As they gathered near the guarded gates of Columbia University in Upper Manhattan on Tuesday, a hundred or so protesters began to chant: “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest.” “Divest” is a demand that has been repeated, on banners, in editorials in student newspapers and during rallies that are sweeping across […]
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The idea triggered a full-scale revolt on the Google campus. Six years ago, the Silicon Valley giant signed a small, $9 million contract to put the skills of a few of its most innovative developers to the task of building an artificial intelligence tool that would help the military detect potential targets on the battlefield […]
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Andreas Bechtolsheim doesn’t like to waste time. The entrepreneur made one of the most celebrated investments in the history of Silicon Valley — the initial $100,000 that bankrolled a search engine called Google in 1998 — while on the way to work one morning. It took just a few minutes. Twenty one years later, Mr. […]
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When Pinduoduo, the Chinese discount shopping app, debuted nearly a decade ago, the tech giants Alibaba and JD.com dominated China’s e-commerce business. Pinduoduo felt more like a gimmick than a future rival. It was a combination of a game arcade, a shopping mall and a social network. Its main selling point was lower prices for […]
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Google on Wednesday fired 28 workers after dozens of employees participated in sit-ins at the company’s New York and Sunnyvale, Calif., offices to protest the company’s cloud computing contract with the Israeli government. A day earlier, nine employees were arrested on charges of trespassing at the two offices. “Physically impeding other employees’ work and preventing […]
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The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion […]
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Listen and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YouTube This week, the companies building artificial intelligence are facing a limit to what training data is publicly available on the internet. Will that stop them from building God? Then, a new bipartisan national privacy law proposal just dropped. We ask what’s in it. And […]
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For nearly 14 years, an online message board called Memegen has served as a virtual water cooler for Google employees. Memegen has been a place for employees to offer blunt critiques of their bosses, to share gallows humor about job cuts or joke about getting notes from their parents to excuse them from returning to […]
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The Maryland Legislature this weekend passed two sweeping privacy bills that aim to restrict how powerful tech platforms can harvest and use the personal data of consumers and young people — despite strong objections from industry trade groups representing giants like Amazon, Google and Meta. One bill, the Maryland Online Data Privacy Act, would impose […]
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There are no end of theories for why the internet feels so crummy these days. The New Yorker blames the shift to algorithmic feeds. Wired blames a cycle in which companies cease serving their users and begin monetizing them. The M.I.T. Technology Review blames ad-based business models. The Verge blames search engines. I agree with […]
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OpenAI, Google and other tech companies train their chatbots with huge amounts of data culled from books, Wikipedia articles, news stories and other sources across the internet. But in the future, they hope to use something called synthetic data. That’s because tech companies may exhaust the high-quality text the internet has to offer for the […]
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Online data has long been a valuable commodity. For years, Meta and Google have used data to target their online advertising. Netflix and Spotify have used it to recommend more movies and music. Political candidates have turned to data to learn which groups of voters to train their sights on. Over the last 18 months, […]
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In late 2021, OpenAI faced a supply problem. The artificial intelligence lab had exhausted every reservoir of reputable English-language text on the internet as it developed its latest A.I. system. It needed more data to train the next version of its technology — lots more. So OpenAI researchers created a speech recognition tool called Whisper. […]
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