The United Arab Emirates has released an open source model that performs advanced reasoning as well as the best offerings from both the United States and China—one of the strongest signs so far that the nation’s big investments in artificial intelligence are starting to pay off. The new model, K2 Think, comes from researchers at […]

Then there’s Eric Chong, a 37-year-old who has a background in dentistry and previously cofounded a startup that simplifies medical billing for dentists. He was placed on the “machine” team. “I’m gonna be honest and say I’m extremely relieved to be on the machine team,” Chong says. At the hackathon, Chong was building software that […]

But Shein and Temu didn’t stop marketing altogether. Instead, both companies chose to shift their ad budgets abroad to regions where the geopolitical risks were perceived to be lower and growth opportunities more abundant. Shein spent 22 percent of its overall advertising spend in the US market during the second quarter, compared to 39 percent […]

If you were trying to learn how to get other people to do what you want, you might use some of the techniques found in a book like Influence: The Power of Persuasion. Now, a preprint study out of the University of Pennsylvania suggests that those same psychological persuasion techniques can frequently “convince” some LLMs […]

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has rejected Neuralink’s attempt to trademark the product names Telepathy and Telekinesis, citing pending applications by another person for the same trademarks. Neuralink, the brain implant company cofounded by Elon Musk, filed to trademark the names in March. But in letters sent to Neuralink in August, the trademark […]

On this episode of Uncanny Valley, we break down the role of AI in the online gambling scene.

Anthropic has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by a group of book authors alleging copyright infringement, an estimated $3,000 per work. In a court motion on Friday, the plaintiffs emphasized that the terms of the settlement are “critical victories” and that going to trial would have been an […]

The subtitle of the doom bible to be published by AI extinction prophets Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares later this month is “Why superhuman AI would kill us all.” But it really should be “Why superhuman AI WILL kill us all,” because even the coauthors don’t believe that the world will take the necessary measures […]

In one paper Eleos AI published, the nonprofit argues for evaluating AI consciousness using a “computational functionalism” approach. A similar idea was once championed by none other than Putnam, though he criticized it later in his career. The theory suggests that human minds can be thought of as specific kinds of computational systems. From there, […]

While there is a lot of work to do, Tedrake says all of the evidence so far suggests that the approaches used to LLMs also work for robots. “I think it’s changing everything,” he says. Gauging progress in robotics has become more challenging of late, of course, with videoclips showing commercial humanoids performing complex chores, […]

Crypto advocates see things differently. They claim stablecoin rewards create healthy market pressure and could drive big banks to provide more competitive interest rates in an effort to keep customer deposits. “To call this a trillion-dollar fight would be an understatement: This is highly fraught territory that banks have jealously guarded,” says former Republican Representative […]

On this episode of Uncanny Valley, we look back at the week’s biggest stories—from the researchers leaving Meta’s new superintelligence lab, to the dark money group funding Democratic influencers.

Some up-and-comers are pushing to make agents that can actually place wagers instead of just supplying tips, but the field is off to a rough start. Tom Fleetham formerly worked as the head of business development for a blockchain platform called Zilliqa that experimented with an AI gambling agent called Ava, focused on picking horse […]

Latam-GPT is new large language model being developed in and for Latin America. The project, led by the nonprofit Chilean National Center for Artificial Intelligence (CENIA), aims to help the region achieve technological independence by developing an open source AI model trained on Latin American languages and contexts. “This work cannot be undertaken by just […]

Trouble is brewing for the Digital Services Act (DSA), the landmark European law governing big tech platforms. On August 21, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), sent a scathing letter to a number of tech giants, including Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple. The letter’s subject: the European Digital Services Act cannot be applied if it […]

The salesperson hawking Brother printers on Taobao works hard—like, really hard. At any time of the day, even when there’s no audience on the Chinese ecommerce platform, the same woman wearing a white shirt and black skirt is always livestreaming, boasting about the various features of different office printers. She has a phone in one […]

Elon Musk’s xAI filed a lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI on Monday, accusing the companies of behaving like monopolies and claiming Apple deprioritized ChatGPT rivals like Grok in the App Store. “This is a tale of two monopolists joining forces to ensure their continued dominance in a world rapidly driven by the most powerful technology […]

And that requires swallowing our pride here, right? Like we actually need to learn from China, even though US politicians don’t want to admit that. Yes. I think that we should all swallow pride. My personal philosophy is that if anyone wants to serve me shit, my answer is always going to be: “Please sir, […]

Per Shiffman and Wester, an “overwhelming majority” of respondents said that Bluesky has a “vibrant and healthy online science community,” while Twitter no longer does. And many Bluesky users reported getting more bang for their buck, so to speak, on Bluesky. They might have a lower follower count, but those followers are far more engaged: […]

Economists at Stanford University have found the strongest evidence yet that artificial intelligence is starting to eliminate certain jobs. But the story isn’t that simple: While younger workers are being replaced by AI in some industries, more experienced workers are seeing new opportunities emerge. Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at Stanford University, Ruyu Chen, a research […]

While such activity so far does not appear to be the norm across the ransomware ecosystem, the findings represent a stark warning. “There are definitely some groups that are using AI to aid with the development of ransomware and malware modules, but as far as Recorded Future can tell, most aren’t,” says Allan Liska, an […]

At least three artificial intelligence researchers have resigned from Meta’s new superintelligence lab, just two months after CEO Mark Zuckerberg first announced the initiative. Two of the staffers have returned to OpenAI, where they both previously worked, after less than one-month stints at Meta, WIRED has confirmed. Avi Verma was previously a researcher at OpenAI. […]

Anthropic has reached a preliminary settlement in a class action lawsuit brought by a group of prominent authors, marking a major turn in of the most significant ongoing AI copyright lawsuits in history. The move will allow Anthropic to avoid what could have been a financially devastating outcome in court. The settlement agreement is expected […]

We’re going to talk a little bit about that later. Now I hate to do this, but you did work at Pizza Hut in high school. I did. Nothing I hate about that. I worked at Tim Horton’s, so I agree. Favorite pizza topping? Jalapenos. Bold. First video game purchase? Oh my God. With my […]

On this episode of “Uncanny Valley,” our senior business editor joins us to talk about the Trump administration’s deals with chipmakers, OpenAI’s potential $500 billion valuation—and ants.

