Month: March 2024

Voice synthesis has come a long way since 1978’s Speak & Spell toy, which once wowed people with its state-of-the-art ability to read words aloud using an electronic voice. Now, using deep-learning AI models, software can create not only realistic-sounding voices but can also convincingly imitate existing voices using small samples of audio. Along those

Your local public library is a great source of free information, journals, and databases (even ones that generally require a subscription and include embargoed research). For example, your search should include everything from health databases (Sage Journals, Scopus, PubMed) to databases for academic sources and journalism (American Periodical Series Online, Statista, Academic Search Premier) and

Ever since the rollout of ChatGPT in November 2022, many people in science, business, and media have been obsessed with AI. A cursory look at my own published work during that period fingers me as among the guilty. My defense is that I share with those other obsessives a belief that large language models are

The anti-smartphone movement is having a moment. On March 25, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill banning children under 14 from social media platforms. In February, the UK government backed tighter guidance to keep children from using their smartphones at school. In the past year, grassroots organizations like Smartphone Free Childhood have risen to

Oregon governor Tina Kotek yesterday signed the state’s Right to Repair Act, which will push manufacturers to provide more repair options for their products than any other state so far. The law, like those passed in New York, California, and Minnesota, will require many manufacturers to provide the same parts, tools, and documentation to individuals

Call it a bug zapper, not a feature. Data from Fakespot, a service owned by Mozilla that helps consumers spot fake reviews and scams on shopping sites, shows a bizarre rise in the number of listings for bug zappers on Amazon over the past three years. At the same time, Fakespot has logged an increase

A US federal judge in the Southern District of New York has sentenced Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, to 25 years in prison. In addition, Bankman-Fried has been ordered to forfeit $11 billion. Last November, at the end of a month-long trial, Bankman-Fried—known colloquially as SBF—was found guilty of seven counts of

The US government issued new rules Thursday requiring more caution and transparency from federal agencies using artificial intelligence, saying they are needed to protect the public as AI rapidly advances. But the new policy also has provisions to encourage AI innovation in government agencies when the technology can be used for public good. The US

In the early hours of Tuesday morning, the global supply chain and US coastal infrastructure collided in the worst possible way. An enormous container ship, the Dali, slammed into a support of the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore, crumpling its central span into the Patapsco River and cutting off the city’s port from the

This past Monday, about a dozen engineers and executives at data science and AI company Databricks gathered in conference rooms connected via Zoom to learn if they had succeeded in building a top artificial intelligence language model. The team had spent months, and about $10 million, training DBRX, a large language model similar in design

On March 12, Russian-Swedish national Roman Sterlingov was found guilty of money laundering conspiracy and other violations by a federal jury in Washington, DC, for having operated Bitcoin Fog, a service criminals used to launder what authorities claim was hundreds of millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains. The conviction was heralded by the US Department

Last week, the Biden administration made it official: American cars are really going electric. The US Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule, long in the works, that will require automakers selling in the United States to dramatically boost the number of battery-powered vehicles sold this decade, putting a serious dent in the country’s carbon emissions

Earlier this month, Meta announced that it would be shutting down CrowdTangle, the social media monitoring and transparency tool that has allowed journalists and researchers to track the spread of mis- and disinformation. It will cease to function on August 14, 2024—just months before the US presidential election. Meta’s move is just the latest example

Apple is among three tech giants being investigated for failing to comply with the European Union’s new competition rules, in another blow to the embattled smartphone maker. Apple was the primary focus of an EU press conference on Monday morning. But authorities also opened formal investigations into Meta and Alphabet, Google’s parent company. The trio

Another image on the site showed a group of young teens who appear to be in middle school: a boy taking a selfie in what appears to be a school gymnasium with two girls, who smile and pose for the picture. The boy’s features were obscured by a Snapchat lens that enlarged his eyes so

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Two years ago, in a project called the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark, or BIG-bench, 450 researchers compiled a list of 204 tasks designed to test the capabilities of large language models, which power chatbots like ChatGPT. On most tasks, performance improved predictably and smoothly

Back in 2022 at the annual Code Conference, where tech luminaries submit to on-stage interviews, an audience member asked Apple CEO Tim Cook for some tech support. “I can’t send my mom certain videos,” he said, because she used an Android device incompatible with Apple’s iMessage. Cook’s now-infamous response was, “Buy your mom an iPhone.”

