You hardly need ChatGPT to generate a list of reasons why generative artificial intelligence is often less than awesome. The way algorithms are fed creative work often without permission, harbor nasty biases, and require huge amounts of energy and water for training are all serious issues. Putting all that aside for a moment, though, it…
Microsoft deleted the over-eager office assistant Clippy some 17 years ago, but the vision for a friendly and optimistic AI helper has apparently found its way out of the Recycle Bin. The company is overhauling Copilot, the text-based artificial intelligence tool bundled with Windows and other software, with the addition of vision, voice, and the…
Kteily says by the time the company rolled out these services, it was too late. Customers had already left the platform. “I think they hit on something viral, which was the concept of where you’ve come from. People found that so fascinating. But once you know that information, you’re not going to come back five…
So far, when AI companies have trained on YouTube’s invaluable stash of videos, captions, and other content, they’ve done so without permission. An AI-focused content licensing startup called Calliope Networks is hoping to change that with its new “License to Scrape,” a program aimed directly at YouTube stars. “There’s obvious demand from AI companies to…
A select number of all-electric Tesla Cybertrucks now have the ability to drive on US highways hands-free, after the automaker pushed an update to vehicles this morning. Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy wrote on X that Cybertrucks will be the first Tesla vehicles to receive the “end-to-end on highway” driving feature, which the company says…
At this point, phrases like ambient computing, ubiquitous computing, and even (shudder) Internet of Things may be zipping and popping around your brain. Are we back here again? If the answer is yes, it might not be a reason to despair. Béhar cites Embodied’s Moxie companion robot, ElliQ’s elder care, and the Happiest Baby robotic…
Nearly every survey of the podcast industry in 2024 agrees on one point: Chat podcasts are king. As video rises in popularity (33 percent of US podcast listeners prefer to consume this way), ad spending increases (estimated to top $4 billion worldwide), and listenership steadily grows at 8 percent year-over-year, it is the chat format—in…
We already knew where OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, stands on artificial intelligence vis-à-vis the human saga: It will be transformative, historic, and overwhelmingly beneficial. He has been nothing but consistent across countless interviews. For some reason, this week he felt it necessary to distill those opinions in a succinct blog post. “The Intelligence Age,” as…
AI takes a lot of energy to run, but underwater data centers might not be the answer.
At the start of September, Nour was having an ordinary evening at home in Beirut—eating pumpkin seeds and watching Netflix—when the SMS hit her device like the smartphone version of a brick through her window. The sender name appeared as eight question marks, “????? ???”, and in the message preview she could read, in clunky,…