Covid-19 made remote work a reality for a lot of people, but for me, it was business as usual. I haven’t worked in a physical office in a long time. In fact, for several years, I’ve worked from anywhere but a physical office. Across three continents and a few employers (including myself), I’ve dragged my
Month: September 2023
ChatGPT definitely has its limits. When given a random photo of a mural, it couldn’t identify the artist or location; however, ChatGPT easily clocked where images of multiple San Francisco landmarks were taken, like Dolores Park and the Salesforce Tower. Although it may still feel a bit gimmicky, anyone out on an adventure in a
When I bring up these concerns to Meta’s VP of generative AI, Ahmad Al-Dahle, post-keynote, he accuses me of having “a dystopian point of view.” Adding AI bots to the various feeds will spur human connection, he counters. “I think these AIs are entertaining and can help people learn new skills that help them better
“We needed weapons, and we needed them fast,” 3D says, sitting beneath the stalactites in a dimly lit cave, somewhere deep in the jungle in eastern Myanmar. The space reverberates with the hum of 3D printers, the devices that gave 3D his nom de guerre. A network engineer, 3D comes across as controlled and cautious,
At first, Anand thought it was just a glitch. He’d read a few tweets saying that withdrawals from FTX—then the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world—had been suspended. But these things had happened before in the crypto market, he said, “when they do server maintenance or something like that … so I didn’t take it
X, the company formerly known as Twitter, has fired its head of threat intelligence, Aaron Rodericks, and four other members of the team responsible for combating disinformation and misinformation, just months before the US Republican primaries mark the beginning of the 2024 American election cycle—and a year in which more than 50 countries around the
Six months ago this week, many prominent AI researchers, engineers, and entrepreneurs signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on development of AI systems more capable than OpenAI’s latest GPT-4 language generator. It argued that AI is advancing so quickly and unpredictably that it could eliminate countless jobs, flood us with disinformation, and—as
In 2017, Bankman-Fried started his own trading outfit, Alameda Research, taking seed funding from effective-altruist donors. Early employees were mostly EAs too; it was all about earning to give. The firm focused on arbitrage trading, whereby profits are realized on tiny differences in the prices of assets across different exchanges. Specifically, it took advantage of
On October 3, Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, is due to go on trial for fraud and conspiracy in a court in the Southern District of New York. Last fall, a report published by news outlet CoinDesk cast doubt over the health of FTX’s sibling company, Alameda Research, with which it had
“In the last year or two, people have taken advances in AI and machine learning and said ‘we can make a real business case here, whether it’s lowering costs or improving efficiency or whatever,” says Matthew Johnson-Roberson, director of the robotics institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Johnson-Roberson says years of investment in areas like self-driving
The AI mimics are available today in beta on Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. They include a chatbot based on Paris Hilton playing a mystery-solving detective, another based on Snoop Dogg as a dungeon master, and YouTuber Mr. Beast as a chatbot that Meta describes as “the big brother that roasts you—because he cares.” The
This did not look guaranteed to work, says Matthew Chantry, machine-learning coordinator at the ECWMF, who is spending this storm season evaluating their performance. The algorithms underpinning ChatGPT were trained with trillions of words, largely scraped from the internet, but there’s no sample so comprehensive for Earth’s atmosphere. Hurricanes in particular make up a tiny
Idris Elba learned about crypto at the same time as almost everyone else: when prices went through the roof. The British actor and filmmaker, best known for his roles in TV series The Wire and Luther, watched on during the pandemic as his celebrity peers tried to get in on the action. In 2021, sensing
“Congress is in charge of money and everything for the government, and Congress should be in charge of funding special counsels. Those are my red lines,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican, told a group of congressional reporters. Greene’s other top demand is impeaching President Joe Biden. McCarthy has already launched an inquiry. With Trump
Nearly 1,500 US police departments operate drones but only about a dozen routinely dispatch them in response to 911 calls, according to ACLU research. Drone maker Skydio aims to see that change, with a new model launched last week called the X10. The goal, cofounder and CEO Adam Bry said during a launch event last