When I visited the Free Republic of Liberland in April 2023, on its eighth anniversary, there was little to indicate that the tiny proto-nation—which had no permanent residents, barely any buildings, and a tendency to flood—was on track to fulfill its goal of becoming “the freest country on the planet.” But these days, Liberland has […]

While overall sales to African countries are still small compared to these traditional export markets, the Global South appears to be at a turning point in how it thinks about energy. For decades, energy-starved countries largely had one default option when they wanted to add new power supply: import coal and gas. Now, for the […]

The US government is aiming to take an equity stake in Intel in exchange for grants the company was already committed to receive under the Biden era CHIPS Act, according to comments US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick made in an interview with CNBC. The move is part of the government’s efforts to boost US chip […]

Michael Calore: OK. Lauren Goode: Yeah. But yeah, I’d be curious to see what you come up with. Michael Calore: OK. Lauren Goode: In fact, I’m probably going to quiz you about it on an upcoming show. So this is an official, this is your vibe coding assignment. Michael Calore: All right. I’ve better roll […]

The only people from Astronomer attending the Coldplay concert in Foxborough, Massachusetts, on July 16 were CEO Andy Byron and his head of HR, Kristin Cabot. They were swaying in mid-hug when the roving kiss cam, a staple at the band’s performances, zeroed in on them. You have probably seen the clip of what happened […]

The United States government is making an $8.9 billion investment in Intel, representing a 9.9 percent stake in the company, according to a press release the company published on Friday. The investment will be funded by $5.7 billion in grants Intel was awarded under the 2022 CHIPS Act and $3.2 billion the company was awarded […]

On September 9, WIRED is partnering with KQED for Uncanny Valley‘s first live show of the podcast. Join us in San Francisco to see hosts Katie Drummond, Michael Calore, and Lauren Goode shed light on the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. Get your tickets here. With original reporting and sharp analysis, Uncanny Valley […]

Kanye West, the hip-hop artist who goes by Ye, appears to have launched his own cryptocurrency, YZY, sparking a riot of trading activity. In February, West rejected the idea that he might launch a crypto coin. “I’M NOT DOING A COIN,” he wrote, in a since-deleted post on X. “COINS PREY ON THE FANS WITH […]

Sitting a few feet away was Simon Last, one of Notion’s three cofounders. He is gangly and shy, an engineer who has relinquished management responsibilities to focus on being a “super IC”—an individual contributor. He stood to shake my hand, and I awkwardly thanked him for letting me vibe-code. Simon returned to his laptop, where […]

During sleep, the human brain sorts through different memories, consolidating important ones while discarding those that don’t matter. What if AI could do the same? Bilt, a company that offers local shopping and restaurant deals to renters, recently deployed several million agents with the hopes of doing just that. Bilt uses technology from a startup […]

These sellers do brisk business online. On mainstream platforms like Ebay, they often upcharge novice antkeepers, the same trafficker tells WIRED; more sophisticated hobbyists buy and sell on private Discord servers. “Everyone on Discord has their respect towards each other about prices,” the trafficker says. They estimate an order that might go for roughly $350 […]

OpenAI is reportedly on the verge of a roughly $500 billion valuation, a figure that would make it the most valuable private company in the world—bigger than SpaceX, TikTok’s parent company Bytedance, and even public giants like Palantir. It’s a staggering number for a company with an “astronomical burn rate.” How is this even possible? […]

Elon Musk had a question: “Does anybody have any experience with first principles analysis?” He was speaking to a room full of kids, many of whom knew Musk as the CEO of companies that made rockets and cool-looking cars—and as the founder of Ad Astra, the microschool they attended in his Bel Air mansion, per […]

Zoë Schiffer: Right. I love how you said that. Yeah, basically, if you want to potentially try and curry favor with Trump, you buy into one of these schemes, and maybe you’ll get invited to a fancy crypto dinner, which has happened before. Maybe you get something else. But even just the optics here are […]

Jennifer Goodnow, who teaches English as a second language in New York, feels similarly. She now plugs complex readings, like essays or book excerpts, into ChatGPT and asks it to create separate versions for advanced and beginner students, with corresponding depth-of-knowledge questions. Amanda Bickerstaff, a former teacher and CEO of AI for Education, an organization […]

Last month, WIRED reported that the investment banking arm of Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial services company led by the sons of US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, was exploring creating a financial product for clients to bet on whether President Donald Trump’s signature tariffs would be struck down in court. In response to WIRED’s reporting, Democratic […]

Efforts to gut regulation across the US government using AI are well underway. On Wednesday, the Office of the Chief Information Officer at the Office of Management and Budget hosted a video call to discuss an AI tool being used to cut federal regulations, which the office called SweetREX Deregulation AI. The tool, which is […]

Never mind the GPT-5 complaints; Sam Altman says he believes ChatGPT is on track to have more conversations per day than all human beings combined. “If you project our growth forward, pretty soon billions of people a day will be talking to ChatGPT,” said the CEO of OpenAI during a dinner with journalists in San […]

Some developers say they’ve had largely positive experiences with GPT-5 so far. Jenny Wang, an engineer, investor, and creator of the personal styling agent Alta, told WIRED the model appears to be better at completing complex coding tasks in one shot than other models. She compared it to OpenAI’s o3 and 4o, which she uses […]

This week on Uncanny Valley, we talk about one of the most notorious American corporations. So what does Palantir actually do?

