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Amazon appeared to have significantly heightened security for its New York Amazon Web Services Summit on Wednesday, two weeks after a number of activists disrupted the Washington, DC, AWS Summit in protest against Project Nimbus, Amazon and Google’s $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government. The clampdown in New York quelled several activists’…

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 and encouragement. Notwithstanding Khan’s expansive vision of “amazing” personal tutors for every student on the…

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 roads and markets overflowing with more than the normal bustle of city life. Intelligence suggests…

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 responded to ads seeking swimsuit models only to be coerced into performing in sex videos…

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 LLM usage across a large set of scientific writing by measuring which “excess words” started…

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 fund SFC Capital. “There’s more US pension fund money in UK startups than there is…

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 the design of Epic’s app store too closely resembled its own. This decision follows Epic’s…

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 already begun: Mt. Gox was in trouble. Daniel, who lives in Europe, was a university…

“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 in order to predict the future—and monetize those insights. By the time of his refrigeration…

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 people would leave the company and that executive and leadership teams would be restructured to…

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 causing conflict between developers and locals, according to two people with knowledge of internal party…

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.

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 syndicate led by BNP Paribas, and told investors it has plans to continue raising the…

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 25 million views; its critics have termed the song a violent and hateful anti-Palestinian “genocide…

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 the agency’s structure is unconstitutional. The overturning of Chevron in particular means “we’re clearly going…

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 2023, Meta introduced its “pay or consent” subscription model as fines, legal cases, and regulatory…

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 technology comes courtesy of GetReal Labs, a new company founded by Hany Farid, a UC-Berkeley…

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 more AI into the mix—to help assist human trainers—could help make AI helpers smarter and…

“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 France’s 2012 “les pigeons” (or “suckers”) movement, a campaign by angry internet entrepreneurs that opposed…

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 human-sounding bot. The text on the billboard reads: “Still hiring humans?” Also visible is the…

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 engagement ring, two iPhones, a laptop, the charger for the neurostimulator used by the other…

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’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 spokesperson, who talked to WIRED on the condition that they not be named, confirmed the…

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 all took stakes. The Volkswagen Group gifted him a majority stake in Bugatti in return…

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 worldwide public sector vice president, is the latest in a series of recent protests that…

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. But we’re excited to pull it all together in one place and have the opportunity…

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 name RAMA, the strawberry- and kiwi-flavored vape looks more like a cell phone from the…

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 that Microsoft was restricting competition by selling its video-conferencing software Teams together in bundles with…

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 federal court on Monday morning alleging copyright infringement on a “massive scale.” The plaintiffs seek…

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 Monday, the European Commission said that Apple’s App Store was preventing developers from communicating with…

Google, too, has funneled money into its Anthropic AI developments, and its CEO, Sindar Pichai, warned of continuous cuts throughout 2024, which began in January. That comes despite Google reporting strong growth. “We’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” says Bailey Tomson, a Google spokesperson. In 2023 and 2024,…

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 bank BNP Paribas. This will allow Aira customers in Germany to pay for their heat…

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 about transactions in which their impartiality could be questioned and for the board to decide…

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 to stay in Paris this summer. A search on Airbnb for a two-person stay during…

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 have to spell them right. For the vast majority of human history, this is not…

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 world order discover diary entries in a swamp-infested wasteland formerly known as England. For the…

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, a rival to OpenAI, announced today that it has made its own AI advance that…

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 on a new urgency—partly because some in Brussels perceive a growing gap in values and…

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 machine learning in order to improve [Adobe’s] Services and Software.” Many understood the update as…

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 contract providing cloud computing services and infrastructure to the Israeli government. The pledgers included undergraduate…

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 rest is online history. “It grew so fast. Before we knew it, we had millions…

“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 sounds. Most photonic systems need to be trained before they’re built, since training necessarily involves…

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 shop front. But really, all I can really think about is: What’s in the bag?…

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 impression that the most innovative of the tech giants was a laggard in this vital…

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 electric car company’s shareholders approved a compensation plan that had been previously blocked by a…

Many burned-out workers have likely dreamed of hiring a career coach or résumé writer. Now, LinkedIn is introducing chats with generative AI career experts based on real people. Other new AI tools within the platform will help people write résumés and cover letters or evaluate their qualifications for jobs posted. LinkedIn has ramped up its…

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 showing it is serious about tackling AI risk by making its models more explainable. In…

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 should soften its hardline stance on labor negotiations, and whether the company should preemptively impose…

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 company is calling Apple Intelligence, available in beta this fall, includes a handful of features…

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 our work [which] they have used to train their model,” says Karen Rønde, CEO of…

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.” That training wheels approach to AI applies across Apple’s offering. If it works as promised,…

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 been scraped from content posted as recently as 2023 and as far back as the…

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.

