wired.com
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…
6 days 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…
13 days 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…
27 days ago
wired.com
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…
29 days ago
wired.com
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…
about 1 month ago
wired.com
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…
about 2 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…
about 2 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…
2 months ago
wired.com
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…
2 months ago
wired.com
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,…
2 months ago
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…
2 months ago
wired.com
My own relationship with the computer dates back to its beginnings, when I got a prelaunch peek some weeks before its January 1984 launch. I even wrote a book about the Mac—Insanely Great—in which I described it as “the computer that changed everything.” Unlike every other nonfiction subtitle, the hyperbole was justified. The Mac introduced the way all computers would one day work, and the break from controlling a machine with typed commands ushered us into an era that extends to our mobile inte…
3 months ago
wired.com
Until last November, I had never heard of Perry Johnson and Associates. But they had heard of me. In fact, without my knowledge, they had information about me that even my closest friends and relatives might not know. Because the company provides “transcription and dictation” services to Northwell Health, a medical provider that has treated me in the past, they had access to what they refer to as “certain files containing my health information as well as other personal data.” This might have inc…
3 months ago
wired.com
No one knows whether artificial intelligence will be a boon or curse in the far future. But right now, there’s almost universal discomfort and contempt for one habit of these chatbots and agents: hallucinations, those made-up facts that appear in the outputs of large language models like ChatGPT. In the middle of what seems like a carefully constructed answer, the LLM will slip in something that seems reasonable but is a total fabrication. Your typical chatbot can make disgraced ex-congressman G…
3 months ago
wired.com
LeCun’s views matter. Along with Hinton and Bengio, he helped create the deep learning approach that’s been critical to leveling up AI—work for which the trio later earned the Turing Award, computing’s highest honor. Meta scored a major coup when the company (then Facebook) recruited him to be founding director of the Facebook AI Research lab (FAIR) in 2013. He’s also a professor at NYU. More recently, he helped persuade CEO Mark Zuckerberg to share some of Meta’s AI technology with the world: T…
4 months ago
wired.com
Steven Johnson has written 13 books, on topics ranging from a London cholera outbreak to the value of video games. He’s been a television presenter and a podcast host. He’s a keynote speaker who doesn’t have to call himself that in his LinkedIn profile. And for over a year now, he’s been a full-time employee of Google, a status that’s clear when he badges me into the search giant’s Chelsea offices in New York to show me what his team has been creating.
It’s called NotebookLM, and the easiest way…
4 months ago
wired.com
No human celebrating a first birthday is as verbose, knowledgeable, or prone to fabrication as ChatGPT, which is blowing out its first candle as I type these words. Of course, OpenAI’s game-changing large language model was precocious at birth, tumbling into civilization’s ongoing conversation like an uninvited guest busting into a dinner party and instantly commanding the room. The chatbot astonished everyone who prompted it with fully realized, if not always completely factual, responses to al…
5 months ago
wired.com
In June I had a conversation with chief scientist Ilya Sutskever at OpenAI’s headquarters, as I reported WIRED’s October cover story. Among the topics we discussed was the unusual structure of the company. OpenAI began as a nonprofit research lab whose mission was to develop artificial intelligence on par or beyond human level—termed artificial general intelligence or AGI—in a safe way. The company discovered a promising path in large language models that generate strikingly fluid text, but dev…
5 months ago
wired.com
Sam Altman always insisted that he wasn’t the most important person at OpenAI despite being its CEO. As he traveled the world this year meeting world leaders—the world’s unofficial ambassador of AI—Altman would soft-pedal his role, even as he stole glances at his phone to keep up with what was happening in OpenAI’s luxe San Francisco offices.
“We have an incredibly great team here that can do a lot of things, so mostly, I defer to them,” he told me in May when I asked him how the company ran in…
5 months ago
wired.com
People know Otter.ai as one of the AI-driven transcription services that have popped up over the past few years, automatically converting spoken words in interviews and meetings into text. The service can even distinguish between individual speakers. But its CEO, Sam Liang, sees this handy functionality as just a beachhead into a more sweeping and provocative project: Capturing everything you hear into a master dataset where you can search and reexperience every conversation you’ve ever had.
Lia…
5 months ago
wired.com
This interview was conducted in July 2023 for WIRED’s cover story on OpenAI. It is being published today after Sam Altman’s sudden departure to provide a glimpse at the thinking of the powerful AI company’s new boss.
Steven Levy: How did you come to join OpenAI?
Mira Murati: My background is in engineering, and I worked in aerospace, automotive, VR, and AR. Both in my time at Tesla [where she shepherded the Model X], and at a VR company [Leap Motion] I was doing applications of AI in the real wo…
5 months ago