Earlier this year, the stock-photo service provider Getty Images sued Stability AI over what Getty said was the misuse of more than 12 million Getty photos in training Stability’s AI photo-generation tool, Stable Diffusion. Now Getty Images is releasing its own AI photo-generation tool, which will be available to its commercial customers. And it’s bringing
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has done tens of thousands of face recognition searches using software from outside providers in recent years. Yet only 5 percent of the 200 agents with access to the technology have taken the bureau’s three-day training course on how to use it, a report from the Government Accountability
OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company that unleashed ChatGPT on the world last November, is making the chatbot app a lot more chatty. An upgrade to the ChatGPT mobile apps for iOS and Android announced today lets a person speak their queries to the chatbot and hear it respond with its own synthesized voice. The new
If your PDFs aren’t hosted online, then AskYourPDF can upload them for you, and you can then submit queries through ChatGPT. You can ask for specific details from specific sections, get overviews and summaries, get certain sections rewritten, and generally do anything ChatGPT can do with standard blocks of text. The plug-in also responds well
California governor Gavin Newsom worked late last night, vetoing a law that would have banned self-driving trucks without a human aboard from state roads until the early 2030s. State lawmakers had voted through the law with wide margins, backed by unions that argued autonomous trucks are a safety risk and threaten jobs. The bill would
Researchers and futurists have been talking for decades about the day when intelligent software agents will act as personal assistants, tutors, and advisers. Apple produced its famous Knowledge Navigator video in 1987. I seem to remember attending an MIT Media Lab event in the 1990s about software agents, where the moderator appeared as a butler,
For a second year running, Revolut, the jewel in the UK’s fintech crown, will fail to file its annual accounts on time. It’s not a good look. Since it launched in 2015, Revolut has grown quickly to 6,000 staff and 25 million customers. In pursuit of a “one app, all things money” vision, it has
Trucking and delivery driving jobs come in many different forms. Steve Viscelli, an economic sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies autonomous trucking, says that long-distance highway driving is the most susceptible to automation in the near term. Most autonomous trucking companies are focused on that type of driving. He estimates that 294,000 of
Google’s first data center consisted of 40-foot, server-filled shipping containers, which enabled advanced cooling and fewer construction headaches. It opened its own data center campus in Oregon in 2006, resembling the conventional bland, boxy, and massive buildings that now dot the world. But Barroso’s ideas made the insides exceptional. He and his Google colleagues turned
I recently needed to contact the CEO of a startup called Lindy, a company developing personal assistants powered by artificial intelligence. Instead of looking for it myself, I turned to an AI helper of my own, an open source program called Auto-GPT, typing in “Find me the email address of the CEO of Lindy AI.”
Months out of law school, Yosef Weitzman already has a huge courtroom role in the biggest antitrust trial of the century. In a US federal trial that started last week, Google is accused of unlawfully monopolizing online search and search ads. The company’s self-defined mission is to make the world’s information universally accessible, yet Google
Elon Musk hasn’t been sighted at the picket lines in Missouri, Ohio, or Michigan, where autoworkers are striking against the Big Three US carmakers. Yet the influence of Musk and his non-unionized company Tesla have been everywhere since the United Auto Workers called the strike last week. In some ways, Tesla—the world’s most valuable automaker
These comments were made by Thiel in a private capacity, says Palantir’s McArdle. “Our CEO has made it clear he disagrees with them and that he wishes ‘we had a health care system in the US that served the poor and underserved as well as I perceive the British system does.’” There is a lot
Fresh allegations of potential securities fraud have been leveled at Elon Musk over statements he recently made regarding the deaths of primates used for research at Neuralink, his biotech startup. Letters sent this afternoon to top officials at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by a medical ethics group call on the agency to
This image, rendered by Dall-E 3, shows how using ChatGPT to fill in a prompt produces a more coherent and sophisticated image. It might normally require a huge amount of prompt engineering, whereby a user tries increasingly complex prompts to create something sophisticated. But with Dall-E 3, ChatGPT takes on the work of crafting that