Everything you need to know about ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Midjourney, Dall-E and more.
The second U.S. presidential debate of 2020 was more sedate than the first, with its whining, braying, and general frothing at the mouth. We all remember how the human moderator at the first rumble struggled to cut through to the actual issues that people care about, such as jobs, the environment, and stopping the pandemic.…
When the idea behind ClipDrop first appeared a few months ago, it seemed like magic: You could point the app at any object and then clip it out its background, creating a standalone image of anything from a plant to a coffee mug. It’s basically like copy and paste, but for anything. The app is…
Waymo, the self-driving unit of Alphabet, said Thursday that it’s offering its fully driverless robo-taxis to all customers of its ride-hailing service in Phoenix, Arizona. Previously, the company only afforded its fleet of unmanned cars to a select few hundred people as part of its early rider program beginning in 2017. To start out, the…
A Reddit user went on an impressive comment streak last week. The user stuck to the pages of the mega-popular AskReddit subforum, and their responses were relatively elaborate. But the length of the replies was especially unusual in that they were sometimes coming within a minute of the question first being asked. After an impressive…
In the endlessly escalating war between those striving to create flawless deepfake videos and those developing automated tools that make them easy to spot, the latter camp has found a very clever way to expose videos that have been digitally modified by looking for literal signs of life: a person’s heartbeat. If you’ve ever had…
Microsoft is having a hell of a week. On Monday, the company announced a $7.5 billion deal to acquire Zenimax and all of its big video game properties. In one move, the Xbox platform’s future suddenly looked a lot brighter. Today, Microsoft announced another deal that could also have a huge long-term impact in the…
Wolf3D, an Estonian company that originally focused on 3D printing, now has a simple goal: to put your 3D avatar into games, media, and virtual experiences. If these guys have anything to say about it, you’re about to have a persistent virtual 3D copy of yourself that will hop from game to game and platform…
As covid-19 disrupted the world in March, online retail giant Amazon struggled to respond to the sudden shift caused by the pandemic. Household items like bottled water and toilet paper, which never ran out of stock, suddenly became in short supply. One- and two-day deliveries were delayed for several days. Though Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos…
Earlier this week, MIT permanently pulled its 80 Million Tiny Images dataset—a popular image database used to train machine learning systems to identify people and objects in an environment. The reason? It used racist, misogynistic, and other offensive terms to label photos. In a letter published Monday to MIT’s CSAIL website, Antonio Torralba, Rob Fergus,…
Once the global pandemic hit, it was a no-brainer that those with the privilege of working from home absolutely should. But the ability to work remotely also came with a surge in workplace surveillance programs—a dangerous trend that ought to be smacked down before it’s too late. (Which, unfortunately, already may be true.) The premise…
Neon is the name of the company and also the name of its only product—if you can call it that. I’m told a Neon is a living entity, but it doesn’t have a physical body. I’m told a Neon is computationally created, but it’s not an AI assistant. So what the fuck is Neon and…
Expert human pathologists typically require around 30 minutes to diagnose brain tumors from tissue samples extracted during surgery. A new artificially intelligent system can do it in less than 150 seconds—and it does so more accurately than its human counterparts. New research published today in Nature Medicine describes a novel diagnostic technique that leverages the…
Technologists have long speculated on the privacy implications of largely ungoverned, camera-enabled vehicle fleets roaming the roads of America. Now we’ve finally bumped up against the tip of that particularly worrying iceberg. With the help of a judge-signed search warrant, police in Chandler, Arizona, obtained footage from one of Google’s Waymo-branded autonomous vehicles in the…
As traditionally depicted, Santa Claus is a kind of cult leader who runs an enormous factory using slave labor and stolen IP to churn out knockoffs of the latest products. He’s basically Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jack Ma, and Jeff Bezos rolled into one. Which is to say, he should be regulated or put in…
When you think of artificial intelligence and cars, the first thing that likely comes to mind is ambitious self-driving vehicle projects of tech giants like Google, Uber, and probably Apple. Most of these companies are leveraging AI to create cars that can understand their environments and navigate roads under different conditions, and hopefully, make driving…
One of the world’s top human champions of Go has decided to retire from playing the strategy game professionally, citing AI as a reason he feels he can no longer compete. South Korean Go player Lee Sedol gained international notoriety in March 2016 when he took on Google Deepmind’s artificial intelligence AlphaGo. The machine won…
A prepared speech that President Richard Nixon thankfully never had to make has been brought to life in an art project that poses the question: Can a deepfake rewrite history? As Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins traveled towards the Moon in July 1969, President Richard Nixon had a speech ready…
Artificial intelligence has changed the way we roam the internet, buy things, and in many cases, navigate the world. At the same time, AI can be incredibly weird, such as when an algorithm suggests “Butty Brlomy” as a name for a guinea pig or “Brother Panty Tripel” as a beer name. Few people are more…
An interim report compiled by a national security panel warns the U.S. government of falling too far behind China and Russia in the AI arms race, while calling for new investments to foster innovation. Released yesterday, the November interim report from the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) advises the U.S. government to get…
Speaking in Washington, D.C. earlier today, former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger said he’s convinced of AI’s potential to fundamentally alter human consciousness—including changes in our self-perception and to our strategic decision-making. He also slammed AI developers for insufficiently thinking through the implications of their creations. Kissinger, now 96, was speaking to an audience…