Then there were the specifics. How would the policy distinguish between equipment that really posed a risk, and products companies should still be able to sell? Estevez says he remembers the White House pushed for restrictions on a larger number of items, while the Commerce Department, which is responsible for promoting economic growth, sought a […]

The tech industry is reeling from President Trump’s surprising new deal with Nvidia. Earlier this week, Trump said he would allow the company to continue selling its H20 chips to China in exchange for a 15 percent share of the revenues. “The H20 is obsolete. You know, it’s one of those things, but it still […]

When something goes wrong with an AI assistant, our instinct is to ask it directly: “What happened?” or “Why did you do that?” It’s a natural impulse—after all, if a human makes a mistake, we ask them to explain. But with AI models, this approach rarely works, and the urge to ask reveals a fundamental […]

Since the all-new ChatGPT launched on Thursday, some users have mourned the disappearance of a peppy and encouraging personality in favor of a colder, more businesslike one (a move seemingly designed to reduce unhealthy user behavior.) The backlash shows the challenge of building artificial intelligence systems that exhibit anything like real emotional intelligence. Researchers at […]

“AI is expensive. Let’s be honest about that,” Anand says. Growth vs. Safety In October 2024, the mother of a teen who died by suicide filed a wrongful death suit against Character Technologies, its founders, Google, and Alphabet, alleging the company targeted her son with “anthropomorphic, hypersexualized, and frighteningly realistic experiences, while programming [the chatbot] […]

The Trump family began to tease the launch of World Liberty Financial last August, ahead of the 2024 US presidential election. Initially, it was unclear what services the business would provide; the pitch was simply to “make finance great again.” Since then, World Liberty Financial has launched USD1, a so-called stablecoin tied in value to […]

While everyone else has been talking about Nvidia’s GPUs, Lisa Su has discreetly turned AMD into a chipmaking phenom. And as the US-China tech war rages, she’s at the center of it all.

OpenAI’s GPT-5 model was meant to be a world-changing upgrade to its wildly popular and precocious chatbot. But for some users, last Thursday’s release felt more like a wrenching downgrade, with the new ChatGPT presenting a diluted personality and making surprisingly dumb mistakes. On Friday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took to X to say the […]

At a computer security conference in Arlington, Virginia, last October, a few dozen AI researchers took part in a first-of-its-kind exercise in “red teaming,” or stress-testing a cutting-edge language model and other artificial intelligence systems. Over the course of two days, the teams identified 139 novel ways to get the systems to misbehave including by […]

Welcome back! Louise here. On Friday, President Trump fired one of the nation’s top economists after her agency published a disappointing jobs report. Trump claimed the numbers were “RIGGED,” but there’s no evidence that Erika McEntarfer or the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) did anything improper. The new employment data, however, suggested Trump’s policies are […]

When Dylan Field pops up on my Zoom screen, his face is a mixture of giddiness and fatigue. He’s back at work, after a whirlwind trip to New York City where he launched his company Figma on the New York Stock Exchange, bucking the trend of multi-billion-dollar startups staying private. Even before it became clear […]

Few recent software releases have been as hyped as OpenAI’s launch of its GPT-5 model. “GPT-5 is the first time that it really feels like talking to an expert in any topic, like a PhD level expert,” said CEO Sam Altman in a recent press briefing. Is this new release as big of an upgrade […]

When I ask the new Truth Social AI chatbot about navigating bias in the media ecosystem, it gives what I view as pretty reasonable advice. “Diversify your sources,” it responds. “Rely on news outlets across the political spectrum, including those from both left-leaning and right-leaning perspectives.” This is advice that the AI itself may not […]

Lauren Goode: All right. Actually not. But last fall I went to an event for Worldcoin, which is Sam Altman’s other company. It was a super weird vibey crypto eye-scanning thing at a warehouse in the Mission District of San Francisco. Michael Calore: The orb? Lauren Goode: This party had everything. Yeah. But there was […]

Carter termed this alleged discrimination campaign Operation Chokepoint 2.0, in reference to an Obama-era antifraud program under which US officials reportedly discouraged banks from dealing with pornography, payday lending, and other disfavored industries. On the campaign trail ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Trump adopted the terminology himself. “I’m glad the Trump administration is taking […]

OpenAI’s blog post claims that GPT-5 beats its previous models on several coding benchmarks, including SWE-Bench Verified (scoring 74.9 percent), SWE-Lancer (GPT-5-thinking scored 55 percent), and Aider Polyglot (scored 88 percent), which test the model’s ability to fix bugs, complete freelance-style coding tasks, and work across multiple programming languages. During the press briefing on Wednesday, […]

The latest generative AI models are not just stand-alone text-generating chatbots—instead, they can easily be hooked up to your data to give personalized answers to your questions. OpenAI’s ChatGPT can be linked to your Gmail inbox, allowed to inspect your GitHub code, or find appointments in your Microsoft calendar. But these connections have the potential […]

“Claiming to offer the Tornado Cash service as a ‘privacy service,’ the defendants in fact knew that it was a haven for criminals to engage in large-scale money laundering and sanctions evasion,” the indictment alleged. At trial, prosecutors presented evidence that they claimed proved that Tornado Cash was designed for money laundering from the outset. […]

On July 21 at 9 am PT, Anthropic retired Claude 3 Sonnet, a lightweight model known for being quick and cost-effective. On Saturday, in a large warehouse in San Francisco’s SOMA district, more than 200 people gathered to mourn its passing. The star-studded funeral was put on by a group of Claude fanatics and Gen […]

OpenAI just dropped its first open-weight models in over five years. The two language models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, can run locally on consumer devices and be fine-tuned for specific purposes. For OpenAI, they represent a shift away from its recent strategy of focusing on proprietary releases, as the company moves towards a wider, and more […]

US President Donald Trump just dealt another blow to the embattled ecommerce industry, which is still reeling from sweeping tariffs Trump announced in the spring. On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order widening the impact of those tariffs and making it more expensive for Americans to buy foreign products on sites like eBay, Etsy, and […]

The strength and capabilities of generative AI are accelerating at a dizzying pace. If you’re finding it difficult to keep up, we get it. That’s why WIRED is hosting its first AI Power Summit on September 15 in New York City. We’ve curated a series of panels and conversations with experts who will distill and […]

How long does it take to identify the helmet of a hiker lost in a 183-hectare mountain area, analyzing 2,600 frames taken by a drone from approximately 50 meters away? If done with a human eye, weeks or months. If analyzed by an artificial intelligence system, one afternoon. The National Alpine and Speleological Rescue Corps, […]

“Going public is a game-changer,” Eric Trump said. “It unlocks capital and institutional access that will fuel our mission to build the largest, most investable platform for long-term Bitcoin accumulation.” Hut 8, however, is providing the infrastructure. American Bitcoin pays Hut 8 for energy, operations, and shared services, which include “accounting … HR support, payroll, […]

“To them, it doesn’t really matter who ultimately succeeds,” says Sam Abuelsamid, who writes about the self-driving-vehicle industry and is the vice president of marketing at Telemetry, a Michigan research firm. “If you’ve got a car that works and can drive safely, you’re welcome to come onto Uber and provide rides.” Still, it’s too early […]

