The people of San Francisco haven’t always been kind to Waymo’s growing fleet of driverless taxis. The autonomous vehicles, which provide tens of thousands of rides each week, have been torched, stomped on, and verbally berated in recent months. Now Waymo is striking back—in the courts. This month, the Silicon Valley company filed a pair…
On August 27, 1960, at the Olympics in Rome, one of the most controversial gold medals was awarded. At the 100-meter freestyle men’s swimming event, Australian swimmer John Devitt and American Lance Larson both recorded the same finish time of 55.2 seconds. Only Devitt walked away with the gold medal. The way swimming was timed…
On Friday, when a CrowdStrike update caused millions of Microsoft systems to crash around the world, many businesses were faced with a choice: Go cash-only or close until systems came back online. This quickly caused chaos in Australia, whose government has explicitly encouraged businesses to go cashless. Pictures posted on social media showed card-only self-checkout…
With high hopes of finding some hidden gems in our home cities and $100 (£77) each burning a hole in our pockets, we—Natasha Bernal in London and Amanda Hoover in New York—asked AI to plan out the perfect day. We decided to use Littlefoot, an AI-powered local discovery chatbot that can generate experiences in 161…
Andreessen talks about the proposal as if it were Putin himself invading Atherton, California, the elite zip code where he resided until recently. If this tax is imposed, he says, investors will exit the market and innovations won’t be funded. “Number one, you kill startups and venture capital. So congratulations, you kill the technology industry,…
I am by no means a skilled coder, but thanks to a free program called SWE-agent, I was just able to debug and fix a gnarly problem involving a misnamed file within different code repositories on the software-hosting site GitHub. I pointed SWE-agent at an issue on GitHub and watched as it went through the…
OpenAI has faced opprobrium in recent months from those who suggest it may be rushing too quickly and recklessly to develop more powerful artificial intelligence. The company appears intent on showing it takes AI safety seriously. Today it showcased research that it says could help researchers scrutinize AI models even as they become more capable…
In response to the suits, defendants such as Meta, OpenAI, and Bloomberg have argued that their actions constitute fair use. A case against EleutherAI, which originally scraped the books and made them public, was voluntarily dismissed by the plaintiffs. Litigation in remaining cases remains in the early stages, leaving the questions surrounding permission and payment…
A judge in the UK High Court has directed prosecutors to consider bringing criminal charges against computer scientist Craig Wright, after ruling that he lied “extensively and repeatedly” and committed forgery “on a grand scale” in service of his quest to prove he is Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of bitcoin. In a judgment published Tuesday, Justice…
That appears to still include the IDF. WIRED identified several Israeli government statements and documents published since 2022 that confirm the IDF’s continued involvement with Project Nimbus, although they do not provide details of the tools and capabilities it uses. For instance, a government document published on June 15, 2022, that outlines the scope of…