Cristiano Lincoln Mattos, CEO and cofounder at Tempest, which also spun out of Cesar, attributes the very existence of his company to the ecosystem’s ability to translate expertise from the academic world into market needs. “We wouldn’t even be able to create the company if we didn’t have Cesar’s support at the start, especially considering
Month: June 2023
In June 2021, GitHub announced Copilot, a kind of auto-complete for computer code powered by OpenAI’s text-generation technology. It provided an early glimpse of the impressive potential of generative artificial intelligence to automate valuable work. Two years on, Copilot is one of the most mature examples of how the technology can take on tasks that
Social media researchers at the Network Contagion Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, got a rude awakening early last month. They were roused by 6:30 am phone calls from a colleague warning that Reddit had started blocking the institute’s Pushshift service from updating its ongoing archive of every post on the discussion platform. That was
On other parts of the app, silence spread through normally vocal accounts. That applied to more conventional propagandists, such as Margarita Simonyan, editor of state TV news network RT. Once a Prigozhin supporter, Simonyan’s Telegram account was quiet on Saturday. Her explanation? She was on a cruise on the River Volga. But parts of the
On the morning of June 22, Karl Verboten tried to log into the Instagram account for Klub Verboten, his London kink space and fortnightly party, but was met with the message: “We suspended your account … Your account is not visible to people on Instagram right now, and you cannot use it.” Klub Verboten, founded
When Elon Musk arrived at VivaTech, a leading technology conference in France, his presence had an immediate effect, as event founder Maurice Levy of Publicis Groupe was quick to point out. Suddenly everyone wanted to be there. Musk’s visit represented a substantial investment for the organization, with rumors of a fee of around a million
This past spring, as I closed out my 18th year of teaching, I felt anxiety that I’d never before felt at the end of a school year. By the time grades are submitted and signs of summer arrive, teachers are typically able to breathe for the first time in nine months. Instead of the relaxation,
In May 2006, Stockholm was the unlikely front line in the fight for the future of the music industry. The city’s police raided Swedish-owned file-sharing site The Pirate Bay and seized its web servers, temporarily shutting down its global business. Across town, a young entrepreneur named Daniel Ek was about to launch Spotify. It was
A year ago, the idea of holding a meaningful conversation with a computer was the stuff of science fiction. But since OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched last November, life has started to feel more like a techno-thriller with a fast-moving plot. Chatbots and other generative AI tools are beginning to profoundly change how people live and work.
In 2014, DeepMind was acquired by Google after demonstrating striking results from software that used reinforcement learning to master simple video games. Over the next several years, DeepMind showed how the technique does things that once seemed uniquely human—often with superhuman skill. When AlphaGo beat Go champion Lee Sedol in 2016, many AI experts were
About once a fortnight, David Ermes gets an email from a journalist or fact checker along the lines of “Boys have to dress up as girls in queer week at school, is it true?” “Of course I can say it’s not true—it isn’t even lawful, since we don’t have school uniforms,” says Ermes, who is
While negotiations started with Young and Schumer, they didn’t end there. Rather, the pair heard input from other congressional committees and worked that into the final package. “That was the most utilization I’ve seen of the committee process since I’ve been in Congress, and I think this has an opportunity to be even more inclusive,”
In a giant warehouse in Reading, Massachusetts, I meet a pair of robots that look like goofy green footstools from the future. Their round eyes and satisfied grins are rendered with light emitting diodes. They sport small lidar sensors like tiny hats that scan nearby objects and people in 3D. Suddenly, one of them plays
The first time we speak, Joep Meindertsma is not in a good place. He tears up as he describes a conversation in which he warned his niece about the risk of artificial intelligence causing societal collapse. Afterward, she had a panic attack. “I cry every other day,” he says, speaking over Zoom from his home
Since the pandemic, Madison has noticed an uptick in high-net-worth individuals booking out entire expeditions. “One client bought a whole trip to climb Mount Vinson in Antarctica for $200,000 last year,” he says. “It’s the latest trend: billionaires wanting their own private adventure with friends; they fly to Antarctica in a private jet. It’s next-level.”
