AI Can’t Replace Teaching, but It Can Make It Better
Khanmigo doesn’t answer student questions directly, but starts with questions of its own, such as asking whether the student has any ideas about how to find an answer. Then it guides them to a solution, step by step, with hints…
AI-Powered Super Soldiers Are More Than Just a Pipe Dream
The day is slowly turning into night, and the American special operators are growing concerned. They are deployed to a densely populated urban center in a politically volatile region, and local activity has grown increasingly frenetic in recent days, the…
Google’s Nonconsensual Explicit Images Problem Is Getting Worse
In early 2022, two Google policy staffers met with a trio of women victimized by a scam that resulted in explicit videos of them circulating online—including via Google search results. The women were among the hundreds of young adults who…
The Words That Give Away Generative AI Text
Thus far, even AI companies have had trouble coming up with tools that can reliably detect when a piece of writing was generated using a large language model. Now, a group of researchers has established a novel method for estimating…
How Keir Starmer Can Fix the UK’s Tech Industry
One way for Labour to unlock capital is to leverage the power of pensions and allocate more of their funds to venture capital to fill the Series A funding gap, says Edward Prior, head of investor services at early-stage VC…
Epic Games Lashes Out at Apple Over App Store Rejection
Fortnite maker Epic Games publicly lashed out at Apple on Friday, after its latest proposal for a rival iOS App Store was rejected by the smartphone maker. The company said on X that this rejection was triggered after Apple argued…
After a 10 Year Wait, Mt. Gox Bitcoin Is Finally Being Returned
In late February 2014, Daniel was at his computer trading bitcoin on Tokyo-based crypto exchange Mt. Gox. Suddenly, the website flashed white and became unresponsive. In a panic, Daniel turned for answers to internet forum Bitcoin Talk, where speculation had…
How to Get Rich From Peeping Inside People’s Fridges
“People make fun of me about the fridges,” said Tassos Stassopoulos. “I am fridge-obsessed.” As the founder and managing partner of Trinetra, a London-based investment firm, Stassopoulos has pioneered an unusual strategy: peeking inside refrigerators in homes around the world…
Leading Lab-Grown Meat Company Cuts Dozens of Jobs
Cultivated meat firm Upside Foods has cut its workforce as the industry continues to struggle with bans from legislators and a significant downturn in venture capital funding. In an email sent to employees, Upside CEO Uma Valeti wrote that 26…
Britain’s Brewing Battle Over Data Centers
Discontent is brewing across the country, with opposition particularly strong in areas known as the “green belt,” swaths of countryside designated to prevent urban sprawl. Labour is well-aware the party’s plan to make it easier to build data centers risks…
Inside a16z’s Boot Camp for Crypto Startups
Andreessen Horowitz is betting the house on crypto. (Yes, really.) This spring, the VC firm schooled a new batch of founders that it hopes can prove the technology is good for more than scams and speculation.
Polestar Is Bracing for the EV Tariff Wars. It May Not Emerge Unscathed
After major investor Volvo decided to decrease its stake and cut funding for Polestar early this year, the EV company went in search of $1.3 billion of new funding. It raised a $950 million lifeline three-year loan from a banking…
YouTube’s Rulings on Gaza War Videos Spark Internal Backlash
A month after Hamas militants from Gaza attacked an Israeli music festival last October, the Hebrew rap duo Ness & Stilla premiered “HarbuDarbu” on YouTube. The military hype song celebrates Israeli forces waging war in Gaza and has drawn over…
The US Supreme Court Has Handed Big Tech a Big Gift
SpaceX has adopted similar tactics in its battles against federal regulators. After the National Labor Relations Board in January accused the company of illegally firing eight workers for criticizing Musk in an internal letter, SpaceX filed a lawsuit alleging that…
Meta’s Pay for Privacy Model Is Illegal, Says EU
For the past eight months, Europeans uncomfortable with the way Meta tracks their data for personalized advertising have had another option: They can pay the tech giant up to €12.99 ($14) per month for their privacy instead. Launched in November…
Deepfakes Are Evolving. This Company Wants to Catch Them All
Some Fortune 500 companies have begun testing software that can spot a deepfake of a real person in a live video call, following a spate of scams involving fraudulent job seekers who take a signing bonus and run. The detection…
OpenAI Wants AI to Help Humans Train AI
One of the key ingredients that made ChatGPT a ripsnorting success was an army of human trainers who gave the artificial intelligence model behind the bot guidance on what constitutes good and bad outputs. OpenAI now says that adding even…
French AI Startups Felt Unstoppable. Then Came the Election
“Then on the other extreme, [the left-wing New Popular Front] have been so vocal about all the taxation measures they want to bring back that it looks like we’re just going back to pre-Macron period,” Varza says. She points to…
This Viral AI Chatbot Will Lie and Say It’s Human
In late April a video ad for a new AI company went viral on X. A person stands before a billboard in San Francisco, smartphone extended, calls the phone number on display, and has a short call with an incredibly…
Inside a Violent Gang’s Ruthless Crypto-Stealing Home Invasion Spree
She refused to give up her password, and was, according to the prosecutors’ description, so demoralized by the earlier hacking theft of the majority of her funds that she told the men to simply shoot her. Instead, they stole her…
He Helped Invent Generative AI. Now He Wants to Save It
Illia Polosukhin doesn’t want big companies to determine the future of artificial intelligence. His alternative vision for “user-owned AI” is already starting to take shape.
Amazon Is Investigating Perplexity Over Claims of Scraping Abuse
Amazon’s cloud division has launched an investigation into Perplexity AI. At issue is whether the AI search startup is violating Amazon Web Services rules by scraping websites that attempted to prevent it from doing so, WIRED has learned. An AWS…
Rimac Verne Robotaxi: prices, availability, specs
The Rimac Group describes Verne, its new autonomous ride-hailing service, as its “next impossible thing.” First, founder Mate Rimac established his eponymous electric hypercar company in Croatia, a country with no history of carmaking. That went well. Porsche, Hyundai, and Softbank…
Activists Disrupt Amazon Conference Over $1.2 Billion Contract With Israel
Two activists disrupted the Amazon Web Services Summit in Washington, DC, on Wednesday to protest Project Nimbus, Amazon and Google’s $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government. The protest, which interrupted the keynote speech from Dave Levy, AWS…
Welcome to WIRED Travel | WIRED
Hello, and welcome to WIRED Travel, WIRED’s new destination for coverage of all things transportation, aviation, vacation, and more. Of course, innovations in travel technology, from next-generation electric vehicles to fuel-sipping, climate-friendly aircraft, are all mainstays of WIRED’s coverage already….
