Last month, hundreds of well-known people in the world of artificial intelligence signed an open letter warning that A.I. could one day destroy humanity. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the one-sentence statement said. The letter was the latest […]
Read MoreTag: Computers and the Internet
Founders of Three Arrows, Failed Crypto Fund, Are Living Large
Mr. Zhu said he was tuning out the criticism. On Twitter, he responded to a negative article in The Wall Street Journal by quoting John F. Kennedy: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” “I’ve already created […]
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CNN’s New Leaders Try to Move On From Chris Licht’s Stormy Tenure
It began like any other day at CNN. Scores of staff members tuned in the network’s Thursday morning editorial call from New York, Los Angeles, London and far-flung world capitals. But there was one difference: Chris Licht, who was fired as the network’s chairman on Wednesday, wasn’t on the call. It was led by Virginia […]
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Not Just Math Quizzes: Khan Academy’s Tutoring Bot Offers Playful Features
The new, A.I.-assisted Khanmigo allows students to chat with simulated historical figures or co-write stories with the software. Khan Academy, the popular online learning nonprofit, recently developed an experimental A.I.-assisted tutoring bot for schools called Khanmigo. Students can use it to take math quizzes, practice vocabulary words or prepare for Advanced Placement tests in subjects […]
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Apple Knows You Didn’t Mean to Type ‘Ducking’
Apple on Monday announced an updated autocorrect function that aims to more accurately reflect users’ intended word choices, pleasing customers whose attempts to swear in texts have long been replaced with “duck” or “ducking” (and freeing innocent waterfowl from their unfortunate association with an obscenity). “In those moments where you just want to type a […]
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The AI Boom Is Pulling Tech Entrepreneurs Back to San Francisco
Doug Fulop’s and Jessie Fischer’s lives in Bend, Ore., were idyllic. The couple moved there last year, working remotely in a 2,400-square-foot house surrounded by trees, with easy access to skiing, mountain biking and breweries. It was an upgrade from their former apartments in San Francisco, where a stranger once entered Mr. Fulop’s home after […]
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How Sam Altman Stormed Washington to Set the A.I. Agenda
Weeks after OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot last year, Sam Altman, the chief executive of the artificial intelligence start-up, launched a lobbying blitz in Washington. He demonstrated ChatGPT at a breakfast with more than 20 lawmakers in the Capitol. He called for A.I. to be regulated in private meetings with Republican and Democratic congressional leaders. […]
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Crypto Firms Start Looking Abroad as U.S. Cracks Down
The wave of government enforcement against cryptocurrency companies is beginning to remake the industry. Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the United States, has opened a business in Bermuda. Gemini, a rival firm based in New York, is seeking a license in the United Arab Emirates. And Bittrex, an exchange in Seattle, has shut down […]
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A First Try of Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro Headset
I got a sneak peek into Apple’s vision for the future of computing on Monday. For about half an hour, I wore the $3,500 Vision Pro, the company’s first high-tech goggles, which will be released next year. I walked away with mixed feelings, including a nagging sense of skepticism. On one hand, I was impressed […]
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Apple Debuts Its VR Headset
Apple lived up to months of expectations on Monday when it introduced new high-tech goggles that blend the real world with virtual reality. The $3,500 device, called the Vision Pro, will offer “augmented reality” and introduce “spatial computing,” Apple said. But conspicuously absent from its carefully choreographed announcement were the actual words “virtual reality,” underscoring […]
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Are Stocks in a New Bull Market? It Depends.
The S&P 500, the index obsessed over by investors, executives and government officials, on Monday rose 20 percent above its lowest level of 2022, a gain that some on Wall Street see as the start of a bull market and a new phase of investing exuberance. The index fluctuated around the threshold on Monday, moving […]
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Twitter’s U.S. Ad Sales Plunge 59% as Woes Continue
Elon Musk recently said Twitter’s advertising business was on the upswing. “Almost all advertisers have come back,” he asserted, adding that the social media company could soon become profitable. But Twitter’s U.S. advertising revenue for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May was $88 million, down 59 percent from a […]
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Apple Is Stepping Into the Metaverse. Will Anyone Care?
Mark Zuckerberg embraced a digital world known as the metaverse when he said in November 2021 that he was changing his company’s name from Facebook to Meta. A month later, Bill Gates, a founder of Microsoft, wrote that within two or three years, he believed most virtual meetings would transition from two-dimensional grids of video […]
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The AI Boom Inside Silicon Valley Start-Up Accelerators
The crowd at that night’s GPT-4 hackathon was so large as to render the Wi-Fi basically nonfunctional. Every room overflowed with hackers crowding around whiteboards. In the kitchen, Chinese takeout was laid out on a table. A smattering of investors were present to check out the demos, which started at 8 p.m. with short speeches […]
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How the Shoggoth Has Come to Symbolize the State of A.I.
A few months ago, while meeting with an A.I. executive in San Francisco, I spotted a strange sticker on his laptop. The sticker depicted a cartoon of a menacing, octopus-like creature with many eyes and a yellow smiley-face attached to one of its tentacles. I asked what it was. “Oh, that’s the Shoggoth,” he explained. […]
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How the Shoggoth Meme Has Come to Symbolize the State of A.I.