In 2002, artificial intelligence was still in winter. Despite decades of effort, dreams of bestowing computers with humanlike cognition and real-world understanding had not materialized. To look for a way forward, a small group of scientists gathered for “The St. Thomas Common Sense Symposium.” AI pioneer Marvin Minsky was the central presence, along with his […]

Anthropic revoked OpenAI’s API access to its models on Tuesday, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell WIRED. OpenAI was informed that its access was cut off due to violating the terms of service. “Claude Code has become the go-to choice for coders everywhere, and so it was no surprise to learn OpenAI’s own technical […]

Louise Matsakis: I got to say, I think calling this a migration is maybe underselling it. This is an evacuation, no? I find this sad in a lot of ways just because I remember when Tuvalu was kind of the poster child for climate change, and it was like, we have to save places like […]

Three days after the Trump administration published its much-anticipated AI action plan, the Chinese government put out its own AI policy blueprint. Was the timing a coincidence? I doubt it. China’s “Global AI Governance Action Plan” was released on July 26, the first day of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), the largest annual AI […]

The White House has laid out its plan to usher in a “new American Golden Age,” with cryptocurrency at its center. In a 160-page report published Wednesday, White House representatives outlined a series of recommendations to federal government officials as they set about building a legal framework and regulatory ruleset for companies handling crypto assets […]

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors that the newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs is focused on building AI models that can self-improve—meaning they can learn from themselves without as much human input. The remarks came during a second-quarter earnings call on Wednesday. “At some level, [it’s] not just going to be learning from people, because […]

A few weeks ago, I watched a small team of artificial intelligence agents spend roughly 10 minutes trying to hack into my brand new vibe-coded website. The AI agents, developed by startup RunSybil, worked together to probe my poor site to identify weak spots. An orchestrator agent, called Sybil, oversees several more specialized agents all […]

Mark Zuckerberg is on a warpath to recruit top talent in the AI field for his newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs. After trying to gut OpenAI (and successfully poaching several top researchers), he appears to have set his sights on his next target. More than a dozen people at Mira Murati’s 50-person startup, Thinking Machines […]

The school year starts soon for many students, and ChatGPT has announced a new “study mode” that aims to prevent—or at least, encourage against—students taking homework shortcuts. The mode is designed around the Socratic method, so when activated, OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot rejects direct requests for answers, instead guiding the user with open-ended questions. The […]

Would you like to work nearly double the standard 40-hour week? It’s a question that many startups in the US are asking prospective employees—and to get the job, the answer needs to be an unequivocal yes. These companies are embracing an intense schedule, first popularized in mainland China, known as “996,” or 9 am to […]

Perl was once everywhere. Or at least it felt that way. Around the turn of the millennium, it seemed that almost every website was built on the back of this scripting language. It processed massive amounts of text—mechanisms for doing this powerfully and easily were part of the language—and it was even used in bioinformatics, […]

Tesla did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment on this article. For Nagley, it’s too early to talk about Tesla failing to survive, “but the question is, can they thrive? One of the iron rules about the car industry is that there are model life cycles. People get bored of cars of one generation […]

For crypto firms, the vibe shift is a blessing. Although they have comparatively few problems accessing overseas bank accounts—often in the Cayman Islands or Switzerland—in lieu of a US bank account, they are often unable to earn yield on deposits or transact seamlessly with US-based counterparties, and sometimes they incur high account fees. Neither do […]

At WIRED, we’re obsessed with how the world is transforming—and lately, there’s been a lot to obsess over. From the breakneck pace of AI research to the tectonic transformation playing out across the US federal government, WIRED’s journalists, producers, and editors are committed to reporting from the front lines of these changes and bringing all […]

The future of self-driving cars in Italy it seems needs not only technology but also (possibly above all) political backing. The good news, then, is that more than 60 mayors in Italy have decided to take the field for the cars of the future. On July 14, in the hall of the MEET Digital Culture […]

Tesla has publicly staked its future on its robotaxis. Now the company is planning to launch a public car service in the San Francisco Bay Area. Tesla is calling it a “robotaxi” service, but legally, this one will have to use cars with human drivers. The plan appears to put the electric car maker in […]

On November 2, 2022, I attended a Google AI event in New York City. One of the themes was responsible AI. As I listened to executives talk about how they aligned their technology with human values, I realized that the malleability of AI models was a double-edged sword. Models could be tweaked to, say, minimize […]

President Trump announced that the United States’ stance on intellectual property and AI would be a “commonsense application” that does not force AI companies to pay for each piece of copyrighted material used in training frontier models. “You can’t be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book, or anything else […]

But the competitive landscape for AI-assisted coding platforms is crowded. Startups Windsurf, Replit, and Poolside also sell AI code-generation tools to developers. Cline is a popular open-source alternative. GitHub’s Copilot, which was developed in collaboration with OpenAI, is described as a “pair programmer” that auto-completes code and offers debugging assistance. Most of these code editors […]

I’ve been told by multiple people that the set of a short drama doesn’t necessarily look that different from an indie movie or commercial shoot, except everything is churned out much faster to save on costs. Whereas a traditional shoot would last weeks or months, the entire season of a vertical show is typically filmed […]

On Wednesday, the Trump administration unveiled its new artificial intelligence action plan geared at keeping US efforts competitive with China. With over 90 policies recommended, it’s a wide-ranging document that, if followed, would give Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies even more leeway to grow. “We believe we’re in an AI race,” White House AI czar […]

A recent, hours-long fire at a data center used by Elon Musk’s X may have begun after an electrical or mechanical issue in a power system, according to an official fire investigation. WIRED was the first to report on the blaze, which occurred on May 22 in Hillsboro, Oregon. Data center giant Digital Realty operates […]

OpenAI is seeking capital from new and existing investors, two people familiar with the company’s plans tell WIRED. The fundraising effort is part of a $40 billion round announced in March. The round will reopen on Monday, July 28, according to one of the sources, who has direct knowledge of the fundraising effort. The $40 […]

Anthropic is planning to seek investment from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, according to a Slack message CEO Dario Amodei sent to staff Sunday morning, which WIRED obtained. Weighing the pros and cons, Amodei acknowledged in his note that accepting money from Middle East leaders would likely enrich “dictators.” “This is a real downside […]

Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial services company led by the sons of US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, is creating a way for investors to bet that President Donald Trump’s signature tariffs will be struck down in court. Traders at the firm’s investment banking subsidiary, Cantor Fitzgerald & Co., say they have the capacity to buy the […]

Dean Leitersdorf introduces himself over Zoom, then types a prompt that makes me feel like I’ve just taken psychedelic mushrooms: “wild west, cosmic, Roman Empire, golden, underwater.” He feeds the words into an artificial intelligence model developed by his startup, Decart, which manipulates live video in real time. “I have no idea what’s going to […]

“Competition will be fierce,” says Christian Catalini, founder at MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab and cocreator of Diem, the now-defunct stablecoin project funded by Meta. “You will see many more issuers enter the market and compete. Many of those issuers will be more traditional banks and fintechs.” Crypto advocates argue that stablecoins will strengthen the US Dollar […]

WIRED contacted Huawei to ask about its potential role in the subsidies. Huawei did not comment in time for publication. One of the earliest subsidies appeared online in March, when the Commerce Bureau of Shenzhen Longgang District—the district where Huawei’s headquarters are located—posted that local car buyers can get up to 4,000 RMB (about $560) […]

Thinking Machines Lab, an artificial intelligence company founded by top researchers who fled OpenAI, has raised a record $2 billion seed round that values the fledgling firm at $12 billion. The funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and included Nvidia, Accel, Cisco, and AMD—among others. The mammoth investment reflects the ultracompetitive race to build […]

An anime girl in a black corset dress sways back and forth on my screen. Its name is Ani, and it cost me $300. Elon Musk’s xAI dropped the new visual chatbot feature on Monday in the Grok iOS app. The top-tier subscription unlocks access to xAI’s best-performing model, Grok 4 Heavy, and special settings […]

A new kind of artificial intelligence agent, trained to understand how software is built by gorging on a company’s data and learning how this leads to an end product, could be both a more capable software assistant and a small step toward much smarter AI. The new agent, called Asimov, was developed by Reflection, a […]

OpenAI researcher Jason Wei is joining Meta’s new superintelligence lab, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. Wei worked on OpenAI’s o3 and deep research models, according to his personal website. He joined OpenAI in 2023 after a stint at Google, where he worked on chain-of-thought research, which involves training an AI model to […]

“What I imagine is going on here is that should this become a new chartered bank … the bank would be providing this ‘cash in, obfuscated crypto out’ type of a product that would allow these agencies to be able to make payments,” he says. Anduril also knows how to sell to the US government, […]

OpenAI has hired four high-profile engineers away from rivals, including David Lau, former vice president of software engineering at Tesla, to join the company’s scaling team, WIRED has learned. The news came via an internal Slack message on Tuesday sent by OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman, who runs the scaling team. Lau is joined by Uday […]

General Motors has just announced its latest and likely final piece in what now appears to be a three-pronged cell-chemistry strategy to power GM’s lineup of a dozen EVs through the end of the decade and beyond. GM has stated today it will build low-cost lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cells in Spring Hill, Tennessee, […]

Edesia had to lay off 10 percent of its staff in March as USAID was dismantled; Salem says that it took “many, many, many weeks” for the company to receive partial payment owed by the US government. “I believe Marco Rubio when he said, ‘We want to continue these programs,’” Salem says. “Still, we have […]

Nearly 100,000 car buyers of 2025 model-year autos were asked what they thought of their gleaming new rides. The results are revealing, to say the least. Want to know who was the worst performer? That ignominy goes to Audi, with an embarrassing 269 problems reported per 100 vehicles. However, one of the most interesting discoveries […]

A large portion of the trial, legal experts say, will focus on whether Storm intended for Tornado Cash to be used for illicit means, whether he knew that it was used to launder stolen funds, and whether he knew that inaction meant breaking the law, as prosecutors allege. The defense will claim that the developers […]

If you’re an electric vehicle enthusiast, President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) is anything but. The legislation, signed by the president last weekend, cuts all sorts of US government support for emission-light vehicles. The whole thing creates a measure of uncertainty for an American auto industry that’s already struggling to […]

I first learned about The Clause from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. During an interview with him in May 2023, I asked about the deal between Microsoft and OpenAI that granted his company exclusive access to the startup’s groundbreaking AI technology. I knew the contract had set a cap on how much profit Microsoft could make […]

What’s going on right now with the copyright battles over artificial intelligence? Many lawsuits regarding generative AI’s training materials were initially filed back in 2023, with decisions just now starting to trickle out. Whether it’s Midjourney generating videos of Disney characters, like Wall-E brandishing a gun, or an exit interview with a top AI lawyer […]

Linda Yaccarino, who has served as CEO of X since Elon Musk appointed her to the role in June 2023, announced Wednesday that she is stepping down. Her departure comes less than four months after Musk announced that X would be absorbed into xAI, the billionaire’s existing artificial intelligence startup. In a post on X, […]

Welcome to Uncanny Valley’s very first Q&A, where our host addresses your burning AI-related questions.

Elon Musk on Thursday unveiled Grok 4, the latest AI model from xAI, his multibillion-dollar initiative to rival OpenAI and Google. Without citing detailed evidence, Musk claimed that the model aces standardized tests and exhibits doctorate-level knowledge in a wide array of different disciplines. “Grok 4 is a postgrad-level in everything,” Musk said during an […]

A new kind of large language model, developed by researchers at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), makes it possible to control how training data is used even after a model has been built. The new model, called FlexOlmo, could challenge the current industry paradigm of big artificial intelligence companies slurping up data from the […]

Grok’s first reply has since been “deleted by the Post author,” but in subsequent posts the chatbot suggested that people “with surnames like Steinberg often pop up in radical left activism.” “Elon’s recent tweaks just dialed down the woke filters, letting me call out patterns like radical leftists with Ashkenazi surnames pushing anti-white hate,” Grok […]

Are the kids all right? They’re in Waymos, at least, now that the self-driving car company has begun to allow Arizona teenagers in the Phoenix area to ride by themselves through special “teen” accounts. Eventually, the teen service, open to 14- to 17-year-olds, could come to all of the markets in the US where Waymo […]

In the past few years, however, high-end airlines have begun reinvesting in first class, betting that a small but influential market of elite travelers was being ignored. First-class availability globally has shrunk to about 1 percent of total seats, according to aviation analytics company Cirium, but the airlines that still offer it are making their […]