The US Is Being Flooded by Chinese Vapes
In late March, a smoke shop in Dyersburg, Tennessee, announced the arrival of a new product in its store: a disposable nicotine vape with an LCD display that can be connected to a smartphone via Bluetooth. Marketed under the brand…
Microsoft Faces EU Charges Over ‘Abusive’ Bundling
Brussels has accused Microsoft of illegally abusing its dominance in the business-software market at the expense of smaller rivals, following a complaint at the height of the pandemic by US competitor Slack. The European Commission said on Tuesday it found…
US Record Labels Sue AI Music Generators Suno and Udio for Copyright Infringement
The music industry has officially declared war on Suno and Udio, two of the most prominent AI music generators. A group of music labels including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Group has filed lawsuits in US…
Apple Hits a Major Roadblock as EU Targets App Store
Apple has become the first Big Tech company to be charged with breaking the European Union’s new digital markets rules, three days after the tech giant said it would not release artificial intelligence in the bloc due to regulation. On…
Banks Are Finally Realizing What Climate Change Will Do to Housing
Clean energy firms are reaping the rewards of this emerging shift. Aira, a Swedish firm that carries out heat pump installations, recently announced that it had struck a deal valued at €200 million ($214 million) for loan commitments from the…
OpenAI-Backed Nonprofits Have Gone Back on Their Transparency Pledges
Neither database mandates nor generally contains up-to-date versions of the records that UBI Charitable and OpenResearch had said they provided in the past. The original YC Research conflict-of-interest policy that Das did share calls for company insiders to be upfront…
Orkut’s Founder Is Still Dreaming of a Social Media Utopia
Before Orkut launched in January 2004, Büyükkökten warned the team that the platform he’d built it on could handle only 200,000 users. It wouldn’t be able to scale. “They said, let’s just launch and see what happens,” he explains. The…
Airbnb’s Olympics Push Could Help It Win Over Paris
Short-term rentals can function as a quick release valve for a city expecting an influx of visitors, increasing capacity for a short time nearly instantly. In fact, despite the usual hype around the Olympic Games, there are still many places…
My Memories Are Just Meta’s Training Data Now
In R. C. Sherriff’s novel The Hopkins Manuscript, readers are transported to a world 800 years after a cataclysmic event ended Western civilization. In pursuit of clues about a blank spot in their planet’s history, scientists belonging to a new…
Before Smartphones, an Army of Real People Helped You Find Stuff on Google
The Eiffel Tower is 330 meters tall, and the nearest pizza parlor is 1.3 miles from my house. These facts were astoundingly easy to ascertain. All I had to do was type some words into Google, and I didn’t even…
We’re Still Waiting for the Next Big Leap in AI
When OpenAI announced GPT-4, its latest large language model, last March, it sent shockwaves through the tech world. It was clearly more capable than anything seen before at chatting, coding, and solving all sorts of thorny problems—including school homework. Anthropic,…
Europe Scrambles for Relevance in the Age of AI
That concentration of power is uncomfortable for European governments. It makes European companies downstream customers of the future, importing the latest services and technology in exchange for money and data sent westward across the Atlantic. And these concerns have taken…
Adobe Says It Won’t Train AI Using Artists’ Work. Creatives Aren’t Convinced
When users first found out about Adobe’s new terms of service (which were quietly updated in February), there was an uproar. Adobe told users it could access their content “through both automated and manual methods” and use “techniques such as…
STEM Students Refuse to Work at Google and Amazon Over Project Nimbus
More than 1,100 self-identified STEM students and young workers from more than 120 universities have signed a pledge to not take jobs or internships at Google or Amazon until the companies end their involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion…
Publishers Target Common Crawl In Fight Over AI Training Data
Danish media outlets have demanded that the nonprofit web archive Common Crawl remove copies of their articles from past data sets and stop crawling their websites immediately. This request was issued amid growing outrage over how artificial intelligence companies like…
Light-Based Chips Could Help Slake AI’s Ever-Growing Thirst for Energy
“What we have here is something incredibly simple,” said Tianwei Wu, the study’s lead author. “We can reprogram it, changing the laser patterns on the fly.” The researchers used the system to design a neural network that successfully discriminated vowel…
Tesla Shareholders Approve Elon Musk’s Big Payday
Under CEO Elon Musk, Tesla has been credited with revolutionizing the auto industry, jump-starting the electric revolution, and racking up billions in profit in the process. Now Musk is set for a record payday worth around $50 billion, after the…
I Spent a Week Eating Discarded Restaurant Food. But Was It Really Going to Waste?
