Who owns the data created by cars: their owners, or the companies that built them? In 2020, Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly approved a law that began to answer that question. It required automakers selling cars in the state to build an “open data platform” that would allow owners and independent repair shops to access the information
Last winter, the unveiling of OpenAI’s alarmingly sophisticated chatbot sent educators into a tailspin. Generative AI, it was feared, would enable rampant cheating and plagiarism, and even make high school English obsolete. Universities debated updating plagiarism policies. Some school districts outright banned ChatGPT from their networks. Now, a new school year presents new challenges—and, for
Low Risk: Users can edit or delete data, Some Risk: Users can edit data, High Risk: Users cannot edit or delete data Third-Party Sharing (Ads and Marketing) Research scientist and privacy expert Razieh Nokhbeh Zaeem calls personally identifiable information the “currency of the internet” because of the myriad ways individualized data is collected, bought, and
ChatGPT may well revolutionize web search, streamline office chores, and remake education, but the smooth-talking chatbot has also found work as a social media crypto huckster. Researchers at Indiana University Bloomington discovered a botnet powered by ChatGPT operating on X—the social network formerly known as Twitter—in May of this year. The botnet, which the researchers
Steve Jobs didn’t want the photographer. It was May 1998, and he was about to launch the iMac, the computer that would strap Apple in for a wild ride to the greatest comeback in corporate history. The product was due to ship that August, 25 years ago this month. And Jobs had chosen me, then
However, the reality of the favelas speaks loudly. Driven by the increase in the cost of living and unemployment, Brazil saw a 40 percent increase in the population living in shantytowns, to 16 million in the past 12 years, according to the 2022 census. This is compounded by an unprecedented surge in the percentage of
This March, nearly 35,000 AI researchers, technologists, entrepreneurs, and concerned citizens signed an open letter from the nonprofit Future of Life Institute that called for a “pause” on AI development, due to the risks to humanity revealed in the capabilities of programs such as ChatGPT. “Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,
The plant-based industry has also struggled with claims that its products are ultra-processed and unhealthy. The science around food processing and its effects on our health is still poorly understood, but that hasn’t stopped campaigners from using the ultra-processed label as a stick with which to bash the plant-based industry. The Center for Consumer Freedom,
Over 100 people are confirmed dead after a wildfire devastated parts of Maui, Hawaii. Families fled from their cars and into the ocean to escape the surging flames that engulfed the town of Lahaina with little warning. What ignited the wildfire remains unknown; multiple factors could have contributed to the disaster. Hawaiians who survived are
Gideon Lichfield: If I were a cynic, which of course I’m not at all … Mustafa Suleyman: [Chuckle] Not at all. Lauren Goode: Not Gideon. Gideon Lichfield: I might say that you and the AI companies are setting up a pretty sweet deal for yourselves, because you’re getting to say to government, “Look, you, government,
Interviews with OMRs who worked at other facilities suggest that the practice of sending injured employees back to work isn’t limited to the Albany warehouse. Eight OMRs who spoke to WIRED say they faced direct pressure from managers to keep the number of workers they sent to doctors low, despite Amazon protocol requiring them to
YouTube Music just announced Samples, a new in-app feature where users can scroll through short music video clips from their favorite artists and discover new songs. Welcome back to the short-form video wars. Yes, Silicon Valley remains hyperfixated on generative AI, but don’t forget one of its other, recent favorite trends: releasing features that vaguely
On July 19, Bloomberg News reported what many others have been saying for some time: Twitter (now called X) was losing advertisers, in part because of its lax enforcement against hate speech. Quoted heavily in the story was Callum Hood, the head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit that
For Sander van der Linden, misinformation is personal. As a child in the Netherlands, the University of Cambridge social psychologist discovered that almost all of his mother’s family had been executed by the Nazis during the Second World War. He became absorbed by the question of how so many people came to support the ideas
Large language models like those powering ChatGPT and other recent chatbots have broad and impressive capabilities because they are trained with massive amounts of text. Michael Sellitto, head of geopolitics and security at Anthropic, says this also gives the systems a “gigantic potential attack or risk surface.” Microsoft’s head of red-teaming, Ram Shankar Sivu Kumar,