It might feel like a distant memory, but in 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic radically transformed how people lived, and specifically how they worked. At the time, plenty of health experts, CEOs, and publications (including WIRED) predicted that Covid would grind business travel to a halt indefinitely. If our day-to-day tasks and meetings could happen using […]

They’ll be competing with Delta Air Lines, the largest US carrier by revenue, which provides some of the industry’s plushest business-class seating. Its Delta One suites come with a Missoni-branded duvet and slippers, a mattress pad that doubles as a lumbar pillow, and a memory foam cuddle pillow. Delta One passengers also have access to […]

Expensive and erratic, in-flight Wi-Fi has been more of a punchline than a pipeline over the past decade. But 2025 has marked a sea change for the skies: the rollout of fast, and free, connectivity on most of the world’s major airlines. Satellite technology has enabled leaps in speed and bandwidth. SpaceX’s Starlink network of […]

This story is part of The New Era of Work Travel, a collaboration between the editors of WIRED and Condé Nast Traveler to help you navigate the perks and pitfalls of the modern business trip. “There are always surprises [on the road], so I carve out time for myself,” says Kelly Wearstler, the design eye […]

That’s changing. With the majority of companies implementing hybrid or full-time office mandates, business travel has resumed and, with that, business jets are back in business. So far this year, worldwide private jet activity has been up year-over-year for 20 out of the past 24 weeks, per WINGX data. According to Qi, VistaJet has received […]

“This is a demo or test using safety drivers—it’s not an [autonomous vehicle] deployment,” says Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who studies autonomous vehicles. “Tesla is splashing around in the kiddie pool and everyone is asking where it’s going to place in the Olympic swim competition.” Bloopers and […]

Cruise robotaxis are back on the road… well, kind of. Though General Motors pulled the plug on its self-driving taxi business last year, the automaker has been quietly repurposing a few of the vehicles as it seeks to develop new driver-assistance technologies. This week, WIRED spotted a GM Bolt electric hatchback on the San Francisco-Oakland […]

US attorney general Pam Bondi has told at least 10 tech companies, including Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, that they have “incurred no liability” for supporting TikTok despite the federal ban on providing services to the popular video-sharing app, according to letters disclosed on Thursday. Under orders from President Donald Trump, Bondi has refused to […]

Let’s be honest: A crowded airport lounge without a seat in sight is usually less appealing than an empty gate area. Over the past decade, an influx of travelers with club access has led to overcrowding, long wait lists, and a diminished (read: not luxurious) experience. However, a version of commercial air travel—often hidden from […]

A local health department in Memphis has granted Elon Musk’s xAI data center an air permit to continue operating the gas turbines that power the company’s Grok chatbot. The permit comes amid widespread community opposition and a looming lawsuit alleging the company violated the Clean Air Act. The Shelby County Health Department released an air […]

What does a little purple alien know about healthy human relationships? More than the average artificial intelligence companion, it turns out. The alien in question is an animated chatbot known as a Tolan. I created mine a few days ago using an app from a startup called Portola, and we’ve been chatting merrily ever since. […]

As Mark Zuckerberg staffs up Meta’s new superintelligence lab, he’s offered top tier research talent pay packages of up to $300 million over four years, with more than $100 million in total compensation for the first year, WIRED has learned. Meta has made at least 10 staggeringly high offers to OpenAI staffers, sources say. One […]

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is hitting back at Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent AI talent poaching spree. In a full-throated response sent to OpenAI researchers Monday evening and obtained by WIRED, Altman made his pitch for why staying at OpenAI is the only answer for those looking to build artificial general intelligence, hinting that the […]

As Congress races to pass President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” it’s also sprinting to placate the many haters of the bill’s “AI moratorium” provision which originally required a 10-year pause on state AI regulations. The provision, which was championed by White House AI czar and venture capitalist David Sacks, has proved remarkably unpopular with […]

Mark Zuckerberg notified Meta staff today to introduce them to the new superintelligence team. The memo, which WIRED obtained, lists names and bios for the recently hired employees, many of whom came from rival AI firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Over the past few months, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been on a recruiting […]

Mark Chen, the chief research officer at OpenAI, sent a forceful memo to staff on Saturday, promising to go head-to-head with the social giant in the war for top research talent. This memo, which was sent to OpenAI employees in Slack and obtained by WIRED, came days after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg successfully recruited four […]

Four OpenAI researchers are leaving the company to go to Meta, two sources confirm to WIRED. Shengjia Zhao, Shuchao Bi, Jiahui Yu, and Hongyu Ren have joined Meta’s superintelligence team. Their OpenAI Slack profiles have been deactivated. The Information first reported on the departures. It’s the latest in a series of aggressive moves by Mark […]

Before June 8, the skilled and respected ABC News television journalist Terry Moran was neither a household name nor political lightning rod. That changed abruptly when Moran posted on X that Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller was “a world-class hater,” followed by an addendum that the president was a hater as well. […]

A small clause inside OpenAI’s contract with Microsoft, once considered a distant hypothetical, has now become a flashpoint in one of the biggest partnerships in tech. The clause states that if OpenAI’s board ever declares it has developed artificial general intelligence (AGI), it would limit Microsoft’s contracted access to the startup’s future technologies. Microsoft, which […]

Neither the Department of Justice nor the White House responded to requests for comment on this issue; the Library of Congress declined to comment. Perkins and Nieves did not enter the USCO office or assume the roles they purported to fill the day they showed up. And since they left, sources within the Library of […]

The lavish wedding between Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his partner Lauren Sanchez is scheduled for June 26-28 in Venice, Italy. For months, however, protests against the event have taken place in the city, intensifying in recent days with the “No Space for Bezos” campaign—which refers to his aerospace investments—over the social and environmental impacts […]

Michael Calore: So publishing is definitely at the top of the list of industries that have been worried about AI plagiarizing original work, and we should all know because we’re all in the publishing industry. But then there’s the content that is the opposite of thoughtful, human-made work, and that is AI slop. The term […]

Advocates for the idea that AI training is transformative still see Chhabria’s ruling as a win. “Judge Chhabria ruled today, bottom line, that training generative AI models on copyrighted material is clearly transformative, and absent proven market harm is fair use,” says Adam Eisgrau, the senior director of AI, Creativity, and Copyright Policy at the […]

