Like a lot of people, Alex Woolner was instantly fascinated by ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot which took the internet by storm when it launched in November 2022. But instead of asking it to write screenplays or satirical poetry or magazine articles (OK, not really), she turned it toward her hobby: making cute crochet animals called…
Take a walk around San Francisco this summer and you’ll see something curious: Jaguar SUVs and Chevrolet hatchbacks driving around with no one inside. The ghostly vehicles are owned and operated by Google spinoff Waymo and General Motors subsidiary Cruise. Soon there will likely be a lot more of them, because last week, the companies…
Many of the authors who chastised Smith, like Kunzru, disapprove primarily of this pirated database. Or, more specifically, they hate the idea of trying to make money off work derived from a pirated library as opposed to simply conducting research. “I’m not against all data scraping,” Devin Madson says. “I know a lot of academics…
Many talented artists are represented: a rapper with Trisomy-21 named Jirau (after a pioneering fashion model), who is an especially strong lyricist. In 2073, neurodiverse artists (many formerly known as “disabled”) are valued, as most AI algorithms had largely ignored them in their early training sets. Then there’s DJ Congolia, who made original beats exclusively…
That sounded to me like he was anthropomorphizing those artificial systems, something scientists constantly tell laypeople and journalists not to do. “Scientists do go out of their way not to do that, because anthropomorphizing most things is silly,” Hinton concedes. “But they’ll have learned those things from us, they’ll learn to behave just like us…
Zoom, the company that normalized attending business meetings in your pajama pants, was forced to unmute itself this week to reassure users that it would not use personal data to train artificial intelligence without their consent. A keen-eyed Hacker News user last week noticed that an update to Zoom’s terms and conditions in March appeared…
Gideon: I hear you navigating a kind of, I guess, a broad political space. I hear you talking like someone who is part of both left and right political groupings. You know, you obviously—a lot of the people that you hang out with in Silicon Valley, or around Elon, are libertarians or conservatives, and then…
Synthesia hasn’t always been considered at the sharp end of the generative AI industry. For six years, Riparbelli and his cofounders labored outside the spotlight in pursuit of their mission to invent a way to make video without using any camera equipment. Back in 2017, there were not a lot of investors who thought that…
“You get on an exchange for as long as you can, until they shut your ass down,” says Knox. “You quickly [run out of exchanges], so you sit on a lot of useless money. The whole ‘crypto is permissionless and censorship-resistant’ thing is a bunch of bullshit.” (Knox suspects she has ended up on a…
Artificial intelligence researchers may wonder whether they’re in a modern-day arms race for more powerful AI systems. If so, who is it between? China and the US—or the handful of mostly US-based labs developing these systems? It might not matter. One lesson from The Making of the Atomic Bomb is that imagined races are just…