Month: August 2023

Over the past year or so, you’ve probably had conversations with friends, family, and coworkers about the rise of generative AI capable of making convincing text and imagery—but perhaps also about the hype and fear swirling around the technology. A poll out this week finds that worry over harmful effects of AI is outpacing the

What applies to patents should also apply to copyright, he says. If, for example, an AI is asked to write “the best pop song in history,” and does so, it would have created an extremely valuable piece of intellectual property. “Is that an activity that we ought to incentivize through the copyright system?” Abbott says.

Moore’s pace remains relentless because the stakes are so high; she sees suffering around her and knows that not enough has been done about it. Of the 10 colleagues of Moore’s whom I interviewed, most expressed worry about who would continue her legacy. For all she’s taught the next generation of designers, there’s no one

The interest Aleph Alpha has received so far—the company claims 10,000 customers across both business and government—shows it is able to compete, or at least coexist, with the emerging giants of the field, says Jörg Bienert, who is CEO of the German AI Association, an industry group. “This demand definitely shows it really makes sense

In May, Sputnik International, a state-owned Russian media outlet, posted a series of tweets lambasting US foreign policy and attacking the Biden administration. Each prompted a curt but well-crafted rebuttal from an account called CounterCloud, sometimes including a link to a relevant news or opinion article. It generated similar responses to tweets by the Russian

For researchers and conservationists alike, the potential applications of machine learning are basically limitless. And Earth Species is not the only group working on decoding animal communication. Payne spent the last months of his life advising for Project CETI, a nonprofit that built a base in Dominica this year for the study of sperm whale

The surrounding Charlotte County covers 1,323 square miles of territory—about twice the area of Greater London, and four times the size of New York City—with a population of just 26,015. Its location means it’s faster to row a boat to the US than drive almost anywhere else in Canada. It’s far from an anomaly. Nearly

For months, Etsy has become littered with a new genre of T-shirt: the Donald Trump mug shot. And they’re available in two main styles: Guity AF and Not Guilty. The shirts are adorned with photos of the former US president appearing as if he’d just been booked, but until very recently, they’ve been fakes—most of

Now that we’ve all had experience with large language models, their limitations are all too visible. Yes, they can write. But their prose doesn’t explode in the mind like the words of Jennifer Egan, Emily St. John Mandel, or David Foster Wallace do. Yes they can make music. But Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar are

A melt, a muppet, a fraud, a bungler, a Judas, a taker of bribes. A good boy, a lad, a maestro, a beauty. To the crowd at Real Bedford Football Club on a sun-bleached evening in August, the referee was all of these things within the span of half an hour. The Bedford fans, separated

Donald Trump was arrested in Georgia tonight for his role in what prosecutors christened “a wide-ranging criminal enterprise” aimed at overturning the results of the 2020 election. Trump and 18 others—his former lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, and his ex-chief of staff, Mark Meadows, among them—have been formally accused of 41 state-law felonies. The case is brought

Threads, the text-based social network that Meta recently launched as part of Instagram, is finally on the web. Earlier this week, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg shared that Threads for the web would be “rolling out over the next few days.” That rollout has begun; some users already have access to the web version. It’s

ChatGPT made it possible for anyone to play with powerful artificial intelligence, but the inner workings of the world-famous chatbot remain a closely guarded secret. In recent months, however, efforts to make AI more “open” seem to have gained momentum. In May, someone leaked a model from Meta, called Llama, which gave outsiders access to

When Meta released Llama 2, a powerful artificial intelligence model similar to the one behind ChatGPT, last month, it made it possible for developers, startups, and researchers to play with the kind of AI that has enthralled the world for nearly a year. Today, Meta is following up with the release of Code Llama, a

Cloud computing providers are very aware that their customers are struggling for capacity. Surging demand has “caught the industry off guard a bit,” says Chetan Kapoor, a director of product management at AWS. The time needed to acquire and install new GPUs in their data centers have put the cloud giants behind, and the specific

Who owns the data created by cars: their owners, or the companies that built them? In 2020, Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly approved a law that began to answer that question. It required automakers selling cars in the state to build an “open data platform” that would allow owners and independent repair shops to access the information