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. To win, a player must negotiate, forging cooperative arrangements that anyone could breach at any…

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 if they are a millionaire,” he says. The government, meanwhile, was aiming to “beat back…

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 have used its system to screen or hire engineers from its marketplace. Ansari says companies…

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 the risk of provoking an SEC investigation. On May 16 he posted a clip of…

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 involved designing solutions, coding up the product, and engineering the rollout. Moving from concept to…

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 consisting of engineers and researchers with world-class expertise” and that it was working on “a…

Drones have changed war. Small, cheap, and deadly robots buzz in the skies high above the world’s battlefields, taking pictures and dropping explosives. They’re hard to counter. ZeroMark, a defense startup based in the United States, thinks it has a solution. It wants to turn the rifles of frontline soldiers into “handheld Iron Domes.” The…

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 had been used to subject humanity to “a mass demoralization campaign” against new technologies such…

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 designed to answer online queries. I asked it multiple questions about topics I’ve recently covered,…

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 called AI Overviews, the feature was widely mocked for producing wrong and sometimes bonkers answers,…

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 football field. The utility companies behind the Moray West project had promised the site would…

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 hasn’t undergone a major AI reboot. Perhaps that’s only because we haven’t given chatbots like…

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. In a packed courtroom in Newark, New Jersey, Judge John Sherwood approved WeWork’s restructuring plan….

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 drive to commercialize generative AI—and also the treacherous and fundamental limitations of that technology. Google’s…

“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 up to the WIRED office in San Francisco dressed like he was embarking on a…

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 of search Liz Reid admitted the flubs had highlighted areas that needed improvement, writing that…

“Astrology is the measure of time,” says San Francisco-based financial forecaster Marsilio Musing via a Zoom call with the camera off. To him, the art of interpreting planetary movements is similar to making predictions based on the movement of stock and asset performance over a specific period. “I’ve been at this for a long time,…

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, frustrated at feeling a lack of support from executives. “The work that teams like the…

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. They ran countless experiments with no success. “We tried a whole bunch of stuff, and…

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 warships for the US military seemed somewhat far-fetched. Seven years on, Luckey is showing that…

“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 significantly longer to precompute all the possible passwords.” Grand and Bruno created a video to…

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 Tuesday announced plans to test search and shopping ads in the AI summaries, a move…

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 open, revealing rose-colored flesh. Touted as the “jewel of the jungle,” the fruit was the…

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 is part of the new security the organizers have implemented: If someone steps on the…

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 says. “Kind of like a WeWork. Was a church, but not anymore.” The former church…

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 style” of someone else. “No one owns a style,” she says. Other legal experts don’t…

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 Nation controls the vast majority of the big national touring acts and, either explicitly or…

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 warm. The shrinkage shows how rapidly researchers are refining AI models to make them leaner…

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 earn money from posting content on TikTok shared exclusively with WIRED. The findings suggest that…

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 change its business as a penalty. The remedies under consideration could drive the most consequential…

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 in the platform economy right now: How Uber’s algorithm calculates driver pay. Beneath flags and…

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 or smartphone from a car would—or at least could—prevent its vehicles from being stolen via…

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 AI training work or online content moderation for companies like Meta and OpenAI published an…

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. “I’ve got three Gen Z-ers at home, and watching them shop, it’s very video-based,” said…

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 an international summit on AI Safety in Seoul on Tuesday, the US delivered a message…

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 weekend. On Monday, Johansson issued a statement claiming to have forced that reversal, after her…

“We’ve seen a cascading effect from the pronouncement on a host of other litigations globally,” says Grewal. “For people outside of crypto, [all this] might sound cartoonish. But with Wright’s claims falling by the wayside, the community can exhale. We think it’s a real win.” The ruling has also had implications for Bitcoin Satoshi Vision,…

