On August 27, 1960, at the Olympics in Rome, one of the most controversial gold medals was awarded. At the 100-meter freestyle men’s swimming event, Australian swimmer John Devitt and American Lance Larson both recorded the same finish time of 55.2 seconds. Only Devitt walked away with the gold medal. The way swimming was timed…
With high hopes of finding some hidden gems in our home cities and $100 (£77) each burning a hole in our pockets, we—Natasha Bernal in London and Amanda Hoover in New York—asked AI to plan out the perfect day. We decided to use Littlefoot, an AI-powered local discovery chatbot that can generate experiences in 161…
In response to the suits, defendants such as Meta, OpenAI, and Bloomberg have argued that their actions constitute fair use. A case against EleutherAI, which originally scraped the books and made them public, was voluntarily dismissed by the plaintiffs. Litigation in remaining cases remains in the early stages, leaving the questions surrounding permission and payment…
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In the movie Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr challenges the physicist early in his career: Bohr: Algebra is like sheet music. The important thing isn’t “can you read music?” It’s “can you hear it?” Can you hear the music, Robert? Oppenheimer: Yes, I can. I can’t hear the algebra,…
In a cluttered open-plan office in Mountain View, California, a tall and slender wheeled robot has been busy playing tour guide and informal office helper—thanks to a large language model upgrade, Google DeepMind revealed today. The robot uses the latest version of Google’s Gemini large language model to both parse commands and find its way…
This week, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Arianna Huffington, founder and CEO of the health company Thrive Global, published an article in Time touting Thrive AI, a startup backed by Thrive and OpenAI’s Startup Fund. The piece suggests that AI could have a huge positive impact on public health by talking people into healthier…
In the space of 24 hours, a piece of Russian disinformation about Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s wife buying a Bugatti car with American aid money traveled at warp speed across the internet. Though it originated from an unknown French website, it quickly became a trending topic on X and the top result on Google. On…
“With every one shop that I got to take [items] down, another 10 popped up out of nowhere,” Jödicke says. “I almost wanted to give up on my art, because I felt so devastated that people would just take my work and profit out of it, and I didn’t see anything from it.” The widespread…
Admittedly, our testing artists did push Jen beyond the boundaries of what a “normal” person might ask in a query, veering more toward a “record store clerk” level of familiarity with recorded sound. Cleveland, for instance, failed to get anything good out of a query for “mid-tempo California garage rock influenced by ’70s Indonesian pop,”…
Pretty much every online lurker knows the image: A man gawks at a passing woman making the kind of “How you doin’?” face that would make Joey Tribbiani blush. Ever since it landed in 2017, the “distracted boyfriend” meme, which took that stock photo and projected scenarios onto it, has been seared into the internet’s…