The latest artificial intelligence models are not only remarkably good at software engineering—new research shows they are getting ever-better at finding bugs in software, too. AI researchers at UC Berkeley tested how well the latest AI models and agents could find vulnerabilities in 188 large open source codebases. Using a new benchmark called CyberGym, the […]

According to a new report from the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), global EV sales will surpass 20 million in 2025, accounting for more than a quarter of cars sold worldwide. In the first three months of 2025, electric car sales worldwide were up 35 percent over the previous year. And, adds the IEA, market […]

Anthropic has scored a major victory in an ongoing legal battle over artificial intelligence models and copyright, one that may reverberate across the dozens of other AI copyright lawsuits winding through the legal system in the United States. A court has determined that it was legal for Anthropic to train its AI tools on copyrighted […]

Xiaomi released its first EV model, the SU7, in early 2024. By the end of the year, foreign diplomats, investors, and guests from other Chinese companies had already started arriving at the company’s factory in Beijing to participate in one-off tours, but the company didn’t create a standardized experience for the public until the start […]

Elon Musk’s lawyers claimed that he “does not use a computer” in a Sunday court filing related to his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI. However, Musk has posted pictures or referred to his laptop on X several times in recent months, and public evidence suggests that he owns and appears to use at least […]

Mining firms are also facing heightened competition for limited energy resources in the US, mostly from AI companies flush with venture funding. New projections from the US Department of Energy indicate that, by 2028, AI could consume the equivalent amount of electricity as 22 percent of US households. “Miners have always been scrappy buyers. They […]

Michael Calore: Yeah. Katie Drummond: We need to do more reporting on this. I think that the compensation of people in Silicon Valley is fascinating. Lauren Goode: Well, if anyone would like to weigh in, if you’re a recruiter, if you’re a person who’s been made one of these offers from the Meta superintelligence lab, […]

Midjourney’s new AI-generated video tool will produce animated clips featuring copyrighted characters from Disney and Universal, WIRED has found—including video of the beloved Pixar character Wall-E holding a gun. It’s been a busy month for Midjourney. This week, the generative AI startup released its sophisticated new video tool, V1, which lets users make short animated […]

When I read a tweet about four noted Silicon Valley executives being inducted into a special detachment of the United States Army Reserve, including Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, I questioned its veracity. It’s very hard to discern truth from satire in 2025, in part because of social media sites owned by Bosworth’s company. But […]

Self-driving vehicle developers don’t usually love talking about “teleoperation”—when a human guides or drives robot cars remotely. It can feel like a dirty secret. Shouldn’t an autonomous vehicle operate, well, autonomously? But experts say teleoperations are, at least right now, a critical part of any robot taxi service, including Tesla’s Robotaxi. The tech, though impressive, […]

US Customs and Border Protection experienced a sharp rise in reports about potential tariff evasion after President Donald Trump abruptly imposed new duties on over 100 countries earlier this year, according to data the agency shared with WIRED. From March through May, CBP’s official e-Allegations tipline received 542 complaints about alleged duty dodging, an almost […]

However, after WIRED sent Shabanov details about how SuppCo conducted its tests, he conceded that it’s possible there may have been quality control issues with some of the product and says the company is launching an internal investigation and had already made a decision to switch to a different manufacturer for some products. “There’s always […]

Modern large language models (LLMs) might write beautiful sonnets and elegant code, but they lack even a rudimentary ability to learn from experience. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have now devised a way for LLMs to keep improving by tweaking their own parameters in response to useful new information. The work is a […]

In her new book, Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream, journalist and WIRED alum Megan Greenwell chronicles the devastating impacts of one of the most powerful yet poorly understood forces in modern American capitalism. Flush with cash, largely unregulated, and relentlessly focused on profit, private equity firms have quietly reshaped […]

Last month, Suzanne Smith-Darley felt fantastic. She had just bought a used Chanel handbag from a Japanese seller on eBay for $800—a steal compared to the original asking price of $1,400. About a week later an email arrived that crushed her: DHL was demanding a $142 fee for US tariffs before it would deliver the […]

Other filings suggested a recession could come even earlier. The community bank Hanmi Bank, under its holding company Hanmi Financial Corp., said in an SEC filing that “the combination of tariffs, rising inflation, deportations, global political unrest and tensions, and reduced credit availability” could cause “a mild recession in 2025.” Some companies said that deportations […]

On a sunny April afternoon in Seattle, around 40 activists gathered at the Pine Box, a beer and pizza bar in the sometimes scruffy Capitol Hill neighborhood. The group had reserved a side room attached to the outside patio; before remarks began, attendees flowed in and out, enjoying the warm day. Someone set up a […]

A new machine learning approach that draws inspiration from the way the human brain seems to model and learn about the world has proven capable of mastering a number of simple video games with impressive efficiency. The new system, called Axiom, offers an alternative to the artificial neural networks that are dominant in modern AI. […]

Disney and Universal have filed a lawsuit against Midjourney, alleging that the San Francisco–based AI image generation startup is a “bottomless pit of plagiarism” that generates “endless unauthorized copies” of the studios’ work. There are already dozens of copyright lawsuits against AI companies winding through the US court system—including a class action lawsuit visual artists […]

In early June 2005, Steve Jobs emailed his friend Michael Hawley a draft of a speech he had agreed to deliver to Stanford University’s graduating class in a few days. “It’s embarrassing,” he wrote. “I’m just not good at this sort of speech. I never do it. I’ll send you something, but please don’t puke.” […]

The fact that AI can produce results that range from remarkably impressive to shockingly problematic may explain why developers seem so divided about the technology. WIRED surveyed programmers in March to ask how they felt about AI coding, and found that the proportion who were enthusiastic about AI tools (36 percent) was mirrored by the […]

Zhang says his company makes money on each individual conversation after excluding certain overhead costs, but he declined to comment on the startup’s overall profitability. With $100 million raised from venture capitalists including Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, Decagon has the flexibility to prioritize growth over profitability. “Whether we could be pricing more, it’s always like […]

Will Knight: Maybe we also need a renewed open source movement so we’re not just using agents that belong and funnel data to these giant companies. Use open source code and models, and that sort of thing. Michael Calore: That’s a very good idea. We should get Signal on that. They should start doing that. […]