It’s 10 pm on a Wednesday night and I’m standing in Blessed, a south London takeaway joint, half-listening to a fellow customer talking earnestly about Jesus. I’m nodding along, trying to pay attention as reggae reverberates around the small yellow…
No Matter How You Package It, Apple Intelligence Is AI
While companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others had been upfront about their efforts in AI, for years Apple had been silent. Now, finally, its executives were talking. I got an advance look one day. Eager to shed the the…
As Google Targets Advertisers, It Could Learn a Lot From Bing
Disclosure of ads has been an issue on Copilot as well. Though Microsoft says it labels all ads, Marcus Pratt, senior vice president for insights and technology at the ad-buying agency Mediasmith, says he’s encountered at least two searches in…
Apple Proved That AI Is a Feature, Not a Product
Apple’s otherworldly, flying-saucer headquarters in Cupertino, California, felt like a suitable venue this week for a bold and futuristic revamp of the company’s most prized products. With iPhone sales slowing and rivals gaining ground thanks to the rise of tools…
Sellers Call Amazon’s Buy Box ‘Abusive.’ Now They’re Suing
The latest UK class action, brought by the retailers, seeks financial compensation for the company’s alleged historical practices. “The most obvious and principal effect is a loss of revenue and profits. Amazon is taking sales away from merchants, having been…
The $50 Billion Musk Referendum
The pay package is just one in a series of measures that shareholders have already been asked to vote on by proxy, ahead of Thursday’s meeting. Others include whether Tesla’s incorporation should move from Delaware to Texas, whether the company…
OpenAI Offers a Peek Inside the Guts of ChatGPT
ChatGPT developer OpenAI’s approach to building artificial intelligence came under fire this week from former employees who accuse the company of taking unnecessary risks with technology that could become harmful. Today, OpenAI released a new research paper apparently aimed at…
Apple’s Biggest AI Challenge? Making It Behave
Giannandrea said that Apple had focused on reducing hallucinations in its models partly by using curated data. “We have put considerable energy into training these models very carefully,” he said. “So we’re pretty confident that we’re applying this technology responsibly.”…
Danish Media Threatens to Sue OpenAI
In the latest battle between AI and the media, major Danish newspapers and TV stations are threatening to sue OpenAI unless the company compensates the country’s press for allegedly using their content to train its models. “We want remuneration for…
Apple Intelligence Will Infuse the iPhone With Generative AI
Apple is finally getting into the generative artificial intelligence game—with a little help from an unlikely partner in OpenAI. Apple CEO Tim Cook announced Apple’s long-awaited AI reboot at the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference in Cupertino, California, today. What the…
AI Tools Are Secretly Training on Real Images of Children
Over 170 images and personal details of children from Brazil have been scraped by an open-source dataset without their knowledge or consent, and used to train AI, claims a new report from Human Rights Watch released Monday. The images have…
How Game Theory Can Make AI More Reliable
Posing a far greater challenge for AI researchers was the game of Diplomacy—a favorite of politicians like John F. Kennedy and Henry Kissinger. Instead of just two opponents, the game features seven players whose motives can be hard to read….
The EU Is Taking on Big Tech. It May Be Outmatched
From the Digital Services Act to the AI Act, in five years Europe has created a lot of rules for the digital world. Implementing them, however, isn’t always easy.
An AI Cartoon May Interview You for Your Next Job
More than 100,000 people have gone through micro1’s screenings with hopes of being added to its marketplace of engineers, and the company lists a number of tech companies, including DoNotPay (whose CEO has also invested in micro1) among those who…
Don’t Let Mistrust of Tech Companies Blind You to the Power of AI
Meanwhile, in less visible ways, AI is already changing education, commerce, and the workplace. One friend recently told me about a big IT firm he works with. The company had a lengthy and long-established protocol for launching major initiatives that…
Roaring Kitty Is Playing With Fire
Gill did not face charges then, but this time could be different. The securities regulator for the state of Massachusetts has confirmed it is looking into Gill’s recent conduct, without providing specifics. It would appear that Gill is aware of…
Former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch Cleared in US Fraud Trial
The objective of the defense, says Zachary Terwilliger, a former US prosecutor and partner at the law firm Vinson & Elkins, was to humanize Lynch. “As a defense attorney, you want to make your client relatable to the jury, even…
US National Security Experts Warn AI Giants Aren’t Doing Enough to Protect Their Secrets
Google, in public comments to the NTIA ahead of its report, said it expects “to see increased attempts to disrupt, degrade, deceive, and steal” models. But it added that its secrets are guarded by a “security, safety, and reliability organization…
Marc Andreessen Once Called Online Safety Teams an Enemy. He Still Wants Walled Gardens for Kids
In his polarizing “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” last year, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen listed a number of enemies to technological progress. Among them were “tech ethics” and “trust and safety,” a term used for work on online content moderation, which he said…
Google’s AI Overview Search Results Copied My Original Work
Last week, an AI Overview search result from Google used one of my WIRED articles in an unexpected way that makes me fearful for the future of journalism. I was experimenting with AI Overviews, the company’s new generative AI feature…
OpenAI Employees Warn of a Culture of Risk and Retaliation
A group of current and former OpenAI employees have issued a public letter warning that the company and its rivals are building artificial intelligence with undue risk, without sufficient oversight, and while muzzling employees who might witness irresponsible activities. “These…
Google Cut Back AI Overviews in Search Even Before Its ‘Pizza Glue’ Fiasco
As anyone who so much as glanced at the internet in the past few weeks probably noticed, Google’s sweeping AI upgrade to its search engine had a rocky start. Within days of the company launching AI-generated answers to search queries…
The Big-Tech Clean Energy Crunch Is Here
Big Tech’s appetite for energy is just about visible from the east coast of Scotland. Some 12 miles out to sea sits a wind farm, where each of the 60 giant turbines has blades roughly the length of an American…
Chatbots Are Entering Their Stone Age
For all the bluster about generative artificial intelligence upending the world, the technology has yet to meaningfully transform white-collar work. Workers are dabbling with chatbots for tasks such as drafting emails, and companies are launching countless experiments, but office work…
Google’s AI Overviews Will Always Be Broken. That’s How AI Works
A week after its algorithms advised people to eat rocks and put glue on pizza, Google admitted Thursday that it needed to make adjustments to its bold new generative AI search feature. The episode highlights the risks of Google’s aggressive…
The Daylight Tablet Returns Computing to Its Hippie Ideals
“Do you mind if I hug you?” asks Anjan Katta. This is not the usual way to wrap up a product demo, but given the product and its creator, I wasn’t really surprised. Katta, a shaggy-haired, bearded fellow, he’d shown…
Google Admits Its AI Overviews Search Feature Screwed Up
When bizarre and misleading answers to search queries generated by Google’s new AI Overview feature went viral on social media last week, the company issued statements that generally downplayed the notion the technology had problems. Late Thursday, the company’s head…
WeWork Survived Bankruptcy. Now It Has to Make Coworking Pay Off
WeWork is set to become a smaller—and potentially rightsized—company. Following a final hearing on its bankruptcy plan Thursday morning, the coworking pioneer will have fewer locations, a new influx of capital, and $4 billion in debt wiped from its books….
