Month: September 2023

A couple of weeks ago, startup CEO Flo Crivello typed a message asking his personal assistant Lindy to change the length of an upcoming meeting from 30 to 45 minutes. Lindy, a software agent that happens to be powered by artificial intelligence, found a dozen or so 30-minute meetings on Crivello’s calendar and promptly extended

To try to ensure the products on the shop are of decent quality, TikTok uses technical and human moderation to find listings that violate its policies, says Favazza. The company also looks for negative reviews and complaint rates on sellers, and may take action against them. Some of the shop’s products are Temu-level cheap. Three

But the US venture was also ultimately doomed. It was entering a very crowded market, and wasn’t ready to compete. “There are a lot of scaled telemedicine companies here that have been around a lot longer than Babylon,” says Christina Farr, a health-tech investor at OMERS Ventures in San Francisco. One ex-employee says that Parsa

Under the new model, Deezer promises to separate professional artists from the musical clutter of hobbyists, functional music, and system-gaming bots, and to future-proof its platform. “The new model is designed to effectively stop gaming behavior using white noise,” says Folgueira. “It will also give us a framework to continue developing tools to deal with

There was a brief, strange moment in 2015 when Russell Brand mattered in mainstream British politics. With an election looming, the opposition Labour Party was trailing in the polls against a coalition government that was the very definition of establishment—led by an Eton- and Oxford-educated prime minister in David Cameron and his Westminster- and Cambridge-educated

Newcomers to Pebble will find that its AI-generated suggestions include posts to introduce yourself on the service or welcome recent joiners. Ideas also encourages playful banter with Pebble’s official account, which itself is a bot powered by generative AI. It can also suggest replies to posts from others. During my experiments last week, Ideas suggested

In addition to making everyone an epidemiologist, the Covid-19 pandemic schooled the public on the world-spanning network of manufacturers, assemblers, and shippers behind just about every consumer good that arrives on your doorstep. Or driveway. Car prices soared as automakers struggled with a supply chain jammed up by worker shortages, chip shortages, and shipping delays.

I meet with Walter Isaacson in a small conference room in the offices of book publisher Simon & Schuster. The walls are festooned with framed covers, including of course Isaacson’s mega-bestseller Steve Jobs. I’m sure somewhere else in the office are covers representing his other subjects—Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Jennifer Doudna—which together have earned

Past research shows that large language models are capable of generating text harmful to some groups of people, including those who identify as Black, women, people with disabilities, and Muslims. Since 90 percent of students who attend schools that work with Charter School Growth Fund identify as people of color, Connell says, “having a human

While all the CEOs, union bosses, and civil rights advocates were asked to raise their hands to express consensus, one flaw with muzzling senators, according to critics on both sides of the proverbial aisle, is that lawmakers weren’t easily able to game out where their allies are in the Senate. And coalitions are key to

You’d have to be pretty brave to bet against the idea that applying more computing power and data to machine learning—a recipe that birthed ChatGPT—won’t lead to further advances of some kind in artificial intelligence. Even so, you’d be braver still to bet that combo will produce specific advances or breakthroughs on a specific timeline,

Part of the problem is the slipperiness of attempting to tie a carbon credit—an abstract financial instrument—to any particular product in Apple’s armada of product offerings or the wider global economy. The Watch doesn’t have any role in creating those credits. They’re only brought together by an accountant’s sleight of hand. Of course, that assumes

The siren call of AI says, It doesn’t have to be this way. And when you consider the billions of people who sit outside the elite club of writer-sufferers, you start to think: Maybe it shouldn’t be this way. May Habib spent her early childhood in Lebanon before moving to Canada, where she learned English

As it rolls from one political crisis to another, it’s hard not to think of Britain as metaphorically crumbling. Now, it seems, significant pieces of the country are literally structurally unsound. More than 150 schools, colleges, and nurseries in England have been ordered to close parts of their buildings due to the looming threat of

Like GM, Ford and Stellantis have launched their own joint EV battery ventures with South Korean electronics companies. The UAW says the new businesses are offering jobs with lower pay and safety protections than at established unionized auto plants. Last month, the recently unionized Ultium workers inked an interim agreement to raise wages by an

