Month: December 2023

If 2022 was the year the generative AI boom started, 2023 was the year of the generative AI panic. Just over 12 months since OpenAI released ChatGPT and set a record for the fastest-growing consumer product, it appears to have also helped set a record for fastest government intervention in a new technology. The US
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In 2023, the world has felt like it was balanced on a precipice. A United States presidential election looms, with a resurgent candidate that threatens to bring with him all the chaos of 2016 and 2020. Artificial intelligence developed so quickly that it seemed to have suddenly sprung into being, heralding vast societal promise and
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Once we get computers to match human-level intelligence, they won’t stop there. With deep knowledge, machine-level mathematical abilities, and better algorithms, they’ll create superintelligence, right? Yeah, there’s no question that machines will eventually be smarter than humans. We don’t know how long it’s going to take—it could be years, it could be centuries. At that
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The lawmakers’ letter also claims that NIST is being rushed to define standards even though research into testing AI systems is at an early stage. As a result there is “significant disagreement” among AI experts over how to work on or even measure and define safety issues with the technology, it states. “The current state
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Andersen and Lensky of Google disagree. They do not think the experiment demonstrates a topological qubit, because the object cannot reliably manipulate information to achieve practical quantum computing. “It is repeatedly stated explicitly in the manuscript that error correction must be included to achieve topological protection and that this would need to be done in
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FTX demonstrated what can go wrong when a crypto exchange is given the latitude to operate in an opaque fashion and with minimal external oversight. It changed what is now expected of other exchanges, too. Within a week of FTX’s collapse, Binance, the world’s largest exchange, had proposed a new minimum standard. In a blog
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If you are planning to buy your donkey meat on Amazon this Christmas, you may have to look elsewhere. The world’s largest online retailer says it has stopped selling edible donkey in California, WIRED has learned. Amazon’s new policy kicked in after months of negotiations with the Center for Contemporary Equine Studies, a nonprofit organization
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Christmas is in full swing in New York City; lines snake through Midtown as tourists oggle department store windows and the Rockefeller Center tree, and the Union Square Holiday Market is bustling with vendors and shoppers. All the while, hotel prices are up and vacancies down compared to the 2022 holiday season—and there are almost
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For Big Tech, there are few better places to experiment with data center heating than in the Nordics. This idea works best when data centers can be connected to preexisting district heating systems, where a group of buildings share a common heating system instead of each having their own. These communal systems are commonplace in
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Cruise, General Motors’ self-driving development subsidiary, will lay off almost a quarter of its workforce—about 900 employees—the company announced Thursday. The cuts are part of a broader restructuring to focus the robotaxi unit on a narrower path to commercialization. Instead of expanding its commercial robotaxi service to multiple US cities, the company will relaunch its
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Gen Z-ers are making aspirational boards about houses they want to live in, places they want to visit, and even people they want to date, says Sarah Pollack, Pinterest’s global head of consumer marketing. The app also brings a more visual alternative to traditional search. Some Gen Z-ers are ditching Google, substituting the search engine
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The cost rivals that of the largest private, personal construction projects in human history. Building permits put the price tag for the main construction at around $100 million, in addition to $170 million in land purchases, but this is likely an underestimate. Building costs on the remote island are still higher than pre-pandemic levels. That
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Platform workers can no longer be fired automatically by algorithms, according to new European Union rules agreed today in a sweeping reform of the gig economy that will affect Uber drivers and Deliveroo couriers. “Now we have a proper system, which is something that doesn’t exist anywhere else around the world,” said Elisabetta Gualmini, an
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“There are companies that have partnerships and collaborations, but they’re all still in development,” claims Berdichevsky, “while we’re ready for scale production manufacturing.” Not coincidentally, Moses Lake is also home to REC Silicon, a formerly shuttered supplier to the photovoltaics industry, and now one of only two US makers of silane gas. Group14 will be
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