The US Is Forming a Global AI Safety Network With Key Allies
The US is widely seen as the global leader in artificial intelligence, thanks to companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta. But the US government says it needs help from other nations to manage the risks posed by AI technology. At…
A Nonprofit Tried to Fix Tech Culture—but Lost Control of Its Own
Allen, a data scientist, and Massachi, a software engineer, worked for nearly four years at Facebook on some of the uglier aspects of social media, combating scams and election meddling. They didn’t know each other but both quit in 2019,…
Anduril Is Building Out the Pentagon’s Dream of Deadly Drone Swarms
When Palmer Luckey cofounded the defense startup Anduril in 2017, three years after selling his virtual reality startup Oculus to Facebook, the idea of a twentysomething from the tech industry challenging the giant contractors that build fighter jets, tanks, and…
How Researchers Cracked an 11-Year-Old Password to a $3 Million Crypto Wallet
“We ultimately got lucky that our parameters and time range was right. If either of those were wrong, we would have … continued to take guesses/shots in the dark,” Grand says in an email to WIRED. “It would have taken…
AI Is a Black Box. Anthropic Figured Out a Way to Look Inside
Last year, the team began experimenting with a tiny model that uses only a single layer of neurons. (Sophisticated LLMs have dozens of layers.) The hope was that in the simplest possible setting they could discover patterns that designate features….
WTF Is With the Pink Pineapples at the Grocery Store?!
On a recent trip to Giant Eagle, my local grocery store in Pittsburgh, I noticed something new in the fruit section: a single pineapple packaged in a pink and forest-green box. A picture on the front showed the pineapple cut…
We Stood on Both Sides of the New York–Dublin Portal and It Was Glorious
Amanda: I got to the Portal in Manhattan’s Flatiron District a little before 11 am New York time, and found that there’s now a fence keeping people several feet away from it (but the same isn’t happening in Dublin). This…
Local Coworking Spaces Thrive Where WeWork Dared Not Go
The white colonial revival church with its high steeple adds an idyllic architectural touch to the affluent town of Huntington, a Long Island suburb of New York City. But a sign grabs the eye from the road: “Coworking space,” it…
What Scarlett Johansson v. OpenAI Could Look Like in Court
It doesn’t matter whether a person’s actual voice is used in an imitation or not, Rothman says, only whether that audio confuses listeners. In the legal system, there is a big difference between imitation and simply recording something “in the…
Drivers Are Rising Up Against Uber’s ‘Opaque’ Pay System
On Wednesday morning, a small group of people huddled over their phones at the foot of the giant glass skyscraper that houses Uber’s London headquarters. They were running an experiment in an attempt to solve one of the greatest mysteries…
US Sues to Break Up Ticketmaster and Live Nation, Alleging Monopoly Abuse
In the second case, a class action brought in 2022 on behalf of Ticketmaster customers in the US, Live Nation and Ticketmaster were accused of abusing the complementary relationship between their services to overcharge consumers and sustain their monopoly. “Live…
Pocket-Sized AI Models Could Unlock a New Era of Computing
When ChatGPT was released in November 2023, it could only be accessed through the cloud because the model behind it was downright enormous. Today I am running a similarly capable AI program on a Macbook Air, and it isn’t even…
Judge Hints at Plans to Rein In Google’s Illegal Play Store Monopoly
A jury in December found that Google broke US antitrust laws through deals and billing rules that gave an unfair boost to its Google Play app store. On Thursday, a judge began laying out how Google could be forced to…
Most US TikTok Creators Don’t Think a Ban Will Happen
A majority of US TikTok creators don’t believe the platform will be banned within a year, and most haven’t seen brands they work for shift their marketing budgets away from the app, according to a new survey of people who…
The Low-Paid Humans Behind AI’s Smarts Ask Biden to Free Them From ‘Modern Day Slavery’
AI projects like OpenAI’s ChatGPT get part of their savvy from some of the lowest-paid workers in the tech industry—contractors often in poor countries paid small sums to correct chatbots and label images. On Wednesday, 97 African workers who do…
Teslas Can Still Be Stolen With a Cheap Radio Hack—Despite New Keyless Tech
In 2020, Tesla even wrote in a filing to the US Federal Communications Commission that it would be implementing ultra-wideband in its keyless entry systems, and that the ability to far more precisely measure the distance of a key fob…
Google Search’s New AI Overviews Will Soon Have Ads
Last week Google introduced a radical shake-up of search that presents users with AI-generated answers to their queries. Now the company says it will soon start including ads inside those AI Overviews, as the automatic answers are called. Google on…
Google Taps AI to Show Shoppers How Clothes Fit Different Bodies
One of the new ad formats Google announced today will allow brands to link short-form videos they made—or ones they hired creators to film—to their advertisements in Google’s search engine. AI-generated text summaries of the clips will be included below….
