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…
Another image on the site showed a group of young teens who appear to be in middle school: a boy taking a selfie in what appears to be a school gymnasium with two girls, who smile and pose for the picture. The boy’s features were obscured by a Snapchat lens that enlarged his eyes so…
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…
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…
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…
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 eggs, as it had for many in the country, but now, in his early twenties,…
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…
Annie feels a jolt of alarm. “I could just set her there,” Doug says. “That’s easy enough.” “I know, but it would be better if she could do it herself.” “Why?” Annie asks. “Our sexuality is an integral part of who we are,” Monica says. “How tapped in you are to your sexual desires can…
YouTube has updated its rulebook for the era of deepfakes. Starting today, anyone uploading video to the platform must disclose certain uses of synthetic media, including generative AI, so viewers know what they’re seeing isn’t real. YouTube says it applies to “realistic” altered media such as “making it appear as if a real building caught…
When Danny Simmons finished his first Slack Huddle, the same thing happened to him as did me: He didn’t hang up, the music faded in, and he went hunting for the source. Only he wasn’t looking for a random auto-playing browser tab. He was trying to figure out how a long-ago basement recording session from…