Tech product launches in 2023 have become predictable: Everything now comes with generative AI features that will serve up chatty but knowledgeable text or mind-blowing images. The rollout of the iPhone 15 this week shows Apple opting to Think Different. The new device comes with the A17 Pro processor, an Apple-designed chip to put more

[Laughter] Lauren: But tell us a little bit about the argument you’re making. Cory: Sure. Well, this is an argument about more than tech. This is an argument about all industries. And, if we say, OK, well, there’s something about the leadership of these companies that allowed them to do what their predecessors hadn’t done.

This may not be great news for the climate. A person who swaps a gas truck for a hybrid one will reduce their emissions. An analysis of 2020 pickup trucks found that a hybrid truck emits almost 30 percent less greenhouse gas over its lifetime than a solely gas-powered counterpart. But global climate goals generally

That’s a particular challenge for health care and criminal justice agencies. Loter says Seattle employees have considered using generative AI to summarize lengthy investigative reports from the city’s Office of Police Accountability. Those reports can contain information that’s public but still sensitive. Staff at the Maricopa County Superior Court in Arizona use generative AI tools

Across a sterile white table in a windowless room, I’m introduced to a woman in her forties. She has a square jaw and blonde hair that has been pulled back from her face with a baby-blue scrunchie. “The girls call me Marmalade,” she says, inviting me to use her prison nickname. Early on a Wednesday

We’re talking about AI in a very nuts-and-bolts way, but a lot of the discussion centers on whether it will ultimately be a utopian boon or the end of humanity. What’s your stance on those long-term questions? AI is one of the most profound technologies we will ever work on. There are short-term risks, midterm

“I don’t really know how this plays out,” Sam Sharps, executive director of policy at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, says. “And whether the reassurances they give—even if today, they meet the best standards of investigations of data protection authorities around Europe—are at a political level going to be enough.” TikTok has around

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill currently working its way through the UK Parliament could see Meta (as well as Alphabet) labeled as holding Strategic Market Status (SMS) and therefore asked to financially contribute to content creators to ensure fair competition in the digital market. The amount paid would be decided under arbitration, with

A family member’s hurried Google search for a last-second visa to visit New Zealand recently caused a headache—and provided a timely reminder of why Google faces a landmark US antitrust trial next week. Tapping on the first link took us off to a website that after a few swipes charged $118 for the necessary paperwork.

The US government should create a new body to regulate artificial intelligence—and restrict work on language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 to companies granted licenses to do so. That’s the recommendation of a bipartisan duo of senators, Democrat Richard Blumenthal and Republican Josh Hawley, who launched a legislative framework yesterday to serve as a blueprint for

Mina Hsiang returned to the United States Digital Service, the US government’s rapid digital fix-it squad, on January 26, 2021, when the streets of Washington, DC, had hardly been cleared after Joe Biden’s inauguration. She was one of the group’s founding members but had spent the past few years working for a health care startup.

As with any development proposal, community opposition is complex and localized. Though easier to hide than wind turbines or solar panels, battery installations can mar a view, and construction can create noise or dust. But concerns about safety have become potent fuel for opposition efforts. Developers can point to data indicating that grid battery fires

The number of short-term Airbnbs available in New York City has dropped 70 percent after the city began enforcing a new law requiring short-term rental operators to register their homes. But despite the new requirements, there are still thousands of listings that could be unregistered. The drop, recorded between August 4 and September 5, the

Osborn and Pinterest’s Ta hope that by promoting more diverse body types to its 465 million monthly users, the platform can help reshape public perceptions about body size and shape. “If you are exposed to more people from more backgrounds, we hopefully build a more tolerant and accepting world,” Ta says. That may sound idealistic,

The dating scene in Los Angeles is tough. Doubly so if you’re not fresh out of college. That’s what Evelyn found when a relationship of two decades came to an abrupt end last year, casting her back into the dating pool at 50. “All the beautiful twentysomethings are here trying to make it in the