The best virtual reality experience I’ve had this year was not with the $500 Quest 3 or the $3,500 Apple VisionPro, and it didn’t even require a headset. Sure, it cost $2.3 billion. But it came with a live soundtrack from an iconic rock band. I am talking, of course, about last weekend’s U2 concert
Month: October 2023
The trial of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, now coming to the end of its first week, is far bigger than just crypto. Reporters from the largest media outlets (including WIRED) have flocked to New York to cover it, TV stations are airing feature-length documentaries on the fall of the crypto exchange, and X (formerly Twitter)
“Based on its current financials, Bandcamp requires some adjustments to ensure a sustainable and healthy company that can serve its community of artists and fans long into the future,” says a statement provided by Songtradr chief marketing officer Lindsay Nahmiache. It says the company will be extending job offers to Bandcamp staff over the next
Last month, the UK government announced the home for its new exascale supercomputer, designed to give the country an edge in the global artificial intelligence race. The £900 million ($1.1 billion) project would be built in Bristol, a city in the west of England famed for its industrial heritage, and the machine itself would be
It may be difficult for search engines to automatically detect AI-generated text. But Microsoft could have implemented some basic safeguards, perhaps barring text drawn from chatbot transcripts from becoming a featured snippet or adding warnings that certain results or citations consist of text dreamt up by an algorithm. Griffin added a disclaimer to his blog
In hindsight, zhenya Podtikov realized, he should have known that Ukraine’s first Vector drone was not long for this world. But when it arrived at an army base in Lviv, in April 2022, he couldn’t help admiring it. “I was just surprised that drone hardware could look so good,” he said. The Vector came in
Wining and dining, wooing clients with creative offers, and cashing big bonuses provide the glamor to sales work. Drafting answers to hundreds of dull questions posed by a prospective customer’s request for proposals? That’s just drudgery. Mercifully for workers, after months of speculation about ChatGPT-style AI taking over white-collar work, the corporate chore of responding
Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange FTX may have lost at least $8 billion in customer money, but he “didn’t intend to defraud anyone,” his defense team said Wednesday during the opening arguments of his highly anticipated trial. Though legal experts had long speculated that Bankman-Fried, or SBF for short, would take a “blame the lawyers” approach,
David Ferrucci, CEO of AI company Elemental Cognition and previously the lead on IBM’s Watson project, says language models have removed a great deal of the complexity from building useful assistants. Parsing complex commands previously required a huge amount of hand-coding to cover the different variations of language, and the final systems were often annoyingly
Lauren: Our guest this week is Taylor Lorenz. Taylor is a prominent technology journalist at The Washington Post, and she’s the author of a new book called Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. Taylor (audio clip): We’re living in this internet-mediated world already. I would say that the
In the weeks after Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto exchange began to crumble last November, he chose to ignore the most basic piece of legal advice: Say nothing, or risk incriminating yourself. He took media interviews. He appeared on podcasts. He tweeted incessantly. He started his own Substack. He promised to testify in front of Congress,
Before his arrest in December, Bankman-Fried ignored the most basic legal principle: say nothing, or risk incriminating yourself. Instead, the FTX founder embarked on a parade of media interviews, appeared on podcasts, tweeted, and started his own Substack. In the process, he handed prosecutors a pile of material to inform their case against him. At
A special unit of the Delhi Police, reporting directly to Narendra Modi’s union government, this morning seized the laptops and phones of journalists and satirists associated with a news website, Newsclick.in. The site has been charged under a law usually used to deal with terrorism suspects, and two journalists have been detained. Journalists Abhisar Sharma,
It was meant to be a week for women in tech—but this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration was swamped by men who gate-crashed the event in search of lucrative tech jobs. The annual conference and career fair aimed at women and non-binary tech workers, which takes its name from a pioneering computer scientist, took place last
Back in February, when a Conservative Party lawmaker in the UK’s House of Commons voiced support for the 15-minute city conspiracy, he was laughed at by his fellow members of Parliament. Now, eight months later, the British government is fully embracing the fringe conspiracy and placing it at the heart of government policy. “Right across
Everyone involved in the strike should be calculating what’s at stake to figure out what sort of offers they’d be willing to accept or make—in other words, to resolve the whole dispute. “Absent calculating the pie, I would be negotiating with my eyes closed,” Nalebuff says. Perhaps that sounds too abstract to be much help