Last weekend, I turned to Google Search for help figuring out how many stamps I needed to put on an 8-ounce piece of mail. (Naturally, I was sending a copy of the latest issue of WIRED!). It’s the exact sort of question that I hoped Google Search’s new generative AI feature, which I’ve been testing…
For three months in late 2020, nearly 7,200 US adults on Facebook and 8,800 on Instagram received a radically different experience than the services’ billions of other users. When they scrolled through their newsfeed, Facebook and Instagram showed them the newest posts as determined by the clock, not those judged most relevant by an algorithm…
The United States military is not the unrivaled force it once was, but Alexandr Wang, CEO of startup Scale AI, told a congressional committee last week that it could establish a new advantage by harnessing artificial intelligence. “We have the largest fleet of military hardware in the world,” Wang told the House Armed Services Subcommittee…
Meta’s license for Llama 2 also requires companies with more than 700 million monthly active users to establish a separate license agreement with Meta. It is not clear why, but the clause creates a barrier to other tech giants building on the system. The model also comes with an acceptable use policy, which prohibits generating…
A fleet of robot ships bobs gently in the warm waters of the Persian Gulf, somewhere between Bahrain and Qatar, maybe 100 miles off the coast of Iran. I am on the nearby deck of a US Coast Guard speedboat, squinting off what I understand is the port side. On this morning in early December…
Second, it could instruct any federal agency procuring an AI system that has the potential to “meaningfully impact [our] rights, opportunities, or access to critical resources or services” to require that the system comply with these practices and that vendors provide evidence of this compliance. This recognizes the federal government’s power as a customer to…
The last time Elon Musk flipped the bird at his users, it was to switch Twitter’s logo to a grinning Shiba Inu—a hilarious inside joke that pumped the value of the dogecoin cryptocurrency, in which Musk was an investor, by 30 percent. A class action is still pending. Over the weekend, the former richest man…
Imagine spending a weekend afternoon with friends at an art museum: nodding with crossed arms, desperately searching for something insightful to say. The vast majority of paintings you stroll past are immediately forgotten, but some stick in your mind. As it turns out, the paintings you remember are likely the same ones everyone else does….
It’s been quite a year for ChatGPT, with the large language model (LLM) now taking exams, churning out content, searching the web, writing code, and more. The AI chatbot can produce its own stories, though whether they’re any good is another matter. If you’re in any way involved in the business of writing, then tools…
As he sat down across from me, my patient had a rueful expression on his face. “I had a date,” he announced. “It didn’t go well.” That wasn’t unusual for this patient. For years, he’d shared tales of romantic hopes dashed. But before I could ask him what went wrong, he continued, “So I asked…