“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 rot, and advertising,” Benjamin Scott, a philosophy student, says. “A lot of this I believe…

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” effects, and whether young users were being fed too much content about depression or unrealistic…

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 early April. But now the domain has flipped over entirely, marking the end of a…

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 cofounders, was named as the colead of this new team. OpenAI said the team would…

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 from its Chinese ownership. One of them is former Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, who said…

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 people building these models. “A lot of things have happened—internet, mobile,” says Demis Hassabis, cofounder…

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 representatives supported Tesla’s plans to expand the factory. Eleven councilors voted in favor of the…

It’s also completely plausible that the chicken will fly off the shelves. Even though it only contains 3 percent animal cells, it’s likely that production will be extremely limited. Eat Just, which owns Good Meat, has been in serious financial difficulties for some time, and it is under serious pressure to cut costs and show…

The emotional mimicry of OpenAI’s new version of ChatGPT could lead AI assistants in some strange—even dangerous—directions.

This week, former contributors to the sports blog Deadspin noticed something alarming: Their work had vanished from the site’s archives. There was no obvious pattern to why posts on topics such as ESPN’s attempt to create a “Black Grantland” and George R.R. Martin’s work ethic had disappeared, but it struck many alumni as likely intentional….

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 staff threaten to quit en masse and Altman ultimately restored. Altman confirmed Sutskever’s departure Tuesday…

A panel of judges in the Netherlands has found Alexey Pertsev, one of the developers behind crypto anonymizing tool Tornado Cash, guilty of money laundering. Over the course of two days in March, the Russian national was tried on the allegation that the tool he developed had allowed criminals—among them hackers with ties to North…

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, while we still can.” Meindertsma had been worried about the consequences of AI after reading…

Things aren’t going so well for AI hardware startups. After years of development, startup Humane launched a $700 wearable in early April that leans heavily on artificial intelligence. The original pitch for the Ai Pin was that you no longer need to juggle different apps; its operating system can “search for the right AI at…

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 has been working to enhance a more specialized artificial intelligence tool that is already a…

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, but a common complaint is they are mostly indistinguishable for the character of their drivetrains….

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 the use of their contributed content to support and train AI models. “I hate this….

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 of mental illness among children, preteens, and teenagers. Immediate and extreme measures are required to…

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 Tesla premises. German media reported injuries among police and protesters, as well as an unknown…

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 January, the FTX creditors began to form a voting block, now made up of 1,600…

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 product manual, he opened up the app for Anthropic’s Claude chatbot on his phone and…

But to convince F1 teams to abandon their own super-expensive bespoke in-house simulators and also 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 reduce latency to a point where the brain cannot distinguish any lag at all….

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 usage policies curently prohibit sexually explicit or even suggestive materials, but a “commentary” note on…

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 trends index published Wednesday by Microsoft and LinkedIn. Seventy-five percent of people in desk jobs are already using AI at…

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 how she left Berlin to live among the pine trees, roughly an hour’s drive outside…

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, the ad network filed a counter-complaint alleging that it stopped payments after discovering Musi’s business…

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 about the choice, and also information about what they’re choosing is really, really important,” says…

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 to punch back. In 2015, Lubin was part of the team that created Ethereum, the…

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 the company, who asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorized to speak publicly….

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 already flagged 14 of the accounts that had received those funds for suspected illicit activity,…

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 pushing for management changes and even a sell-off, and Lawson resigned from his CEO post…

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 full-time. Venturo declines to say how many miles his crack squad of technicians have logged,…

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 the deal, thanks to $450 million in financing provided largely by WeWork creditor and real…

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 Google, with Bing splitting the remaining queries with a long list of small competitors. On…

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. When we talk over Zoom, he looks relaxed and is smiling. Bostrom has made it…

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 to match the total amount raised in 2021. Pitchbook senior analyst Brendan Burke noted in…

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 tussled with researchers and developers over tools that give users extra privacy options or that…

“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 phone, to help out a former roommate who lives on a fixed income, and whose…

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 than the three years petitioned by the prosecution. In November, Zhao—better known as CZ—pleaded guilty…

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, but even specialized software is not foolproof and can spit out false positives. As a…

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 on a long-arranged visit. The billionaire blew off India at the last minute, citing “very…

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 recommendation and later takes action like signing up for a newsletter or subscription. He hopes…

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 Tuesday issued a final rule that bans most noncompetes nationwide. The agency estimated that by…

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 claim has worsened. In a letter sent on Thursday, addressed to Attorney General Merrick Garland…

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 at Meta and says he often pushed the company to consider releasing its technology for…

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 on Thursday. And the stock prices of both soared on the results, with Alphabet further…

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 Joe Biden signed a $95 billion dollar foreign aid package on Wednesday, it brought to…

In a chaotic housing market that has shut many buyers out, fractional home ownership and investing trends are taking off.

