The interest Aleph Alpha has received so far—the company claims 10,000 customers across both business and government—shows it is able to compete, or at least coexist, with the emerging giants of the field, says Jörg Bienert, who is CEO of the German AI Association, an industry group. “This demand definitely shows it really makes sense…
In May, Sputnik International, a state-owned Russian media outlet, posted a series of tweets lambasting US foreign policy and attacking the Biden administration. Each prompted a curt but well-crafted rebuttal from an account called CounterCloud, sometimes including a link to a relevant news or opinion article. It generated similar responses to tweets by the Russian…
The surrounding Charlotte County covers 1,323 square miles of territory—about twice the area of Greater London, and four times the size of New York City—with a population of just 26,015. Its location means it’s faster to row a boat to the US than drive almost anywhere else in Canada. It’s far from an anomaly. Nearly…
But despite the removal of what many feel to be both a core capability and function of any internet chatbot, large numbers of people continue to talk to the “characters” of Character.AI—a term the platform uses loosely, even encompassing things like AI assistants, which answer queries just as ChatGPT might, but with humanoid names and…
For months, Etsy has become littered with a new genre of T-shirt: the Donald Trump mug shot. And they’re available in two main styles: Guity AF and Not Guilty. The shirts are adorned with photos of the former US president appearing as if he’d just been booked, but until very recently, they’ve been fakes—most of…
Now that we’ve all had experience with large language models, their limitations are all too visible. Yes, they can write. But their prose doesn’t explode in the mind like the words of Jennifer Egan, Emily St. John Mandel, or David Foster Wallace do. Yes they can make music. But Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar are…
A new analysis shows that “open source” AI tools like Llama 2 are still controlled by big tech companies in a number of ways.
The speed of the prime minister’s about turn, and his unwillingness to act against Facebook, show how important the platform is in Cambodia. More than 10 million of Cambodia’s 16.6 million citizens—or about 92 percent of the people who have access to the internet—use Facebook. Hun Sen, the country’s leader since 1985, has had an…
Last winter, the unveiling of OpenAI’s alarmingly sophisticated chatbot sent educators into a tailspin. Generative AI, it was feared, would enable rampant cheating and plagiarism, and even make high school English obsolete. Universities debated updating plagiarism policies. Some school districts outright banned ChatGPT from their networks. Now, a new school year presents new challenges—and, for…
Low Risk: Users can edit or delete data, Some Risk: Users can edit data, High Risk: Users cannot edit or delete data Third-Party Sharing (Ads and Marketing) Research scientist and privacy expert Razieh Nokhbeh Zaeem calls personally identifiable information the “currency of the internet” because of the myriad ways individualized data is collected, bought, and…