“A lot of the headlines have been saying that I think it should be stopped now—and I’ve never said that,” he says. “First of all, I don’t think that’s possible, and I think we should continue to develop it because it could do wonderful things. But we should put equal effort into mitigating or preventing
By the end of April, the European Parliament had zeroed in on a list of practices to be prohibited: social scoring, predictive policing, algorithms that indiscriminately scrape the internet for photographs, and real-time biometric recognition in public spaces. However, on Thursday, parliament members from the conservative European People’s Party were still questioning whether the biometric
In a declaration in federal court in 2021, Quentin Van Meter, the president of the American College of Pediatricians, described the organization as a “secular, scientific medical association,” whose “views are not religious as such.” ACPeds has also targeted donors, physicians, and other clinicians based solely on their political leanings, documents show. The group maintains
Back then–only months ago—Marcus’ quibbling was technical. But now that large language models have become a global phenomenon, his focus has shifted. The crux of Marcus’ new message is that the chatbots from OpenAI, Google, and others are dangerous entities whose powers will lead to a tsunami of misinformation, security bugs, and defamatory “hallucinations” that
In 2019, a partnership between BP and German energy provider ENBW agreed to pay £231 million ($290 million) in annual option fees alone. While the offshore wind industry booms, the Crown Estate is already eyeing the next opportunity to cash in on its seabed empire: carbon storage. The seabed around the UK has room to store 78
ChatGPT and its brethren are both surprisingly clever and disappointingly dumb. Sure, they can generate pretty poems, solve scientific puzzles, and debug spaghetti code. But we know that they often fabricate, forget, and act like weirdos. Inflection AI, a company founded by researchers who previously worked on major artificial intelligence projects at Google, OpenAI, and Nvidia, built a bot
In 2009, LinkedIn’s new engineering chief, David Henke, assembled his full crew of coders and managers for the first time and fired off tough questions. “What the heck is wrong with all of you?” was the sanitized gist of it. The fast-growing professional social network had about 50 million users, but every Thursday afternoon it
The White House–supported hacking exercise designed to expose weaknesses in generative AI systems will take place this summer at the Defcon security conference. Thousands of participants, including hackers and policy experts, will be asked to explore how generative models from companies including Google, Nvidia, and Stability AI align with the Biden administration’s AI Bill of Rights announced
Why wasn’t Google’s new top-level domain empathetic when listening to other people’s problems? Because it considered itself to be domain character in every situation. Many domain shortcuts from Google are quite practical. Type doc.new in your browser’s address bar and bam! You’ve got a new Google Doc. While some of Google’s recently announced domains are focused on productivity,
“My opinions on this boil down to, ‘Yeah I’d rather not see it’ or have it readily accessible,” says one Bluesky user who raised questions about why there had been backlash to the ban, and who requested anonymity because they had already experienced pushback from fellow Bluesky users for voicing their opinion. “Tons of people
Data collected by CyberWell found that though only 2 percent of anti-Semitism content on social media platforms in 2022 was violent, 90 percent of that came from Twitter. And Cohen Montemayor notes that even the company’s standard moderation systems would likely have struggled under the strain of so much hateful content. “If you’re experiencing surges [of online
Gideon Lichfield: Exactly. Lauren Goode: And you can actually pause. Gideon Lichfield: Yes, and that’s what makes it simple, because there are 17 different apps but only one phone. Lauren Goode: But then do you, like, wake up in the morning, and at 6 in the morning you’ve gone a blissful eight hours of sleep
Academic ties had been growing stronger, with top-ranked US colleges,—including Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Carnegie Mellon—hosting forums for Chinese investors. These were now put under new scrutiny. In January 2021, the FBI arrested MIT professor Gang Chen on allegations of federal grant fraud in January 2021. The charges were later dropped. It
While the material is not expressly religious, it is clearly aimed at painting same-sex marriage as aberrant and immoral behavior. Physicians lobbied by the group are also told to urge patients to purchase Christian-based parenting guides, including one designed to help parents broach the topic of sex with their 11- and 12-year-old kids. The College
But with more crypto investors shifting to self-custody, both software and hardware wallet makers are trying to make their products more accessible and the process less risky. This week, Ledger is launching a new service called Ledger Recover that splits a wallet recovery phrase—basically, a human-readable form of the private key—into three encrypted shards and
