This week, WIRED reported that a group of prolific scammers known as the Yahoo Boys are openly operating on major platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, TikTok, and Telegram. Evading content moderation systems, the group organizes and engages in criminal activities that range from scams to sextortion schemes. On Wednesday, researchers published a paper detailing a new…
Fulfilling the world’s surging demand for AI chatbots and image generators depends on mundane components as much as glitzy GPUs. Server cabinets, heavy-duty metal enclosures to store GPU systems, have at times been a crucial bottleneck. As it scrambled to build up its facilities, CoreWeave once ordered 1,400 of the wrong cabinets. It was a…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
I’ve used only one image that I created with Midjourney, for a blog post. It was a fun process, but the image itself is low quality and has random elements that make no sense. With Midjourney, you get four square images as output and can ask to regenerate different versions of each of them. I…
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…