wired.com
A few months ago, I was called in at the last minute to participate in an onstage fireside chat at an Authors’ Guild event. (I’m on the nonprofit’s council, but of course I speak here only for myself.) Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger and I spent much of the session exploring the implications of a future where AI robots could create viable literary works. For writers, it’s a terrifying scenario. As we discussed the prospect of a marketplace flooded by books authored by prompting neural nets, I had a r…
6 months ago
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In her new memoir, Burn Book, Kara Swisher cites a 2014 profile that dubbed her “Silicon Valley’s Most Feared and Well-Liked Journalist.” She might prefer to downplay the first and emphasize the second. Some people would switch that around. But there is no dispute about Swisher’s impact: When it comes to tech punditry, she’s at the top of the heap.
No tech journalist has built a bigger brand for herself. Her three-decade career is a study in hard work and uncommon confidence. She rose from being…
5 months ago
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We already know that OpenAI’s chatbots can pass the bar exam without going to law school. Now, just in time for the Oscars, a new OpenAI app called Sora hopes to master cinema without going to film school. For now a research product, Sora is going out to a few select creators and a number of security experts who will red-team it for safety vulnerabilities. OpenAI plans to make it available to all wannabe auteurs at some unspecified date, but it decided to preview it in advance.
Other companies,…
5 months ago
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Was that the wrong thing to say? “I don’t know if that’s a compliment or criticism or just a fact,” says Taylor, who left his job as co-CEO of Salesforce to start Sierra. I assured him I saw it as more of the latter. “It’s not like you’re building girlfriends!” I noted.
It’s significant that two of the more visionary leaders in Silicon Valley are building an AI startup not to chase the nerd trophy of superintelligence but to use recent AI advances to futurize nontechnical, mainstream corporation…
5 months ago
wired.com
I don’t think I’m alone when I confess that my streaming strategy is a mess. In fact, calling it a strategy is overly kind. I pay for a number of services, all of which cost more every year, and I still keep hearing of shows I want to see on streamers I don’t have. Maybe there are people who carefully analyze what’s available and keep unsubscribing and resubscribing, then methodically bingeing what they miss and deactivating again. Please do not sit those annoyingly competent people beside me at…
5 months ago
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I thought of Page’s remark when I tried out a chatbot from the startup Groq last week. (The name comes from grok, golden era sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein’s term for deep understanding; it’s unrelated to Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok—more on which later.) Groq makes chips optimized to speed up the large language models that have captured our imaginations and stoked our fears in the past year. You never might have thought of these LLMs as particularly slow. In fact, it’s pretty impressive that when yo…
5 months ago
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When Michael Seibel lost his position at the startup incubator Y Combinator, he didn’t find out in typical tech industry fashion, which might entail an email calling him to a Zoom meeting where the bad news would be delivered. He did it to himself. Today Seibel is announcing that he’s stepping down as YC’s managing director, a job that entailed running the heart of the business: selecting startup founders for the three-month program and running the boot-camp-style operation that hones the vision…
4 months ago
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It’s always a delicate balancing act to figure out how to list names—who gets the coveted lead position, who’s shunted to the rear. Especially in a case like this one, where each participant left a distinct mark in a true group effort. As the researchers hurried to finish their paper, they ultimately decided to “sabotage” the convention of ranking contributors. They added an asterisk to each name and a footnote: “Equal contributor,” it read. “Listing order is random.” The writers sent the paper…
4 months ago
wired.com
For weeks now, the world has been awash in conspiracy theories spurred by weird artifacts in a photographic image of the missing Princess of Wales that she eventually admitted had been edited. Some of them got pretty crazy, ranging from a cover-up of Kate’s alleged death, to a theory that the Royal Family were reptilian aliens. But none was as bizarre as the idea that in 2024 anyone might believe that a digital image is evidence of anything.
Not only are digital images infinitely malleable, but…
4 months ago
wired.com
We’ve all been astonished at how chatbots seem to understand the world. But what if they were truly connect to the real world? What if the dataset behind the chat interface was physical reality itself, captured in real time by interpreting the input of billions of sensors sprinkled around the globe? That’s the idea behind Archetype AI, an ambitious startup launching today. As cofounder and CEO Ivan Poupyrev puts it, “Think of ChatGPT, but for physical reality.”
