunning capabilities of ChatGPT, the chatbot from startup OpenAI, has triggered a surge of new interest and investment in artificial intelligence. But late last week, OpenAI’s CEO warned that the research strategy that birthed the bot is played out. It’s unclear exactly where future advances will come from. OpenAI has delivered a series of impressive advances

For the first 20 minutes of our conversation, Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, the sixth most-visited website in the US, does a good impression of a 2020s tech executive. “Our mission,” he says at one point, “is to bring community belonging and empowerment to everyone in the world.” But then I ask Huffman about regulation.

When will those trials lead to autonomous construction machinery doing real work on construction sites? “We’ll get there,” Weiss says, but Caterpillar’s partners need to be comfortable with the technology’s maturity. “There are risks involved, and we’re on that journey, learning with them as we go, so that when we are commercially ready, they’re ready