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

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

It’s not just you: American cars have gotten bigger. Over the past two decades, growing numbers of US buyers have turned in their sedans for SUVs and pickup trucks. And those SUVs and pickups have grown ever more hulking. The electrification of driving isn’t slowing the growth spurt. Batteries are heavy, and many carmakers are

I was never afraid to train an AI chatbot on my writing, because OpenAI had already broken the seal. CEO Sam Altman announced the “GPT” feature at OpenAI’s first developer day in November, prior to the company’s five days of leadership chaos. Before the release of custom GPTs, ChatGPT with web browsing was already able

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

Clare Walker, a 23-year-old in Brooklyn, has racked up about $700 worth of gift cards or, in her words, “free money,” by referring her contacts to Flip. “There were definitely some people who I haven’t really kept up with since high school, but I was like, ‘Hey, add me on Flip. Here’s a free 75

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

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

The US Department of Justice has got mail: A coalition of more than a dozen tech advocacy groups wrote to the agency today calling on it to launch an investigation into allegedly anticompetitive behavior by Apple. The letter says that Apple’s recent blocking of Beeper, which reverse engineered iMessage to allow compatibility with Android phones,

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

In a minivan with the rear seats ripped out, John is chasing one of his 250 electric scooters down a California highway. He finds it 10 miles away, hiding in a bush—a run-and-dump tactic that he says thieves use to test whether anyone will come after them before they take a scooter home. John, not

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

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

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

Joseph Jerome, who left privacy advocacy to work on Meta’s augmented reality data policies for two years before being laid off in May, says he grew to appreciate how consent decrees force companies to work on privacy. They add “checks and balances,” he says. But without clear privacy protection rules from lawmakers that bind every

Such is the fluidity of this interchange between electric and combustion that, after a time, you stop thinking of the car as being a hybrid at all, and settle to simply enjoy the visceral experience of the Revuelto—which, although hugely entertaining, is more refined than any previous Lamborghini. And not just in the powertrain. The

The relationship between Elon Musk and the European Union deteriorated further on Monday, with the bloc launching a formal investigation into the way X has been run since the billionaire took over last year. Senior officials from the European Commission said they were concerned about a range of new features that have been added to

A little over three years have passed since McDonald’s sent out an email to thousands of its restaurant owners around the world that abruptly cut short the future of a three-person startup called Kytch—and with it, perhaps one of McDonald’s best chances for fixing its famously out-of-order ice cream machines. Until then, Kytch had been

OpenAI was founded on a promise to build artificial intelligence that benefits all of humanity—even when that AI becomes considerably smarter than its creators. Since the debut of ChatGPT last year and during the company’s recent governance crisis, its commercial ambitions have been more prominent. Now, the company says a new research group working on

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

Some Elon Musk enthusiasts have been alarmed to discover in recent days that Grok, his supposedly “truth-seeking” artificial intelligence was in actual fact a bit of a snowflake. Grok, built by Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence company, was made available to Premium+ X users last Friday. Musk has complained that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is afflicted with “the

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

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

In October 2018, a UC Davis veterinarian approved Animal 13 for use in a Neuralink experiment. She was six years old when she received her Neuralink implants. According to her pre-project physical exam and echocardiogram, Davis staff did not observe any medical abnormalities prior to her surgery, only noting that she had superficial scratches on

The US government took the first step Tuesday toward requiring new cars to have technology that checks whether the driver is drunk. At an event in Washington, DC, officials with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the nation’s top road safety regulator, said the technology could help prevent thousands of annual road deaths involving alcohol.

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

“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

YouTube unleashed an influential generation of new internet celebrities in 2007 when it started to share ad revenue with select video creators. For the past couple of years, a snippet of code on YouTube’s website revealed which channels are part of the secretive and exclusive club. But users and activists who had come to rely

More bad news for Google could come in mid-2024 when US district judge Amit Mehta in Washington, DC, is expected to issue his ruling on whether Google has unlawfully maintained its monopoly over web search. Testimony in that case, which was brought by the US Department of Justice and attorneys general for nearly every US