Archetype’s foundational model is…
4 months ago
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The other night I attended a press dinner hosted by an enterprise company called Box. Other guests included the leaders of two data-oriented companies, Datadog and MongoDB. Usually the executives at these soirees are on their best behavior, especially when the discussion is on the record, like this one. So I was startled by an exchange with Box CEO Aaron Levie, who told us he had a hard stop at dessert because he was flying that night to Washington, DC. He was headed to a special-interest-thon c…
4 months ago
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Dan Siroker knows how to pivot. He once had an education startup that morphed into a successful online analytics company called Optimizely. More recently he created an AI company called Scribe.ai, dedicated to capturing data from apps like Zoom, then reintroduced it as a MacOS app called Rewind designed to be “a search engine for your life.” That wasn’t clicking, so this week he changed the name of the company again to Limitless and introduced a spiffy wearable. It’s a $99 clip or pendant that c…
3 months ago
wired.com
This all happened because ChatGPT had stunned the world. In an instant it became very, very obvious that the United States needed to speed up its efforts to regulate the AI industry—and adopt policies to take advantage of it. While the potential benefits were unlimited (Social Security customer service that works!), so were the potential downsides, like floods of disinformation or even, in the view of some, human extinction. Someone had to demonstrate that to the president.
The job fell to Prabh…
3 months ago
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The book currently topping the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list is The Anxious Generation, a jeremiad against social media and its impact on young people. Its thesis is that apps like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have unleashed an epidemic of mental illness among children, preteens, and teenagers. Immediate and extreme measures are required to reverse this deadly trend. The author, NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, has been promoting it everywhere. Parents have rallied around h…
3 months ago
wired.com
Tech pundits are fond of using the term “inflection points” to describe those rare moments when new technology wipes the board clean, opening up new threats and opportunities. But one might argue that in the past few years what used to be called out as an inflection point might now just be called “Monday.”
Certainly that applied this week. OpenAI, denying rumors that it would unveil either an AI-powered search product or its next-generation model GPT-5, instead announced something different, but…
2 months ago
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It seems evident to me that almost 70 years after the first conference on artificial intelligence—where the nascent field’s leaders suggested the task would be completed within a decade—the field is now poised to make a transformational impact on our lives. We don’t need to reach artificial general intelligence, or AGI, whatever that means, for this to happen. I wrote as much in this column three weeks ago, citing evidence that after the astonishing leap of large language models that gave us Cha…
about 2 months ago
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Ray Kurzweil rejects death. The 76-year-old scientist and engineer has spent much of his time on earth arguing that humans can not only take advantage of yet-to-be-invented medical advances to live longer, but also ultimately merge with machines, become hyperintelligent, and stick around indefinitely. Nonetheless, death cast a shadow over my interview with Kurzweil this spring. Just minutes before we met, we both learned that Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize–winning psychologist and one of Kurzw…
about 1 month ago
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While companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others had been upfront about their efforts in AI, for years Apple had been silent. Now, finally, its executives were talking. I got an advance look one day. Eager to shed the the impression that the most innovative of the tech giants was a laggard in this vital technology moment, its software leader Craig Federighi, services czar Eddie Cue, and top researchers argued that Apple had been a leader in AI for years but just didn’t make a big deal…
about 1 month ago
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In 2016, Google engineer Illia Polosukhin had lunch with a colleague, Jacob Uszkoreit. Polosukhin had been frustrated by a lack of progress in his project, using AI to provide useful answers to questions posed by users, and Uszkoreit suggested he try a technique he had been brainstorming that he called self-attention. Thus began an 8-person collaboration that ultimately resulted in a 2017 paper called “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the concept of transformers as a way to superchar…
29 days ago
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Jessamyn West used to describe Metafilter as a social network for non-friends, a description belied in part by the tight-knit camaraderie that emerges in an online group of only a few thousand people. West herself is an example: She met her partner on the site. She also describes the Metafilter cohort as “a community of old Web nerds.”
This month, the venerated site celebrates its 25th anniversary. It’s amazing it has lasted that long; it made it this far in great part thanks to West, who helped…
15 days ago
wired.com
What potential national disaster—one that threatens to destroy the United States—keeps you awake at night? For some it might be the climate crisis, as record heat and storms show us that the clock is approaching midnight on saving the Earth. Others are distressed by the precarious state of our democracy. Still other citizens are haunted by issues of crime, immigration, race relations, or income inequality.
But if you are billionaire venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, apocalyps…
8 days ago