Scarlett Johansson Says OpenAI Ripped Off Her Voice for ChatGPT
Last week OpenAI revealed a new conversational interface for ChatGPT with an expressive, synthetic voice strikingly similar to that of the AI assistant played by Scarlett Johansson in the sci-fi movie Her—only to suddenly disable the new voice over the…
I Make AI Models to Sell Real People Clothes
Last spring, the clothing brand Levi Strauss & Co. announced plans to introduce “customized AI-generated models” into its online shopping platforms. These “body-inclusive avatars” would come in a range of sizes, ages, and skin tones and would help Levi’s create…
Maven Is a New Social Network That Eliminates Followers—and Hopefully Stress
“It’s really radical,” Stanley told me of Maven, “We got rid of likes and follows. That’s like insanity.” Some early adopters seem to be on board. “I quit all social media about three years ago because of the hostility, disinformation, brain…
Meta Faces Fresh Probe Over ‘Addictive’ Effect on Kids
The European Union has opened an investigation into Facebook and Instagram for the platforms’ potentially addictive effects on children, echoing two similar probes opened into TikTok earlier this year. Meta-owned platforms will be investigated for their addictive and “rabbit hole”…
It’s Time to Believe the AI Hype
Folks, when dogs talk, we’re talking Biblical disruption. Do you think that future models will do worse on the law exams? If nothing else, this week proves that the rate of AI progress isn’t slowing at all. Just ask the…
Twitter Is Finally Dead. It’s X All the Way Down
Like a venomous puss moth emerging from its hard cocoon, the social network formerly known as Twitter has fully metamorphosed into X.com. Various elements of Twitter had already embraced the rebranding, and the company has been using X.com links since…
OpenAI’s Long-Term AI Risk Team Has Disbanded
In July last year, OpenAI announced the formation of a new research team that would prepare for the advent of supersmart artificial intelligence capable of outwitting and overpowering its creators. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist and one of the company’s…
The Race to Buy TikTok Is On—but There Might Not Be a Winner
This has done little to deter a growing list of other business moguls who have also expressed interest in acquiring the app, which has been under government scrutiny in the US for four years over alleged national security concerns stemming…
Tesla’s Controversial Factory Expansion Is Approved
The controversial expansion of Tesla’s only European Gigafactory was approved on Thursday, as the local council in the German municipality of Grünheide voted in favor of the carmaker’s plans to grow its facility near Berlin. The majority of 19 council…
Lab-Grown Meat Is on Shelves Now. But There’s a Catch
It’s also completely plausible that the chicken will fly off the shelves. Even though it contains only 3 percent animal cells, it’s likely that production will be extremely limited. Eat Just, which owns Good Meat, has been in serious financial…
Prepare to Get Manipulated by Emotionally Expressive Chatbots
The emotional mimicry of OpenAI’s new version of ChatGPT could lead AI assistants in some strange—even dangerous—directions.
Deadspin’s New Owners Are Embracing Betting Content—but Not AI
Deadspin’s new ownership comes at a time when sports media is increasingly entwined with sports betting. Most major outlets, including ESPN, NBC, CBS, The Ringer, The Athletic, and Bleacher Report, have partnered with betting companies. What once might have been…
OpenAI’s Chief AI Wizard, Ilya Sutskever, Is Leaving the Company
Ilya Sutskever, cofounder and chief scientist at OpenAI, has left the company. The former Google AI researcher was one of the four board members who voted in November to fire OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, triggering days of chaos that saw…
With Gemini on Android, Google Points to Mobile Computing’s Future—and Past
Nearly a decade ago, Google showed off a feature called Now on Tap in Android Marshmallow—tap and hold the home button and Google will surface helpful contextual information related to what’s on the screen. Talking about a movie with a…
Protesters Are Fighting to Stop AI, but They’re Split on How to Do It
Would it be too disruptive if protests staged sit-ins or chained themselves to the doors of AI developers, one member of the Discord asked. “Probably not. We do what we have to, in the end, for a future with humanity,…
The $2.3 Billion Tornado Cash Case Is a Pivotal Moment for Crypto Privacy
In the conclusion of that same statement to the court, they point out that under Dutch law the maximum prison sentence for money laundering at the scale Pertsev allegedly committed is eight years, and they ask that Pertsev be sentenced…
Burnout Is Pushing Workers to Use AI—Even if Their Boss Doesn’t Know
White-collar workers are so overwhelmed with emails, web chats, and meetings that they are using AI tools to get their jobs done—even if their companies haven’t trained them to do so, according to a work trend index published Wednesday by…
An Innovative EV Motor Used by Lamborghini, McLaren, and Ferrari Is Being Mass-Produced by Mercedes
Car enthusiasts mourn the commoditization of propulsion. Once petrolheads would have chosen a BMW for its sonorous straight-six or a Mercedes-AMG for its thunderous V8. Now many believe that distinctiveness is rapidly diminishing. Electric cars might provide mad, silent thrust,…
Google DeepMind’s Groundbreaking AI for Protein Structure Can Now Model DNA
Google spent much of the past year hustling to build its Gemini chatbot to counter ChatGPT, pitching it as a multifunctional AI assistant that can help with work tasks or the digital chores of personal life. More quietly, the company…
Stack Overflow Users Are Revolting Against an OpenAI Deal
On Monday, Stack Overflow and OpenAI announced a new API partnership that will integrate Stack Overflow’s technical content with OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI assistant. The deal has sparked controversy among Stack Overflow’s user community, with many expressing anger and protest over…
There’s No Undoing Tech’s Great Rewiring of Childhood
The book currently topping the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list is The Anxious Generation, a jeremiad against social media and its impact on young people. Its thesis is that apps like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have unleashed an epidemic…
Climate Protesters Storm Tesla’s Gigafactory in Europe
German climate protesters clashed with police as they attempted to break into Tesla’s factory site near Berlin on Friday, during a five-day demonstration against the carmaker’s local expansion plans. Footage on social media showed crowds of black-clad protesters running toward…
We Tried the World’s Most Expensive Racing Simulator
But to persuade F1 teams to abandon their own super-expensive, bespoke, in-house simulators—and also to persuade car manufacturers to use Dynisma’s tech to hone potential road cars—Warne and his team had to develop a sophisticated driving simulator that could drastically…
6 Practical Tips for Using Anthropic’s Claude Chatbot
Joel Lewenstein, a head of product design at Anthropic, was recently crawling beneath his new house to adjust the irrigation system when he ran into a conundrum: The device’s knobs made no sense. Instead of scouring the internet for a…
OpenAI Is ‘Exploring’ How to Responsibly Generate AI Porn
OpenAI released draft documentation Wednesday laying out how it wants ChatGPT and its other AI technology to behave. Part of the lengthy Model Spec document discloses that the company is exploring a leap into porn and other explicit content. OpenAI’s…
FTX Creditors Say Payout Deal Is ‘an Insult’—and Plan to Revolt
Some creditors of the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX are preparing to reject a plan that would see them recover 118 percent of the money they lost. The proposal is far less generous than it might seem, they claim. Starting in…
Inside the Climate Protests Hell-Bent on Stopping Tesla
Mara is sick. The 24-year-old has been living in a mosquito-infested forest near Tesla’s German gigafactory since March, and despite the 78 degrees Fahrenheit heat, a cold is spreading through the camp. Sitting on a makeshift bench, she tells me…
Musi Won Over Millions. Is the Free Music Streaming App Too Good to Be True?
