Month: December 2023

Over the two years lawmakers have been negotiating the rules agreed today, AI technology and the leading concerns about it have dramatically changed. When the AI Act was conceived in April 2021, policymakers were worried about opaque algorithms deciding who would get a job, be granted refugee status or receive social benefits. By 2022, there

Steven Johnson has written 13 books, on topics ranging from a London cholera outbreak to the value of video games. He’s been a television presenter and a podcast host. He’s a keynote speaker who doesn’t have to call himself that in his LinkedIn profile. And for over a year now, he’s been a full-time employee

The history of artificial intelligence has been punctuated by periods of so-called “AI winter,” when the technology seemed to meet a dead end and funding dried up. Each one has been accompanied by proclamations that making machines truly intelligent is just too darned hard for humans to figure out. Google’s release of Gemini, claimed to

Since 2016, the social behemoth now known as Meta has been working to deploy end-to-end encryption in its communication apps. CEO Mark Zuckerberg even promised in 2019 that the data privacy protection would roll out by default across all of the company’s chat apps. In practice, though, it was a wildly ambitious goal fraught with

Mary Yap has spent the last year and a half trying to get farmers to fall in love with basalt. The volcanic rock is chock full of nutrients, captured as its crystal structure forms from cooling magma, and can make soil less acidic. In that way it’s like limestone, which farmers often use to improve

The biggest fight of the generative AI revolution is headed to the courtroom—and no, it’s not about the latest boardroom drama at OpenAI. Book authors, artists, and coders are challenging the practice of teaching AI models to replicate their skills using their own work as a training manual. The debate centers on the billions of

Hoffman and others said that there’s no need to pause development of AI. He called that drastic measure, for which some AI researchers have petitioned, foolish and destructive. Hoffman identified himself as a rational “accelerationist”—someone who knows to slow down when driving around a corner but that, presumably, is happy to speed up when the

Google just launched its Gemini AI model. Want to try it out for free? A version of the model, called Gemini Pro, is available inside of the Bard chatbot right now. Also, anyone with a Pixel 8 Pro can use a version of Gemini in their AI-suggested text replies with WhatsApp now, and with Gboard

One attraction of Binance, as the company grew from its 2017 founding into the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, was the firm’s freewheeling flouting of rules. As it amassed well over 100 million crypto-trading users globally, it openly told the United States government that, as an offshore operation, it didn’t have to comply with

Increasing talk of artificial intelligence developing with potentially dangerous speed is hardly slowing things down. A year after OpenAI launched ChatGPT and triggered a new race to develop AI technology, Google today revealed an AI project intended to reestablish the search giant as the world leader in AI. Gemini, a new type of AI model

Demis Hassabis has never been shy about proclaiming big leaps in artificial intelligence. Most notably, he became famous in 2016 after a bot called AlphaGo taught itself to play the complex and subtle board game Go with superhuman skill and ingenuity. Today, Hassabis says his team at Google has made a bigger step forward—for him,

Unlike OpenAI, Mozilla’s nonprofit cannot fire executives in charge of for-profit work. Each for-profit unit has its own board, with members annually selected by the nonprofit foundation’s board. “It’s different jobs, it’s a different mix of skills,” Surman says. “If you have different functions, it makes sense to have a separation of powers.” The different

ATI’s pilots are taking a less antagonistic tone in hopes of bringing Amazon to the negotiating table. “What we don’t want to do is affect our customers,” says Sterling. “We’ve done a lot to protect our obsession with Amazon.” However, he says the intransigence of ATSG’s management has left the pilots with no choice but

Large language models recently emerged as a powerful and transformative new kind of technology. Their potential became headline news as ordinary people were dazzled by the capabilities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, released just a year ago. In the months that followed the release of ChatGPT, discovering new jailbreaking methods became a popular pastime for mischievous users,

Just days after people gleefully posted their Spotify Wrapped, bad news came for the music streaming giant. Spotify announced today that it would cut 17 percent of its workforce, a chunk that equates to an estimated 1,500 people. It’s the third time the world’s largest music streamer has cut jobs this year. The news came

Josh Miller laughs a few minutes into our conversation and admits that he almost declined today’s interview about The Browser Company. The young CEO is jetlagged from a flight to Paris but appears comfortable over Zoom and eager to talk about Arc, his company’s new AI-fortified web browser. So, what’s the reason for his hesitancy?

One of the most stunning twists in the recent five-day crisis at ChatGPT creator OpenAI came when some 95 percent of the company’s hundreds of employees threatened to quit. The staff planned to follow CEO Sam Altman to develop successors to ChatGPT at Microsoft instead. The threat appeared to mark a turning point in Altman’s

Rain at one point has claimed to investors that it has held advanced talks to sell systems to Google, Oracle, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon. Microsoft declined to comment, and the other companies did not respond to requests for comment. Security Fears The funding round led by Prosperity7 announced last year brought Rain’s total funding to

“Our Mars Jacket has a 3D-printed vomit pocket with a bright orange sick bag,” company cofounder Steve Tidball stated earlier this year. “You might call it provocative, but for us, it isn’t—it’s experimental.” Vollebak is a niche brand, however, and marketing a postapocalyptic future as somehow desirable is far from mainstream. Where Are the Copycats?

No human celebrating a first birthday is as verbose, knowledgeable, or prone to fabrication as ChatGPT, which is blowing out its first candle as I type these words. Of course, OpenAI’s game-changing large language model was precocious at birth, tumbling into civilization’s ongoing conversation like an uninvited guest busting into a dinner party and instantly

After Palmer Luckey founded Anduril in 2017, he promised it would be a new kind of defense contractor, inspired by hacker ingenuity and Silicon Valley speed. The company’s latest product, a jet-powered, AI-controlled combat drone called Roadrunner, is inspired by the grim reality of modern conflict, especially in Ukraine, where large numbers of cheap, agile