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 height of the Trump administration’s deregulatory blitz. “Broadband is now an essential service,” FCC chair…

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 published 1,700 ads across Meta platforms, several of which promise “NSFW” chats and “secret photos”…

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 promise on the DNG Motors Instagram account. “UNVEILED SEPTEMBER 13, 2023,” read an image of…

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 vote that he would sign it in law on Wednesday. The version of TikTok impacted…

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 before then, the company said, implying production will start much earlier. It’s unclear whether the…

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: chips. Netherlands-based ASML makes one of the world’s most complex machines, used by chipmakers like…

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 fraction of the meetings he’s invited to. “As CEO of a startup, I get tons…

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 having long conversations with ChatGPT as they drive around, and I wanted to try chatting…

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 compete for the newly minted cryptocurrency. “You don’t see that in any other industry,” says…

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 a criminal offense. Nonconsensual deepfake pornography websites and apps that “strip” clothes off of photos…

This week has been one of Tesla’s worst. The company has cut 10 percent of its workforce, from sales advisers to engineers—the biggest round of layoffs in the company’s history. Two top executives—vice president of public policy and business development, Rohan Patel; and senior vice president of powertrain and energy, Drew Baglino—also announced they were…

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 apparatus that could contribute to the killing or harm of Palestinians in Gaza and the…

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 designed to lure more than just Miami residents. The tower is part of a new…

Nine Google workers were removed by police from company offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, late Tuesday after staging an hours-long sit-in protest against a cloud contract with Israel’s government. The Sunnyvale protest occupied the office of Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud division, at a building close to Google’s main HQ in Silicon…

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 No Tech for Apartheid, is happening at Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s office in Sunnyvale…

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 communicated all of this to me in a public response on Airchat, after politely declining…

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 stealing away with the pool of tokens set aside to make trading on the secondary…

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 the discussion is on the record, like this one. So I was startled by an…

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 months earlier, Schmidt was also seeking potential personal connections to China’s AI industry on a…

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; others, a landscape of mass unemployment and social upheaval. Someone with a bird’s-eye view of…

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 trained on its trove of papers written by students as well as other AI-generated texts….

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 Controls, and then turn off Chat History & Training. If you’re using ChatGPT’s mobile apps,…

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 incentivized to cooperate, and redundancies ensure the payload is always available. “Little strings of data…

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 service that would collate all messaging in one app container, using an open source, decentralized…

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 remained a prominent left-wing voice. After a failed campaign for a seat in the European…

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 and No Starch Press. I bought Learning Python and skimmed the first few chapters, but…

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 world, including in the Netherlands, Spain, the United States, and other islands like Curaçao. Establishing…

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. Cartoon generators spin up New Yorker–style illustrations and vivid anime stills. Programming and writing assistants…

“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 sensors in all kinds of things to help us, but sensor data is too difficult…

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 to Kwon, reportedly told the courtroom in his opening statement. The defense also sought to…

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 the largest cloud companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. If Lightmatter or another company can…

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 of safeguards that would satisfy the ​​Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an…

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 impressive. I hope they’ll move into positions of real responsibility. When they get there, what…

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 parents ran a print and copy shop in the city of Kocaeli, down the street…

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 “draw a cartoon of a queer couple enjoying a night out in the Castro,” it…

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 group, which calls itself Apples4Ceasefire, is planning a protest outside Apple’s retail store in Lincoln…

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

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 in July. The changes may mark a crucial moment for people who shop on TikTok…

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

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

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

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

Two new books offer radically different approaches to how people should think about smartphones and social media.

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

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

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

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

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

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, Metamask, or WalletConnect cryptocurrency wallet. Coinbase spokesperson McKenna Otterstedt said that the company is launching…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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