“There was no understanding that [the law] would even be enforced in Texas at the time because it was appealed up to the Supreme Court,” she says. “So even before this law actually had significant teeth, they were banning the two hashtags of the two most commonly used abortion medications.” Rathe, the TikTok spokesperson, says
As the pixels settle after Apple’s meticulously planned rollout of its Vision Pro headset, battle lines have solidified in the war for a new reality. Multiple tech powers—and some rising upstarts—are developing headsets and other gizmos to digitally augment or replace the world our raw senses perceive. But there’s a clear split in philosophy over
That pragmatism has been on full display during Europe’s energy crisis, as Habeck has been forced to embrace uncomfortable compromises. When Russia slashed gas supplies flowing into Germany, Habeck ordered the country’s coal stations back into service. When utility company RWE requested to extract coal from underneath the western German village of Lützerath, arguing this
Why speak up when you’ve won the game? McGough admits that her “hard up” working class background might make her more likely to feel that she now has “enough.” She left school for her first job at 16 and set up her first company with her ex-husband with “two laptops and a list of contacts.”
On Sunday, a 22-foot submersible called Titan went missing on a trip to explore the wreck of the Titanic. Five people were aboard. As the sub’s supply of oxygen dwindled, authorities launched a desperate search of the seafloor, covering an area the size of Massachusetts. Rescue ships pinged the ocean with sonar in the hopes
If ChatGPT and generative AI live up to even a tenth of the hype surrounding them, wide-scale job losses might seem inevitable. But new economic data shows that the last big leap in AI did not coincide with a reduction of jobs in affected industries—despite widespread fears of rapid replacement at the time. In a
Competition for jobs is fierce in China right now. After he graduated from college with a business major earlier this year, David struggled to find work. There were too many applicants for every position, and, he says, “even if you find a job, the pay is not as great as previous years, and you have
Over the past few years, Apple has pursued a meal-prepping app with a pear logo, a singer-songwriter named Frankie Pineapple, a German cycling route, a pair of stationery makers, and a school district, among others. The company fought a decades-long battle with the Beatles’ music label, Apple Corps, which was finally resolved in 2007. An
If you have a side hustle or skills that you want to promote, it’s worthwhile to keep a portfolio online so other people can see what you’re capable of: You can list the website at the end of your emails, on your business cards, in your social media profiles, and anywhere else you can think
In 2012, Massachusetts voters became the first to bring the concept into the modern age by requiring automakers to add an onboard port that allowed anyone with a cheap tool to access a car’s data. The law led to a nationwide agreement, where automakers guaranteed independent repairers and owners would have access to the tools
Kevin Kelly had a birthday party earlier this month. It featured a giant bubble-maker, a magic show, an ice cream truck, a toy train demonstration, and a guy who made balloon hats. Kelly, who turned not 6 but 71, invited guests such as Matt Mullenweg, Hugh Howey, Stewart Brand, and Jaron Lanier. The second-grade vibe
For 15 years, Stack Overflow has been the main hub for discussions of computer programming and development. It’s where users who are facing a tricky conundrum or are hitting a wall in their code can come to ask questions of fellow users. And historically, it has been a male-dominated space. In the organization’s annual survey
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, recently said that China should play a key role in shaping the guardrails that are placed around the technology. “China has some of the best AI talent in the world,” Altman said during a talk at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) last week. “Solving alignment for advanced AI systems requires some
Researchers at the CCDH also found several marketing firms catering to crisis pregnancy centers and offering services, including help accessing the Google ad grants, along with strategies to ensure that their content appears next to legitimate reproductive health information by hijacking keywords used by people seeking abortions. “There’s a set of keywords which are clearly
That interference escalated into a full-scale regulatory crackdown, in which the government portrayed the tech sector as a force that needed to be reined in for the good of society. Almost every top tech company has had to make corrections, and Alibaba was no exception. Ride-hailing group Didi was probed and voluntarily delisted from the New