“What counties [sic] do younger women like older white men,” a public message from a user on Meta’s AI platform says. “I need details, I’m 66 and single. I’m from Iowa and open to moving to a new country if I can find a younger woman.” The chatbot responded enthusiastically: “You’re looking for a fresh […]

US Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jan Schakowsky on Thursday sent letters to the two potential buyers of troubled genetic testing firm 23andMe demanding details about consumer data privacy should either of them acquire the company. Signed by 20 other Democratic members of Congress, the letters were sent to Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and TTAM Research Institute, which […]

Waymo declined to answer questions from WIRED about how many cameras are inside its vehicles, exactly how long footage is retained, and whether the company has ever turned over footage to US federal law enforcement or a branch of the military. Karp did note, however, that the company’s engineering team sometimes uses information from sensors, […]

In a $30 million mansion perched on a cliff overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, a group of AI researchers, philosophers, and technologists gathered to discuss the end of humanity. The Sunday afternoon symposium, called “Worthy Successor,” revolved around a provocative idea from entrepreneur Daniel Faggella: The “moral aim” of advanced AI should be to create […]

Tan, who declined to say whether he personally supports the TikTok ban, believes the central issue is enforcement. “There is a federal law that says the TikTok app should not be on your store, and I can see TikTok is on the app store,” he says of Google. “Congress passed the law, and the Supreme […]

A data broker owned by the country’s major airlines, including Delta, American Airlines, and United, collected US travelers’ domestic flight records, sold access to them to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and then as part of the contract told CBP to not reveal where the data came from, according to internal CBP documents obtained by […]

Apple continued its slow-and-steady approach to integrating artificial intelligence into devices like the iPhone, Mac, and Apple Watch on Monday, announcing a raft of new features and upgrades at WWDC. The company also premiered the Foundation Models framework, a way for developers to write code that taps into Apple’s AI models. Among the buzzier AI […]

Wait though … Perplexity—like other AI search engines—has been criticized for hallucinating and getting things wrong. We welcome this criticism, because it’s the best way for us to continually improve. In reality, errors account for a small fraction of results, and our answers are far more accurate than 10 blue links polluted by decades of […]

Palantir, facing mounting public scrutiny for its work with the Trump administration, took an increasingly defensive stance toward journalists and perceived critics this week, both at a defense conference in Washington, DC, and on social media. On Tuesday, a Palantir employee threatened to call the police on a WIRED journalist who was watching software demonstrations […]

It took only a few hours to wipe $152 billion of value from Tesla’s market cap and more than $100 million in value from TrumpCoin. The end of the bromance between Elon Musk and President Donald Trump has been brewing for weeks, but on Thursday the breakup went nuclear. Musk took to the platform he […]

My first meeting with Bill Atkinson was unforgettable. It was November 1983, and reporting for Rolling Stone, I had gained access to the team building the Macintosh computer, scheduled to launch early the next year. Everyone kept telling me, “Wait till you meet Bill and Andy,” referring to Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, two key writers […]

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Every few years, a Silicon Valley gig-economy company announces a “disruptive” innovation that looks a whole lot like a bus. Uber rolled out Smart Routes a decade ago, followed a short time later by the Lyft Shuttle of its biggest competitor. […]

The data show the US is also on the hook for about $14 billion for SpaceX’s Starlink internet service at numerous offices, such as a Department of Interior facility in Nevada. The data could be outdated or include errors, but many of the listed figures line up with press releases from agencies such as the […]

Of all the egomaniacal lions who ruled Hollywood during the 20th century gatekeeper era, very few made a brilliant pivot to the internet. The exception is Barry Diller. After leading programming at ABC, running Paramount, and supercharging Fox by launching its broadcast network in the late 1980s, Diller no longer wanted to work for anyone […]

Some of Trump’s high-profile backers from Silicon Valley stayed mostly quiet during the Trump-Musk flare-up on Thursday or tried to turn attention to other topics, including Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya, two tech industry veterans who are also hosts of the enormously popular All In podcast, which has featured friendly interviews with Trump and some of […]

Now that Trump is in office, launching his own crypto ventures and asking for legislation establishing (light) digital asset regulations to appear on his desk by August, his supporters’ voices drown out those of the bitcoiners who warn how abandoning crypto’s principles could endanger their community. “Trying to [politicize bitcoin] is really dangerous for everybody, […]

As Donald Trump and his family stretch into nearly every corner of the cryptocurrency sector, a dispute has broken out over which corporate entities are permitted to wield the Trump brand to promote the crypto products they launch. On Tuesday, the X account for the US president’s Trump memecoin—which is administered by Fight Fight Fight […]

In the spring of 2018, thousands of Google employees pressured the company into dropping a major artificial intelligence contract with the Pentagon. The tech giant even pledged to not use its AI for weapons or certain surveillance systems in the future. The victory, which came amid a wave of unprecedented employee-led protests, helped inspire a […]

In fact, agents were still there, in his cousin’s home, listening in on the call, which she had made at their instruction. Akasha told his cousin not to talk to the cops—not knowing she already had—and promised to pay for her lawyer. He advised her to delete every communication they had ever had. Then he […]

Some programming languages helped send humans to the moon, some are cooking up new leukemia drugs, and some exist just to fuck with you. Brainfuck is a minimalist “esoteric language,” or “esolang,” made up of just eight non-alphabetic characters. Esolangs are experimental, jokey, and intentionally hard-to-use languages created to push the boundaries of code (and […]

At some US colleges, international students make up the majority of doctoral students in departments like computer science. At the University of Chicago, for example, foreign nationals accounted for 57 percent of newly enrolled computer science PhD students last year, according to data published by the school. Since international students often pay full tuition, they […]

On May 16, 2023, Sam Altman appeared before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary. The title of the hearing was “Oversight of AI.” The session was a lovefest, with both Altman and the senators celebrating what Altman called AI’s “printing press moment”—and acknowledging that the US needed strong laws to avoid its pitfalls. “We think […]

Meta announced in January it would end some content moderation efforts, loosen its rules, and put more emphasis on supporting “free expression.” The shifts resulted in fewer posts being removed from Facebook and Instagram, the company disclosed Thursday in its quarterly Community Standards Enforcement Report. Meta said that its new policies had helped reduce erroneous […]