A few months ago, while meeting with an A.I. executive in San Francisco, I spotted a strange sticker on his laptop. The sticker depicted a cartoon of a menacing, octopus-like creature with many eyes and a yellow smiley-face attached to one of its tentacles. I asked what it was. “Oh, that’s the Shoggoth,” he explained. […]
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Elizabeth Holmes Set to Report to Prison Tuesday in Texas
Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced entrepreneur who was convicted of defrauding investors at her failed blood testing start-up Theranos, is expected to report to a federal prison in Texas on Tuesday to begin her 11-year, three-month sentence. Ms. Holmes is expected to report to FPC Bryan, a minimum-security prison camp for women located roughly 90 minutes […]
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A.I. Poses ‘Risk of Extinction,’ Industry Leaders Warn
A group of industry leaders is planning to warn on Tuesday that the artificial intelligence technology they are building may one day pose an existential threat to humanity and should be considered a societal risk on par with pandemics and nuclear wars. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside […]
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California Builds the Future, for Good and Bad. What’s Next?
While the task force hasn’t set an exact figure on how descendants of enslaved people might be compensated for overpolicing, mass incarceration and housing discrimination, the economists who advise it estimate that the losses suffered by the state’s Black residents could amount to hundreds of billions of dollars. Whether compensation will actually be approved is […]
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Would Large Language Models Be Better If They Weren’t So Large?
When it comes to artificial intelligence chatbots, bigger is typically better. Large language models like ChatGPT and Bard, which generate conversational, original text, improve as they are fed more data. Every day, bloggers take to the internet to explain how the latest advances — an app that summarizes articles, A.I.-generated podcasts, a fine-tuned model that […]
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After Pittsburgh Shootings, a Nationwide Network Tracks Antisemitic Threats
In a dimly lit conference room on an upper floor of a Chicago mid-rise, an intricately detailed snapshot of American peril is being taken, minute by unsettling minute. Reports from around the country — of gunshots, bomb threats, menacing antisemitic posts — flash across more than a dozen screens. A half-dozen analysts with backgrounds in […]
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Beyond the ‘Matrix’ Theory of the Human Mind
Imagine I told you in 1970 that I was going to invent a wondrous tool. This new tool would make it possible for anyone with access — and most of humanity would have access — to quickly communicate and collaborate with anyone else. It would store nearly the sum of human knowledge and thought up […]
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A Man Sued Avianca Airline. His Lawyer Used ChatGPT.
The lawsuit began like so many others: A man named Roberto Mata sued the airline Avianca, saying he was injured when a metal serving cart struck his knee during a flight to Kennedy International Airport in New York. When Avianca asked a Manhattan federal judge to toss out the case, Mr. Mata’s lawyers vehemently objected, […]
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To Be Gay in a Country Where It’s Still Illegal
I’m traveling in West Africa on my annual win-a-trip journey, a global reporting expedition on which I take a university student to highlight issues that deserve more attention. My winner this year is Maddie Bender, a recent Yale graduate (the pandemic delayed our trip) — and with that, I’m handing the rest of the column […]
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DeSantis’s Twitter Event Falls Short of the Reach of Past Livestreams
Within hours of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida announcing his presidential run on Twitter on Wednesday, participants in the audio event celebrated the achievement. David Sacks, a venture capitalist who moderated the Twitter conversation, declared it “by far the biggest room ever held on social media.” After the event, Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, said in […]
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Microsoft Calls for AI Rules to Minimize Risks
Microsoft endorsed a crop of regulations for artificial intelligence on Thursday, as the company navigates concerns from governments around the world about the risks of the rapidly evolving technology. Microsoft, which has promised to build artificial intelligence into many of its products, proposed regulations including a requirement that systems used in critical infrastructure can be […]
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Prompts to Try Asking ChatGPT
Welcome back to On Tech: A.I., a pop-up newsletter that teaches you about artificial intelligence, how it works and how to use it. A few months ago, my colleagues Cade Metz and Kevin Roose explained the inner workings of A.I., including chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Bard. Now we’re back with a […]
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Reid Hoffman Is Praising the Virtues of AI
Reid Hoffman, billionaire entrepreneur and venture capital investor, is worried about artificial intelligence — but not for the doomsday reasons making headlines. Instead, he worries the doomsday headlines are too negative. So in recent months, Mr. Hoffman has engaged in an aggressive thought-leadership regimen to extol the virtues of A.I. He has done so in […]
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New York City Moves to Regulate How AI Is Used in Hiring
The law applies to companies with workers in New York City, but labor experts expect it to influence practices nationally. At least four states — California, New Jersey, New York and Vermont — and the District of Columbia are also working on laws to regulate A.I. in hiring. And Illinois and Maryland have enacted laws […]
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What College Students Need Is a Taste of the Monk’s Life
“On college campuses, these students think they’re all being individuals, going out and being wild,” he said. “But they’re in a playpen. I tell them, ‘You know you’ll be protected by campus police and lawyers. You have this entire apparatus set up for you. You think you’re being an individual, but look at your four […]
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With Climate Panel as a Beacon, Global Group Takes On Misinformation
Two years ago, at a virtual gathering organized by the Nobel Foundation, Sheldon Himelfarb outlined the idea that the world’s leading scholars should join forces to study misinformation the way that scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change documented the global effect of carbon emissions. That new group gathered for its official introduction in […]
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