For weeks now, the world has been awash in conspiracy theories spurred by weird artifacts in a photographic image of the missing Princess of Wales that she eventually admitted had been edited. Some of them got pretty crazy, ranging from a cover-up of Kate’s alleged death, to a theory that the Royal Family were reptilian

Apple uses the dominance of the iPhone to illegally suppress competition in ways that harm consumers, the US Department of Justice alleged in a lawsuit filed Thursday. Apple has denied it acts illegally, with spokesperson Fred Sainz saying that the suit “threatens who we are and the principles that set Apple products apart in fiercely

A man in Denmark was sentenced to 18 months in prison today for using fake accounts to trick music streaming services into paying him 2 million Danish kroner ($290,000) in royalties. The unusual case reveals a weak spot in the business model behind the world’s biggest music platforms. The 53-year-old consultant, who had pleaded not

The US Department of Justice had long been expected to file an antitrust lawsuit against Apple. But when the suit arrived Thursday, it came with surprising ferocity. In a press conference, attorney general Merrick Garland noted that Apple controlled more than 70 percent of the country’s smartphone market, saying the company used that outsize power

A big concern ahead of the public listing was that Reddit, the platform that gave birth to the memestocks of 2021, could also suffer the wild price swings caused by large numbers of investors coordinating their strategy over social media, including Reddit itself, on forums such as r/wallstreetbets. Reddit’s IPO is a test of investor

Electrical engineer Gilbert Herrera was appointed research director of the US National Security Agency in late 2021, just as an AI revolution was brewing inside the US tech industry. The NSA, sometimes jokingly said to stand for No Such Agency, has long hired top math and computer science talent. Its technical leaders have been early

The US Department of Justice, along with more than a dozen state attorneys general, has filed a lawsuit against Apple that takes direct aim at the iPhone and the company’s lucrative iOS ecosystem. Claiming that Apple had established an “iPhone monopoly,” the suit argues that the company’s allegedly anticompetitive behavior resounds well beyond smartphones themselves.

Aravind Srinivas credits Google CEO Sundar Pichai for giving him the freedom to eat eggs. Srinivas remembers the moment seven years ago when an interview with Pichai popped up in his YouTube feed. His vegetarian upbringing in India had excluded eggs, as it had for many in the country, but now, in his early twenties,

“The ‘heart of joy’ effectively takes 30 years of experience and blends it into a single control unit,” BMW chief technical officer Frank Weber tells WIRED. “Everything that is driving-performance-related, chassis-control-related, powertrain-related—it’s all integrated into one control unit. If you love the idea of the ultimate driving machine, there are functions in there that are

In 2023, OpenAI told the UK parliament that it was “impossible” to train leading AI models without using copyrighted materials. It’s a popular stance in the AI world, where OpenAI and other leading players have used materials slurped up online to train the models powering chatbots and image generators, triggering a wave of lawsuits alleging

The last two weeks before the deadline were frantic. Though officially some of the team still had desks in Building 1945, they mostly worked in 1965 because it had a better espresso machine in the micro-kitchen. “People weren’t sleeping,” says Gomez, who, as the intern, lived in a constant debugging frenzy and also produced the

Richard Battarbee spent his entire life studying freshwater ecology as an academic at University College London—but it was only when he retired to Yorkshire that he found himself on the frontline of a battle to save a river. Fishermen in the town of Ilkley near where he lived started catching condoms, wet wipes and sanitary

While the tech industry went gaga for generative artificial intelligence, one giant has held back: Apple. The company has yet to introduce so much as an AI-generated emoji, and according to a New York Times report today and earlier reporting from Bloomberg, it is in preliminary talks with Google about adding the search company’s Gemini