As the height of wedding season approaches, some people are turning to artificial intelligence for help with their hitches. Yes, ChatGPT can spin those unremarkable wedding vows into something more poetic, or add jokes to that toast. Turning to a chatbot to express your deepest love may feel cold, lazy, or even dystopian. But those harnessing
Meanwhile, demand is rising for magnets embedded in the tools of decarbonization, such as cars and wind turbines. Currently, 12 percent of rare earths go into EVs, according to Adamas Intelligence, a market that’s just now taking off. At the same time, rare earth prices have recently whiplashed due to internal Chinese markets and political interventions
AI-powered chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google Bard are certainly having a moment—the next generation of conversational software tools promise to do everything from taking over our web searches to producing an endless supply of creative literature to remembering all the world’s knowledge so we don’t have to. ChatGPT, Google Bard, and other bots like
Ben Smith thought that he’d be spending the end of April banking interviews about his book that goes on sale next week. It’s not working out that way. Instead, the celebrated news maven—who slung scoops at Politico, launched BuzzFeed News, covered media for The New York Times, and is now cofounder of the buzzy Semafor news startup—found
Elon Musk caused a stir last week when he told the (recently fired) right-wing provocateur Tucker Carlson that he plans to build “TruthGPT,” a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Musk says the incredibly popular bot displays “woke” bias and that his version will be a “maximum truth-seeking AI”—suggesting only his own political views reflect reality. Musk is far
LinkedIn influencers use ChatGPT as a brainstorming aid, should you? OpenAI’s chatbot responds in a conversational tone to text prompts, and millions of users continue to experiment with it. The chatbot helps software developers with coding, scientists with research, and students with homework. With a little repetition and exploration, ChatGPT is worth trying out as part of your brainstorming
“It consistently amazes me that in the physical world, when we release products there are really stringent guidelines,” Farid says. “You can’t release a product and hope it doesn’t kill your customer. But with software, we’re like, ‘This doesn’t really work, but let’s see what happens when we release it to billions of people.’” If
Some observers have welcomed the ruling, arguing that regulators have allowed tech companies to amass too much power by scaling through acquisitions. “We feel that there has been over a decade of under-enforcement,” says Max von Thun, Europe director at think tank Open Markets, referring to past decisions to let Facebook merge with WhatsApp and
While all the major Silicon Valley social media firms—from Instagram to TikTok—say they block children from using their apps, these senators say those efforts have failed. “It’s not working,” Schatz says.“There’s no free speech right to be jammed with an algorithm that makes you upset, and these algorithms are making us increasingly polarized and disparaging
Twitter’s verification system debacle has had more twists than a Stephen King novel—fitting, given that the author has been at the center of yet another storm on the platform. A “legacy” verified user because of his fame as a horror novelist, King likely expected to lose his blue check mark on April 20, the date
Something needs to be done about crypto. In 2022, billions of dollars were lost to crypto bankruptcies and hundreds of millions more to hacks. The mess has spilled over into traditional finance, with the collapse of the two biggest crypto-friendly banks: Silvergate and Signature. And all the while, new scam tokens flood the market. In the US,
Jordi Ribas hasn’t taken a day off since last September. That month, the Microsoft search and AI chief got the keys to GPT-4, a then secret version of OpenAI’s text-generation technology that now powers ChatGPT. As Ribas had with GPT-4’s predecessors, the Barcelona native wrote in Spanish and Catalan to test the AI’s knowledge of cities like
Archival audioclip (Back to the Future): I’m from the future. Lauren Goode: Alright, I’m gonna ask the question that everyone’s wondering about: What is a futurist? Is this a real job? Gideon Lichfield: Well, I mean, I think some people imagine it’s just, you know, a guy who sits around making predictions about the future, and there are
That ban helped set the path for the development of the Chinese metaverse, experts say, since it decoupled virtual spaces from digital assets. “The key difference [in the metaverse] between China and the rest of the world is it’d be heavily regulated in a centralized manner,” says Zhengyuan Bo, a partner at China-focused research firm
There is, Droogan says, an implicit violence in the theory, particularly when it’s filtered through a US perspective. American mainstream media, and Fox in particular, gives platforms to people who use conspiracist terminology—including references to “elites” and “globalists” and nods to the “great reset,” like those made by Vlaardingerbroek—in a way that rarely happens on