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Many of yesterday’s talks were littered with the acronyms you’d expect from this assemblage of high-minded panelists: YC, FTC, AI, LLMs. But threaded throughout the conversations—foundational to them, you might say—was boosterism for open source AI. It was a stark left turn (or return, if you’re a Linux head) from the app-obsessed 2010s, when developers

Steve Jobs is 28 years old, and seems a little nervous as he starts his speech to a group of designers gathered under a large tent in Aspen, Colorado. He fiddles with his bow tie and soon removes his suit jacket, dropping it to the floor when he finds no other place to set it

Angry T-Mobile customers have filed a class action lawsuit over the carrier’s decision to raise prices on plans that were advertised as having a lifetime price guarantee. “Based upon T-Mobile’s representations that the rates offered with respect to certain plans were guaranteed to last for life or as long as the customer wanted to remain

The California Supreme Court on Thursday ruled unanimously that drivers for app-based companies including Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash will remain independent contractors, as opposed to employees. The decision, upholding a state ballot measure called Proposition 22, was considered a major victory for the gig-economy companies. The question of whether those who drive for the companies

Several years before ChatGPT began jibber-jabbering away, Google developed a very different kind of artificial intelligence program called AlphaGo that learned to play the board game Go with superhuman skill through tireless practice. Researchers at the company have now published research that combines the abilities of a large language model (the AI behind today’s chatbots)

Just before 1:00 am local time on Friday, a system administrator for a West Coast company that handles funeral and mortuary services woke up suddenly and noticed his computer screen was aglow. When he checked his company phone, it was exploding with messages about what his colleagues were calling a network issue. Their entire infrastructure

On January 29, in testimony before the Georgia Senate Judiciary Committee, Hunt-Blackwell urged lawmakers to scrap the bill’s criminal penalties and to add carve-outs for news media organizations wishing to republish deepfakes as part of their reporting. Georgia’s legislative session ended before the bill could proceed. Federal deepfake legislation is also set to encounter resistance.

Most tech moguls hope to sell artificial intelligence to the masses. But Mark Zuckerberg is giving away what Meta considers to be one of the world’s best AI models for free. Meta released the biggest, most capable version of a large language model called Llama on Monday, free of charge. Meta has not disclosed the

Losing traction while driving at high speed is generally very bad news. Scientists from the Toyota Research Institute and Stanford University have developed a pair of self-driving cars that use artificial intelligence to do it in a controlled fashion—a trick better known as “drifting”—to push the limits of autonomous driving. The two autonomous vehicles performed

The people of San Francisco haven’t always been kind to Waymo’s growing fleet of driverless taxis. The autonomous vehicles, which provide tens of thousands of rides each week, have been torched, stomped on, and verbally berated in recent months. Now Waymo is striking back—in the courts. This month, the Silicon Valley company filed a pair

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s decade-in-the-making effort to understand how handing out free money affects recipients and the broader economy delivered its first big results Monday. OpenResearch found that when it gave some of the poorest Americans $1,000 a month for three years with no strings attached, they put much of the money toward basic needs

On Friday, when a CrowdStrike update caused millions of Microsoft systems to crash around the world, many businesses were faced with a choice: Go cash-only, or close until systems came back online. This quickly caused chaos in Australia, whose government has explicitly encouraged businesses to go cashless. Pictures posted on social media showed card-only self-checkout

Andreessen talks about the proposal as if it were Putin himself invading Atherton, California, the elite zip code where he resided until recently. If this tax is imposed, he says, investors will exit the market and innovations won’t be funded. “Number one, you kill startups and venture capital. So congratulations, you kill the technology industry,

With high hopes of finding some hidden gems in our home cities and $100 (£77) each burning a hole in our pockets, we—Natasha Bernal in London and Amanda Hoover in New York—asked AI to plan out the perfect day. We decided to use Littlefoot, an AI-powered local discovery chatbot that can generate experiences in 161

The outages could result in “millions” being lost by organizations impacted who have had to halt their operations or stop business, says Lukasz Olejnik, an independent cybersecurity consultant, who says the CrowdStrike update appears to be linked to its Falcon Sensor product. The Falcon system is part of CrowdStrike’s security tools and can block attacks

