Everything you need to know about ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Midjourney, Dall-E and more.
Computer scientists at DeepMind have developed an artificially intelligent bot capable of defeating the world’s best players at StarCraft II, the popular real-time strategy video game. New research published today in Nature describes AlphaStar—the first artificially intelligent agent capable of playing StarCraft II at the grandmaster level. Developed by DeepMind, the system is ranked above…
Sure, you love your dog/cat/currently trendy animal people are keeping as pets, but is there a chance you might like it more if it were a different breed? You can’t simply trade in your Golden Retriever for a weekend test drive with a Schnauzer, but with Nvidia’s new GANimals tool, you can at least see…
What actually happens to workers when a company deploys automation? The common assumption seems to be that the employee simply disappears wholesale, replaced one-for-one with an AI interface or an array of mechanized arms. Yet given the extensive punditeering, handwringing, and stump-speeching around the “robots are coming for our jobs” phenomenon—which I will never miss…
Just two weeks after Amazon pledged to radically reduce its company-wide carbon emissions, the head of its oil and gas web services subsidiary traveled to Houston, Texas, to participate in the oil industry’s “Accelerate Production 4.0” event. The event was part of a conference put on by Weatherford, a major oilfield services provider, and was…
California has become the latest state to ban politically motivated deepfakes amidst growing concern about how the technology could be used to interfere with the 2020 election. On Thursday, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the AB 730 bill into law, making it illegal to create or distribute deceptively altered videos, audio, or photos of political…
Over the next decade, U.S. banks, which are investing $150 billion in technology annually, will use automation to eliminate 200,000 jobs, thus facilitating “the greatest transfer from labor to capital” in the industry’s history. The call is coming from inside the house this time, too—both the projection and the quote come from a recent Wells…
In the run-up to today’s global climate strikes, the major tech companies and their attendant luminaries have had much to say on matters of sustainability. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos personally announced his Climate Pledge, which promises to bring the retail giant he runs to net zero carbon emissions by 2040. Google’s Sundar Pichai announced “the…
A middle-aged man, holding a tool from the machine shop, looking forlorn and wistful. That’s what we might call the stock image of automation fears. It’s the picture that graces the news story about grim job-loss forecasts or think pieces about whether the robots are ‘coming for our jobs.’ (It’s either that or a menacing…
On Tuesday, the automation-focused meme candidate Andrew Yang tweeted, “Fast food may be first.” He was commenting on a new CNBC report that reported annual employee turnover rates of 100 percent at the Panera Bread chain—a figure that is low for the fast food industry, which can see annual turnover of up to 150 percent.…
The self-driving freight truck startup TuSimple has been carrying mail across the state of Arizona for several weeks. UPS announced on Thursday that its venture capital arm has made a minority investment in TuSimple. The announcement also revealed that since May TuSimple autonomous trucks have been hauling UPS loads on a 115-mile route between Phoenix…
A collaborative research team claims their artificially intelligent system should be recognized as the rightful inventor of two innovative designs, in a potentially disruptive development in patent law. Patent law is complicated even at the best of times, but a new project led by researchers from the University of Surrey could make it more convoluted…
We’re getting quite used to our algorithmic overlords. We’ve ceded, for the most part, that complex and invisible rulesets determine who will see our missives, travel pics, and RT dunks. More substantially, millions of workers now toil, essentially, for algorithms, whether via Uber, Lyft, Postmates, or the like. And the DoorDash tipping fiasco that unfolded…
When it comes to image recognition tech, it’s still remarkably easy to fool the machines. And while it’s some good comedy when a neural network mistakes a butterfly for a washing machine, the consequences of this idiocy are pretty nightmarish when you think about rolling these flawed systems out into the real world. Researchers from…
When 21-year-old Brandon Andrew Clark posted a series of graphic images on Sunday of the slain corpse of 17-year-old Bianca Devins to Instagram and Discord, users immediately began spreading the gory pictures online, often alongside brutal, misogynist commentary. Some said the victim, an ‘e-girl’ who was popular on 4Chan, deserved it, and others called for…
Fancy algorithms capable of solving a Rubik’s Cube have appeared before, but a new system from the University of California, Irvine uses artificial intelligence to solve the 3D puzzle from scratch and without any prior help from humans—and it does so with impressive speed and efficiency. New research published this week in Nature Machine Intelligence…
Computer scientists have developed a card-playing bot, called Pluribus, capable of defeating some of the world’s best players at six-person no-limit Texas hold’em poker, in what’s considered an important breakthrough in artificial intelligence. Two years ago, a research team from Carnegie Mellon University developed a similar poker-playing system, called Libratus, which consistently defeated the world’s…
If you want to get a sense of who, exactly, automation is working for right now, well, there’s a study for that. Spoiler—it’s the c-suite executives doing the automating. A report published by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU)—part of the Economist Group, which separately publishes the Economist magazine—and sponsored by UIPath, “the world’s leading Robotics…
Like self-checkout kiosks—perhaps even more so—automated phone menus are a prime example of shitty automation. They are exemplars of the kind of automated system that no user asked for, that are deployed solely in an effort to pad corporate bottom lines by cutting labor costs, and that ultimately make everyone who encounters them worse off.…
It’s early yet, but automation is already on track to become the most ignored issue this campaign cycle—outpacing even the neglected climate change, which, while broached both nights of the first Democratic presidential debate this week, deserves a much larger share of the conversation. Corporate automation, and the mass job loss and degradation it portends,…
Over the years, a number of companies have claimed to make “the first” smartphone-controlled, automated home grow system. But I have thus far been only pitched by one that positions itself as a solution to growing herbs and marijuana in the age of climate catastrophe. That honorific belongs to Seedo, an Israeli company whose “fully…