Take a walk around San Francisco this summer and you’ll see something curious: Jaguar SUVs and Chevrolet hatchbacks driving around with no one inside. The ghostly vehicles are owned and operated by Google spinoff Waymo and General Motors subsidiary Cruise. Soon there will likely be a lot more of them, because last week, the companies
That sounded to me like he was anthropomorphizing those artificial systems, something scientists constantly tell laypeople and journalists not to do. “Scientists do go out of their way not to do that, because anthropomorphizing most things is silly,” Hinton concedes. “But they’ll have learned those things from us, they’ll learn to behave just like us
In the summer of 2016, teenagers Anastasia Georgievskaya and Ivan Novikov were walking along London’s South Bank, picking their way past the food stalls lining the Thames, when they caught an aroma of fried doughnuts that instantly reminded them of childhood. At dinner that night, the couple started to wonder: If one of them hadn’t
California today cleared all-day paid robotaxi service in San Francisco—with unlimited fleets of self-driving cars. Soon, anyone in the city might be able to hail a driverless car with a few taps of a phone. And San Francisco cab and ride-hail drivers will have new, automated competition. The 3-1 vote by the California Public Utilities
Zoom, the company that normalized attending business meetings in your pajama pants, was forced to unmute itself this week to reassure users that it would not use personal data to train artificial intelligence without their consent. A keen-eyed Hacker News user last week noticed that an update to Zoom’s terms and conditions in March appeared
Verified accounts “were the people who were producing the majority of the content that was driving more people to stay engaged and increasing the number of people who were using Twitter,” says Fullerton. But to an influencer like Musk, a blue check was a valuable commodity. Who wouldn’t want to pay for it? So in
There was a time in the not too distant past—say, nine months ago—when the Turing test seemed like a pretty stringent detector of machine intelligence. Chances are you’re familiar with how it works: Human judges hold text conversations with two hidden interlocutors, one human and one computer, and try to determine which is which. If
Synthesia hasn’t always been considered at the sharp end of the generative AI industry. For six years, Riparbelli and his cofounders labored outside the spotlight in pursuit of their mission to invent a way to make video without using any camera equipment. Back in 2017, there were not a lot of investors who thought that
Gideon: I hear you navigating a kind of, I guess, a broad political space. I hear you talking like someone who is part of both left and right political groupings. You know, you obviously—a lot of the people that you hang out with in Silicon Valley, or around Elon, are libertarians or conservatives, and then
“You get on an exchange for as long as you can, until they shut your ass down,” says Knox. “You quickly [run out of exchanges], so you sit on a lot of useless money. The whole ‘crypto is permissionless and censorship-resistant’ thing is a bunch of bullshit.” (Knox suspects she has ended up on a
For most people, the idea of using artificial intelligence tools in daily life—or even just messing around with them—has only become mainstream in recent months, with new releases of generative AI tools from a slew of big tech companies and startups, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. But behind the scenes, the technology has been
AI’s presence in the gaming industry has evolved from a mere novelty to an indispensable force. With every algorithmic breakthrough, new possibilities and challenges arise for gamers and developers alike. In March 2023, a Reddit user shared a story of how AI was being used where she worked. “I lost everything that made me love
In short, the tentacles of US tech firms are everywhere—vaccines, food, cancer research, psilocybin centers, criminal justice reform, homelessness—the list could reach the moon. (Speaking of the moon, how could we forget commercial spaceflight?) And the AI boom is likely to further expand tech firms’ power and riches. Yet on Capitol Hill, some powerful Republicans
Ever since the ChatGPT API opened up, all sorts of apps have been strapping on AI functionality. I’ve personally noticed this a lot in email clients: Apps like Spark and Canary are prominently bragging about their built-in AI functionality. The most common features will write replies for you, or even generate an entire email using
But when this doesn’t happen, companies desperately rework their models. When they need to curb spending, or when they struggle to raise new funding, marketing is the first thing they cut. Demand drops, creating an oversupply of workers on the platform. “And the excessive supply on the platforms feels the pinch. That’s the typical cycle