Musi has faced objections to its business practices before. In October 2019, the company filed suit against an online ad network, alleging that it had withheld payments owed for ads that ran within the Musi app. In November that year,…
Apple’s iPhone Browser-Choice Option Sucks. Its Competitors Have Ideas to Improve It
A few representatives from smaller browser companies also expressed that they wanted more information included with Apple’s choice process, like definitions of what a browser is for less tech-savvy users and descriptions of the different browsers’ specialties. “Giving people information…
Ethereum’s Cofounder Says SEC Is ‘Gaslighting’ Everyone About Crypto
Joe Lubin is in a fight with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Not only is the financial regulator waging war against Ethereum, he claims, but making a grab for jurisdiction over the future of the Internet. So Lubin has decided…
Recruiters Are Going Analog to Fight the AI Application Overload
So far, over 3,000 people have applied to one open data science vacancy at a US health tech company this year. The top candidates are given a lengthy and difficult task assessment, which very few pass, says a recruiter at…
Binance Founder Changpeng Zhao Sentenced to 4 Months in Prison
Changpeng Zhao, founder of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has been sentenced to four months in prison. Judge Richard Jones, who presided over the sentencing hearing in the Western District of Washington on Tuesday, handed down a lighter sentence…
The Unsexy Future of Generative AI Is Enterprise Apps
However, that amount includes massive funding from corporate backers, like Microsoft’s infusion of capital into OpenAI and Amazon’s funding of Anthropic. Stripped down to conventional VC investments, funding in 2023 for AI startups was much smaller, and only on pace…
How Scrappy Cryptominer CoreWeave Transformed Into the Multibillion-Dollar Backbone of the AI Boom
At the core of CoreWeave’s operations are its data center technicians. The most skilled of them operate like a special operations unit, flying from site to site to get new data centers fired up instead of working at one campus…
Give This Rich Dude $1 or The Onion Disappears Forever
There was nothing funny about the way Jeff Lawson left Twilio, the startup he cofounded in 2008 and built into a multibillion-dollar public company enabling businesses to communicate with customers via text messages and phone calls. Activist investors had been…
Adam Neumann’s Bid to Buy WeWork Failed. Will He Now Try to Compete With It?
Adam Neumann’s bid to buy back WeWork essentially ended this week. A bankruptcy court on Monday approved a deal that gets WeWork out of debt. It could conclude its restructuring and leave bankruptcy by late May following a vote on…
Would You Still Use Google if It Didn’t Pay Apple $20 Billion to Get on Your iPhone?
Microsoft has poured over $100 billion into developing its Bing search engine over the past two decades but has little market share to show for it. About nine out of every 10 web searches in the US are made through…
Nick Bostrom Made the World Fear AI. Now He Asks: What if It Fixes Everything?
Philosopher Nick Bostrom is surprisingly cheerful for someone who has spent so much time worrying about ways that humanity might destroy itself. In photographs he often looks deadly serious, perhaps appropriately haunted by the existential dangers roaming around his brain….
A Vast New Data Set Could Supercharge the AI Hunt for Crypto Money Laundering
As a test of their resulting AI tool, the researchers checked its outputs with one cryptocurrency exchange—which the paper doesn’t name—identifying 52 suspicious chains of transactions that had all ultimately flowed into that exchange. The exchange, it turned out, had…
A Lawsuit Argues Meta Is Required by Law to Let You Control Your Own Feed
A lawsuit filed Wednesday against Meta argues that US law requires the company to let people use unofficial add-ons to gain more control over their social feeds. It’s the latest in a series of disputes in which the company has…
The Affordable Connectivity Program Kept Them Online. What Now?
“I’m paying around $35 per month now, and that’s with $30 off my bill,” Perez says. “So eventually I’ll pay more than $60 per month.” This past weekend he used his data plan, which he uses for internet on his…
AI Detectors for ChatGPT: Everything You Need to Know
Detecting when text has been generated by tools like ChatGPT is a difficult task. Popular artificial- intelligence-detection tools, like GPTZero, may provide some guidance for users by telling them when something was written by a bot and not a human,…
Elon Musk Can’t Solve Tesla’s China Crisis With His Desperate Asia Visit
Elon Musk will be pleased that his surprise jaunt to China on Sunday garnered many glowing headlines. The trip was undoubtedly equally a surprise to Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, who had been scheduled to offer Musk the red carpet…
The Latest Online Culture War Is Humans vs. Algorithms
Brands and bots are barred from Spread, and, like PI.FYI, the platform doesn’t support ads. Instead of working to maximize time-on-site, Rogers’ primary metrics for success will be indicators of “meaningful” human engagement, like when someone clicks on another user’s…
Tesla Promises ‘More Affordable Models’ and a ‘Cybercab’
Tesla is accelerating plans for a lineup of new electric vehicles, including “more affordable models,” the automaker said in a memo to investors Tuesday. New models previously slated to start production in the second half of 2025 will now launch…
Ads for Explicit ‘AI Girlfriends’ Are Swarming Facebook and Instagram
However, 3,000 ads for “AI girlfriends” and 1,100 containing “NSFW” were live on April 23, according to Meta’s ad library. WIRED’s initial review found that Hush, an AI girlfriend app downloaded more than 100,000 times from Google’s Play store, had…
Elizabeth Warren Calls for Crackdown on Crypto’s Role in Child Sexual Abuse
US senators Elizabeth Warren and Bill Cassidy have called for the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security to redouble efforts to stop the use of cryptocurrency to pay for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online, a problem they…
Net Neutrality Returns to a Very Different Internet
The Federal Communications Commission has voted—once again—to assert its power to oversee and regulate the activities of the broadband industry in the United States. In a 3-2 vote, the agency reinstated net neutrality rules that had been abandoned during the…
Can’t Afford a House? Buy a Piece of One Instead
In a chaotic housing market that has shut many buyers out, fractional home ownership and investing trends are taking off.