Last winter, the unveiling of OpenAI’s alarmingly sophisticated chatbot sent educators into a tailspin. Generative AI, it was feared, would enable rampant cheating and plagiarism, and even make high school English obsolete. Universities debated updating plagiarism policies. Some school districts outright banned ChatGPT from their networks. Now, a new school year presents new challenges—and, for

Low Risk: Users can edit or delete data, Some Risk: Users can edit data, High Risk: Users cannot edit or delete data Third-Party Sharing (Ads and Marketing) Research scientist and privacy expert Razieh Nokhbeh Zaeem calls personally identifiable information the “currency of the internet” because of the myriad ways individualized data is collected, bought, and

ChatGPT may well revolutionize web search, streamline office chores, and remake education, but the smooth-talking chatbot has also found work as a social media crypto huckster. Researchers at Indiana University Bloomington discovered a botnet powered by ChatGPT operating on X—the social network formerly known as Twitter—in May of this year. The botnet, which the researchers

Steve Jobs didn’t want the photographer. It was May 1998, and he was about to launch the iMac, the computer that would strap Apple in for a wild ride to the greatest comeback in corporate history. The product was due to ship that August, 25 years ago this month. And Jobs had chosen me, then

However, the reality of the favelas speaks loudly. Driven by the increase in the cost of living and unemployment, Brazil saw a 40 percent increase in the population living in shantytowns, to 16 million in the past 12 years, according to the 2022 census. This is compounded by an unprecedented surge in the percentage of

This March, nearly 35,000 AI researchers, technologists, entrepreneurs, and concerned citizens signed an open letter from the nonprofit Future of Life Institute that called for a “pause” on AI development, due to the risks to humanity revealed in the capabilities of programs such as ChatGPT. “Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,

The plant-based industry has also struggled with claims that its products are ultra-processed and unhealthy. The science around food processing and its effects on our health is still poorly understood, but that hasn’t stopped campaigners from using the ultra-processed label as a stick with which to bash the plant-based industry. The Center for Consumer Freedom,

Over 100 people are confirmed dead after a wildfire devastated parts of Maui, Hawaii. Families fled from their cars and into the ocean to escape the surging flames that engulfed the town of Lahaina with little warning. What ignited the wildfire remains unknown; multiple factors could have contributed to the disaster. Hawaiians who survived are

Gideon Lichfield: If I were a cynic, which of course I’m not at all … Mustafa Suleyman: [Chuckle] Not at all. Lauren Goode: Not Gideon. Gideon Lichfield: I might say that you and the AI companies are setting up a pretty sweet deal for yourselves, because you’re getting to say to government, “Look, you, government,

Interviews with OMRs who worked at other facilities suggest that the practice of sending injured employees back to work isn’t limited to the Albany warehouse. Eight OMRs who spoke to WIRED say they faced direct pressure from managers to keep the number of workers they sent to doctors low, despite Amazon protocol requiring them to

YouTube Music just announced Samples, a new in-app feature where users can scroll through short music video clips from their favorite artists and discover new songs. Welcome back to the short-form video wars. Yes, Silicon Valley remains hyperfixated on generative AI, but don’t forget one of its other, recent favorite trends: releasing features that vaguely

On July 19, Bloomberg News reported what many others have been saying for some time: Twitter (now called X) was losing advertisers, in part because of its lax enforcement against hate speech. Quoted heavily in the story was Callum Hood, the head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit that

For Sander van der Linden, misinformation is personal. As a child in the Netherlands, the University of Cambridge social psychologist discovered that almost all of his mother’s family had been executed by the Nazis during the Second World War. He became absorbed by the question of how so many people came to support the ideas

Large language models like those powering ChatGPT and other recent chatbots have broad and impressive capabilities because they are trained with massive amounts of text. Michael Sellitto, head of geopolitics and security at Anthropic, says this also gives the systems a “gigantic potential attack or risk surface.” Microsoft’s head of red-teaming, Ram Shankar Sivu Kumar,