Our goal is to combine both approaches—to run a moderation service that tries to provide a baseline and to also have an open ecosystem where anyone who wants to innovate can come in and start building. I think this is particularly useful around cases where information is really fast moving and there’s specialized knowledge. There…
As CEO of Amazon’s dominant cloud computing platform AWS, Adam Selipsky is one of the most powerful people in computing at a time when the industry is racing to adopt generative artificial intelligence. Although a fan of the technology, he also has a warning for anyone trying to make sense of the moment: Some AI…
“I’m not a fan of AI,” Nebojša Vujinović Vujo says. The admission surprises me: He has built a bustling business by snapping up abandoned news outlets and other websites and stuffing them full of algorithmically generated articles. Although he accepts that his model rankles writers and readers alike, he says he’s simply embracing an unstoppable…
For eight years, Craig Wright has claimed to be the elusive Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. On Monday, in the swelling heat of a UK courtroom, a trial began that will finally settle the question. Wright, flanked by his legal team, appeared relaxed during opening arguments, leaning back in his chair with one leg crossed over…
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Driverless cars and planes are no longer the stuff of the future. In the city of San Francisco alone, two taxi companies have collectively logged 8 million miles of autonomous driving through August 2023. And more than 850,000 autonomous aerial vehicles, or drones, are registered…
A group of former customers of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX are rebelling against a proposed plan that would return the entirety of the money they lost. In a lawsuit filed this week, the customers argue they are due a whole lot more. The plan laid out by FTX in December to return customer funds does…
The most famous virtual valets around today—Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant—are a lot less impressive than the latest AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT or Google Bard. When the fruits of the recent generative AI boom get properly integrated into those legacy assistant bots, they will surely get much more interesting. To get a preview of what’s…
Satoshi Nakamoto is the founding father of cryptocurrency—and a mystery. In October 2008, Nakamoto gave Bitcoin to the world. Then they disappeared. To this day, nobody knows who Nakamoto is. Amongst the speculation, one man stepped forward: Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist who has, since 2016, maintained that he is Nakamoto. Now he’ll have…
TikTok has irreversibly bent our culture’s trajectory, but that doesn’t guarantee it’ll be around to reap the benefits. (India banned the app long ago, and it’s under growing scrutiny in a handful of other countries.) It has walked the political tightrope this far, but any bad PR could knock it off. Maybe that’s why TikTok’s…
When Google CEO Sundar Pichai emailed his workers the company priorities for 2024 this month, developing AI responsibly was top of the list. Some employees now wonder if Google can live up to that goal. The small team that has served as its primary internal AI ethics watchdog has lost its leader and is being…