I am by no means a skilled coder, but thanks to a free program called SWE-agent, I was just able to debug and fix a gnarly problem involving a misnamed file within different code repositories on the software-hosting site GitHub. I pointed SWE-agent at an issue on GitHub and watched as it went through the

OpenAI today announced a cut-price “mini” model that it says will allow more companies and programs to tap into its artificial intelligence. The new model, called GPT-4o mini and available starting today, is 60 percent cheaper than OpenAI’s most inexpensive existing model while offering higher performance, the company says. OpenAI characterizes the move as part

Spotify’s decision to introduce comment sections under podcasts should surprise no one. For years now, apps have been ripping off each other’s most popular features. Where once apps adhered to their respective “things,” today they want to do it all: You can post Stories on YouTube, use AI search tools on Instagram, and shop for

OpenAI has faced opprobrium in recent months from those who suggest it may be rushing too quickly and recklessly to develop more powerful artificial intelligence. The company appears intent on showing it takes AI safety seriously. Today it showcased research that it says could help researchers scrutinize AI models even as they become more capable

Yardi Systems, another US property management company, is also facing a class action suit regarding antitrust violations for artificially inflating rent prices. The company has said it did “nothing illegal,” as it does not mandate rent prices through its software or make “collusive pricing decisions.” Typical rental costs in Phoenix have increased by more than

Elon Musk said he is moving more of his business empire to Texas. Musk-run X and SpaceX will shift their corporate headquarters to the Lone Star State from California, he wrote in a series of posts on X on Tuesday. He didn’t provide a timeline for the move, but he was clear about his rationale.

In response to the suits, defendants such as Meta, OpenAI, and Bloomberg have argued that their actions constitute fair use. A case against EleutherAI, which originally scraped the books and made them public, was voluntarily dismissed by the plaintiffs. Litigation in remaining cases remains in the early stages, leaving the questions surrounding permission and payment

A judge in the UK High Court has directed prosecutors to consider bringing criminal charges against computer scientist Craig Wright, after ruling that he lied “extensively and repeatedly” and committed forgery “on a grand scale” in service of his quest to prove he is Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of bitcoin. In a judgment published Tuesday, Justice

The billionaire Arkady Volozh, known as the architect of “Russia’s Google,” valued at $30 billion at its peak, has long had an apolitical public persona. “I don’t have friction with the state,” Volozh told WIRED in 2017. “Just like I don’t have friction with the weather. What happens if it’s raining? I need to build

That appears to still include the IDF. WIRED identified several Israeli government statements and documents published since 2022 that confirm the IDF’s continued involvement with Project Nimbus, although they do not provide details of the tools and capabilities it uses. For instance, a government document published on June 15, 2022, that outlines the scope of

When Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook as Meta in 2021, he estimated the metaverse could reach a billion people over a decade. Not long after, Bill Gates predicted that within two or three years “most virtual meetings will move from 2D camera image grids—which I call the Hollywood Squares model, although I know that probably dates

Paid-for blue checks on social media network X deceive users and are abused by malicious actors, the European Union said today, threatening the Elon Musk–owned platform with millions of dollars in fines unless the company makes changes. Enabling any account to pay for a verification breaches the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), European Commission officials

Jessamyn West used to describe Metafilter as a social network for non-friends, a description belied in part by the tight-knit camaraderie that emerges in an online group of only a few thousand people. West herself is an example: She met her partner on the site. She also describes the Metafilter cohort as “a community of

In a cluttered open-plan office in Mountain View, California, a tall and slender wheeled robot has been busy playing tour guide and informal office helper—thanks to a large language model upgrade, Google DeepMind revealed today. The robot uses the latest version of Google’s Gemini large language model to both parse commands and find its way

When Tigran Gambaryan was first invited in February to meet with the Nigerian government in order to settle a dispute with his employer, the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, Nigerian officials detained him against his will, stripped him of his passport, and told him he was a “guest” of the state. He’s since been charged with financial