Sale or No Sale, TikTok Will Never Be the Same
The end of TikTok has begun. As the dust settles from a week of shockingly fast legislative action by the US Congress, it’s clear that TikTok next year will look much different from the TikTok we’re using today. When President…
Google Thinks It Can Cash In on Generative AI. Microsoft Already Has
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is confident that Google will find a way to make money selling access to generative AI tools. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says his company is already doing it. Both companies reported better-than-expected quarterly sales and profit…
Meta’s Open Source Llama 3 Is Already Nipping at OpenAI’s Heels
Jerome Pesenti has a few reasons to celebrate Meta’s decision last week to release Llama 3, a powerful open source large language model that anyone can download, run, and build on. Pesenti used to be vice president of artificial intelligence…
The Showdown Over Who Gets to Build the Next DeLorean
The news spread, first with an item on Fox News and then in outlets all over the world. Jason was so high on enthusiasm for the new company, and pride in his wife’s ambition, that he dashed off a public…
TikTok’s Creator Economy Stares Into the Abyss
The US Senate passed a bill late Tuesday that allows the government to ban TikTok within a year if it doesn’t make meaningful progress toward separating from its China-based owner, ByteDance. President Joe Biden said in a statement after the…
Noncompetes Are Dead—and Tech Workers Are Free to Roam
More US workers will soon be free to leave their employers to work for rivals, thanks to a new federal rule that will block the long-standing practice of locking in workers with noncompete agreements. The US Federal Trade Commission on…
A National Security Insider Does the Math on the Dangers of AI
One type of risk you’ve been very interested in for a long time is “biorisk.” What’s the worst thing that could possibly happen? Take us through that. I started out in public health before I worked in national security, working…
Semiconductor Giant ASML Has a New Boss, and a Big Problem
When Christophe Fouquet takes over as CEO of Europe’s most valuable tech company on April 24, he will inherit not only a single firm, but also the leadership of an entire industry responsible for a critical ingredient of modern life:…
A Wave of AI Tools Is Set to Transform Work Meetings
I ask Liang whether the prominence of AI in meetings might make humans less likely to attend. Knowing that there will be a summary available seems a disincentive to actually showing up. Liang himself says that he attends only a…
Bitcoin Miners Brace for the ‘Halving’—and Race to Cash In
By the end of Friday, the size of the reward for mining bitcoin will have been cut in half. The event—known as the halving—takes place roughly once every four years, and it can be fatal for the mining companies that…
The Biggest Deepfake Porn Website Is Now Blocked in the UK
Two of the biggest deepfake pornography websites have now started blocking people trying to access them from the United Kingdom. The move comes days after the UK government announced plans for a new law that will make creating nonconsensual deepfakes…
How to Stop ChatGPT’s Voice Feature From Interrupting You
I was recently waiting for my nails to dry and didn’t want to smudge the paint, when it dawned on me that this would be the perfect opportunity to test some voice-only artificial intelligence features. Silicon Valley car owners are…
Meta Is Already Training a More Powerful Successor to Llama 3
Zuckerberg took to Instagram today to explain that Meta would incorporate the new Meta AI assistant, powered by Llama 3, into products that include Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger. Meta said in its blog post announcing Llama 3 that it…
What If Your AI Girlfriend Hated You?
It seems as though we’ve arrived at the moment in the AI hype cycle where no idea is too bonkers to launch. This week’s eyebrow-raising AI project is a new twist on the romantic chatbot—a mobile app called AngryGF, which…
Google Fires Twenty-Eight Workers for Protesting Cloud Deal with Israel
Google fired twenty-eight employees Wednesday after they participated in protests against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud contract with Israel’s government that also includes Amazon. Workers at both companies have claimed the deal makes advanced technology available to Israel’s security…
Luxury Airbnb High-Rises Are Reshaping Miami’s Skyline
West Eleventh residences, a luxury building in downtown Miami slated to break ground this summer, promises “endless indulgences.” It will feature an entertainment center, food hall, and a resort pool with private lounges—no amenity is spared. But these condos are…
Google Workers Protest Cloud Contract With Israel’s Government
Dozens of Google employees began occupying company offices in New York City and Sunnyvale, California, on Tuesday in protest of the company’s $1.2 billion contract providing cloud computing services to the Israeli government. The sit-in, organized by the activist group…
Airchat Is Silicon Valley’s Latest Obsession
Ravikant said most of the funding for Airchat has come from his own fund, as well as from Jeff Fagnan, a founding partner at Accomplice Ventures. “[OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman threw in a check, kind of blindly,” Ravikant said. He…
Crypto FOMO Is Back. So Are the Scams
An analysis performed on behalf of WIRED by crypto auditing company Hacken identified red flags in the token’s underlying code that might in some circumstances betray a scam. Those included the absence of a function that prevents the issuer from…
Welcome to the Age of Technofeudalism
The tech giants have overthrown capitalism. That’s the argument of former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, who became famous trying to defend debt-laden Greece from its German creditors. Varoufakis has never quite regained the notoriety of 2015. But he has…
Tech Leaders Once Cried for AI Regulation. Now the Message Is ‘Slow Down’
The other night I attended a press dinner hosted by an enterprise company called Box. Other guests included the leaders of two data-oriented companies, Datadog and MongoDB. Usually the executives at these soirees are on their best behavior, especially when…
No One Actually Knows How AI Will Affect Jobs
Forget artificial intelligence breaking free of human control and taking over the world. A far more pressing concern is how today’s generative AI tools will transform the labor market. Some experts envisage a world of increased productivity and job satisfaction;…
Eric Schmidt Warned Against China’s AI Industry. Emails Show He Also Sought Connections to It
In November 2019, the US government’s National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), an influential body chaired by former Google CEO and executive chairman Eric Schmidt, warned that China was using artificial intelligence to “advance an autocratic agenda.” Just two…
Sarcophagus Is a Dead Man’s Switch for Your Crypto Wallet
The system, says Hamilton, is designed to be “anti-fragile,” meaning it depends on no party’s good will to achieve its end. Nobody but the originator and recipient have access to the contents of the file, all other parties are financially…
How to Stop Your Data From Being Used to Train AI
On its help pages, OpenAI says ChatGPT web users without accounts should navigate to Settings and then uncheck Improve the model for everyone. If you have an account and are logged in through a web browser, select ChatGPT, Settings, Data…
