As someone who quite enjoys the Zen of tidying up, I was only too happy to grab a dustpan and brush and sweep up some beans spilled on a tabletop while visiting the Toyota Research Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts last year. The chore was more challenging than usual because I had to do it using
Month: January 2024
For those who trade in child sexual exploitation images and videos in the darkest recesses of the internet, cryptocurrency has been both a powerful tool and a treacherous one. Bitcoin, for instance, has allowed denizens of that criminal underground to buy and sell their wares with no involvement from a bank or payment processor that
In California, the Bay Area’s Contra Costa County will get $15 million, for instance, to deploy more than 100 chargers at its libraries. In Alaska, the Chilkoot Indian Association will get $1.4 million for a charging station in the disadvantaged community of Haines. The city of Mesa, in Arizona, will get $12 million for a
Do AI companies need to pay for the training data that powers their generative AI systems? The question is hotly contested in Silicon Valley and in a wave of lawsuits levied against tech behemoths like Meta, Google, and OpenAI. In Washington, DC, though, there seems to be a growing consensus that the tech giants need
US regulators have approved a new breed of financial product that will give people a way to invest in bitcoin through their brokerage for the first time, as if it were a regular stock. A selection of financial institutions, including household names like BlackRock and Fidelity, have been given permission by the US Securities and
ChatGPT also functions as a kind of translator or helper for GPT apps. When WIRED asked the AllTrails GPT to suggest a two-hour hike in Berkeley, California, ChatGPT responded by asking how strenuous the hike should be and if the trail should be dog-friendly. ChatGPT then asked for permission to call up AllTrail’s API and
Rumble, the so-called free speech alternative to YouTube, is the subject of an investigation by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), according to the company and a letter from the SEC. The SEC confirmed its investigation involving Rumble in response to a public records request that WIRED first filed in November, seeking documents
Right, and this is a very US-centric problem, because in other places those third-party messaging apps are more dominant. Yes. So iMessage is integrated in the iPhone operating system in a very deep way. But that’s not “premium.” That’s anticompetitive. You wrote in a blog post late last month that every time there’s an outage
No one knows whether artificial intelligence will be a boon or curse in the far future. But right now, there’s almost universal discomfort and contempt for one habit of these chatbots and agents: hallucinations, those made-up facts that appear in the outputs of large language models like ChatGPT. In the middle of what seems like
Some robots, including from Boston Dynamics, are already doing warehouse work. Do you expect to see that humanoid workforce growing in the coming years? Warehouse work is one of the great applications at the moment because there’s such a need for people. Employers are really frustrated with the difficulty of getting humans and training them
Jeff Farrah, CEO of lobbying group the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, which counts Waymo, Cruise, and other self-driving developers in its membership, says keeping motor vehicle regulation authority firmly in states’ hands is consistent with how vehicles have been regulated in the past. “Cities have a role to play in enforcing traffic laws, but life-saving
Fleming believed that growth has natural limits. Things grow to maturity—kids into adults, saplings into trees, startups into full-fledged companies—but growth beyond that point is, in his words, a “pathology” and an “affliction.” The bigger and more productive an economy gets, he argued, the more resources it needs to burn to maintain its own infrastructure.
On January 1, Mike Neville gave Midjourney the following prompt: “Steamboat Willie drawn in a vintage Disney style, black and white. He is dripping all over with white gel.” There’s no polite way to describe what this prompt conjured from the AI image generator. It looks, very much, like Mickey Mouse is drenched in ejaculate.
If you’ve worried that candidate-screening algorithms could be standing between you and your dream job, reading Hilke Schellmann’s The Algorithm won’t ease your mind. The investigative reporter and NYU journalism professor’s new book demystifies how HR departments use automation software that not only propagate bias, but fail at the thing they claim to do: find