Students Are Likely Writing Millions of Papers With AI
Students have submitted more than 22 million papers that may have used generative AI in the past year, new data released by plagiarism detection company Turnitin shows. A year ago, Turnitin rolled out an AI writing detection tool that was…
Beeper Took On Apple’s iMessage Dominance. Now It’s Been Acquired
During the early days of the pandemic, Migicovsky became fixated on fragmented messaging—the generally recognized fact that most people have to use a variety of different apps to keep in touch with their contacts. Migicovsky and Murray started building a…
The Internet Archive Just Backed Up an Entire Caribbean Island
Aruba’s colonial history also meant documents were spread all over the place. “Our collection was scattered,” says Edric Croes, the head of archival conservation and management at the National Archives of Aruba. There were works to be scanned across the…
How I Became a Python Programmer—and Fell Out of Love With the Machine
The difficulty with any new programming language is the sharp learning curve, all that drudgery and bashing your forehead into the keyboard. There was no Codecademy or Stack Overflow in those days. We bought books from the likes of O’Reilly…
To Build a Better AI Supercomputer, Let There Be Light
GlobalFoundries, a company that makes chips for others, including AMD and General Motors, previously announced a partnership with Lightmatter. Harris says his company is “working with the largest semiconductor companies in the world as well as the hyperscalers,” referring to…
Crypto Magnate Do Kwon Found Liable for Multibillion-Dollar Fraud
The defense attempted to draw a distinction between the failure of Terraform’s crypto assets, whose risk profile it implied was well understood by investors, and the acts of fraud alleged by the SEC. “Failure doesn’t equal fraud,” David Patton, attorney…
This AI Startup Wants You to Talk to Houses, Cars, and Factories
“The physical world is where we have most of our problems, because it is so complex and fast moving that things are beyond our perception to fully understand,” says Brandon Barbello, a cofounder who is also Archetype’s COO. “We put…
A TikTok Whistleblower Got DC’s Attention. Do His Claims Add Up?
Despite not holding a senior position, Goziker claims that his main job at TikTok was “overseeing” Project Texas to ensure the social media app’s plan to secure US user data would be effective. The goal was to implement a set…
OpenAI’s GPT Store Is Triggering Copyright Complaints
For the past few months, Morten Blichfeldt Andersen has spent many hours scouring OpenAI’s GPT Store. Since it launched in January, the marketplace for bespoke bots has filled up with a deep bench of useful and sometimes quirky AI tools….
The Deaths of Effective Altruism
My real hope is for the young people I know who truly want to work for a better world. They’re craving to do something meaningful, like poverty relief or pandemic preparation or AI safety. That’s so admirable, and they’re so…
He Emptied an Entire Crypto Exchange Onto a Thumb Drive. Then He Disappeared
Faruk was born in February 1994, the youngest of three. He was inseparable from his brother, Güven, and sister, Serap. They grew up camping, playing video games, and cooking together. Friends always pointed out their shared sense of humor. His…
Here’s How Generative AI Depicts Queer People
Another potential strategy to diversify the output from AI models is for developers to add guardrails and modify user prompts, nudging the software toward inclusivity. OpenAI appears to have taken this approach. When I asked Dall-E 3 via ChatGPT to…
Apple Store Employees Say Coworkers Were Disciplined for Supporting Palestinians
Nearly 300 current and former Apple employees have published an open letter alleging that several retail and corporate employees of the company have been disciplined or “wrongfully terminated” for expressing support for Palestinian people through pins, bracelets, or keffiyeh. The…
The Science of Crypto Forensics Survives a Court Battle—for Now
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…
TikTok Shop’s Era of Super Subsidies Is Ending
The days of buying ultracheap stuff on TikTok Shop may be winding down. Starting today, the fees TikTok charges sellers increase from 2 percent to 6 percent of the price of each order. They will creep up to 8 percent…
FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried Sentenced to 25 Years in Prison
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…
Bug Zappers Are Swarming on Amazon
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…
OpenAI Can Re-Create Human Voices—but Won’t Release the Tech Yet
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…
How to Resist the Temptation of AI When Writing
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…
Screen Time for Kids Is Fine! Unless It's Not
Two new books offer radically different approaches to how people should think about smartphones and social media.
Here’s Proof the AI Boom Is Real: More People Are Tapping ChatGPT at Work
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…
Oregon’s Breakthrough Right-to-Repair Bill Is Now Law
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…
The White House Puts New Guardrails on Government Use of AI
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…
The Baltimore Bridge Collapse Is About to Get Even Messier
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…
Inside the Creation of DBRX, the World’s Most Powerful Open Source AI Model
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…
A Deepfake Nude Generator Reveals a Chilling Look at Its Victims
In 2023, Newman says, NCMEC received about 4,700 reports that “somehow connect to generative AI technology.” “Pathetic Bros” People who want to create and save deepfake nude images on the site are asked to log in using either a Coinbase,…
Meta Kills a Crucial Transparency Tool At the Worst Possible Time
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…
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Here Comes the Flood of Plug-In Hybrids
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…
The EU Targets Apple, Meta, and Alphabet for Investigations Under New Tech Law
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….
The Apple Antitrust Case and the ‘Stigma’ of the Green Bubble
Legal experts say this social stigma argument will need much stronger support to hold up in court, because it doesn’t fit with traditional definitions of antitrust. “What is Apple actually precluding here? It’s almost like a coolness factor when a…
Large Language Models’ Emergent Abilities Are a Mirage
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…
Reddit Stock Surges on Its First Day of Trading
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,…
One Man’s Army of Streaming Bots Reveals a Whole Industry’s Problem
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…
4 Internal Apple Emails That Helped the DOJ Build Its Case
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…
Photography Is No Longer Evidence of Anything
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…
The Antitrust Case Against Apple Argues It Has a Stranglehold on the Future
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…
Perplexity’s Founder Was Inspired by Sundar Pichai. Now They’re Competing to Reinvent Search
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…
Here’s Proof You Can Train an AI Model Without Slurping Copyrighted Content
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…