At an upscale sushi bar in New York last week, a smattering of media and policy types chowed down on a menu of sushi rolls, Peking duck tapas, and mushroom salad. But what made this menu unusual was the one ingredient that ran through the dishes—foie gras made from quail cells brewed in a bioreactor. […]
AI Will Understand Humans Better Than Humans Do
Michal Kosinski is a Stanford research psychologist with a nose for timely subjects. He sees his work as not only advancing knowledge, but alerting the world to potential dangers ignited by the consequences of computer systems. His best-known projects involved analyzing the ways in which Facebook (now Meta) gained a shockingly deep understanding of its […]
What an ‘Airbnbopoly’ Game Says About Silicon Valley’s Standoff With Lina Khan
Four years ago, one of Vice President Kamala Harris’ top donors—the billionaire cofounder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman—celebrated the IPO of Airbnb, a company he was heavily invested in, by fashioning Monopoly boards where the game’s “jail” space is replaced by “government regulation.” Since Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, many billionaire tech investors have come […]
The Guy Behind the Fake AI Halloween Parade Listing Says You’ve Got It All Wrong
I appreciate that. We own this mistake. So your name is Nazir Ali, but when you say “we”— We are not going to give you any personal information that might be harmful for us. Everyone is writing about us, and they are telling us that we are scammers. Would you be comfortable telling me about […]
Profiteers Are Exploiting US Election Conspiracies and Hate to Make Millions
The messages, potentially misleading US citizens or stoking hate towards various groups, will have been seen by many times more people than actually made a purchase. Those running the network of Facebook pages in Nigeria may simply believe that US-focused clickbait is the best way to boost the number of people who see their scams. […]
The EU Is Investigating Temu for Illegal Products and Addictive Design
The European Union has launched a formal investigation into Chinese shopping platform Temu, citing concerns that the platform is selling illegal products and has been designed in a way that is addictive for consumers. “There is a real suspicion that not enough is done—not in an effective way—to really prevent the dissemination of illegal products,” […]
OpenAI’s Transcription Tool Hallucinates. Hospitals Are Using It Anyway
On Saturday, an Associated Press investigation revealed that OpenAI’s Whisper transcription tool creates fabricated text in medical and business settings despite warnings against such use. The AP interviewed more than 12 software engineers, developers, and researchers who found the model regularly invents text that speakers never said, a phenomenon often called a “confabulation” or “hallucination” […]
AI Slop Is Flooding Medium
Some Medium writers and editors do applaud the platform’s approach to AI. Eric Pierce, who founded Medium’s largest pop culture publication Fanfare, says he doesn’t have to fend off many AI-generated submissions and that he believes that the human curators of Medium’s boost program help highlight the best of the platform’s human writing. “I can’t […]
Nigeria Drops Charges Against Tigran Gambaryan, Jailed Binance Exec and Former IRS Agent
For eight months, the criminal investigator who pioneered cryptocurrency tracing as a law enforcement technique has, in a bizarre twist of fate, been jailed in Nigeria facing charges of money laundering and tax evasion. Now he is finally coming home. On Wednesday in Abuja, a court ruled that criminal charges against Tigran Gambaryan, a Binance […]
Liquid AI Is Redesigning the Neural Network
Artificial intelligence might now be solving advanced math, performing complex reasoning, and even using personal computers, but today’s algorithms could still learn a thing or two from microscopic worms. Liquid AI, a startup spun out of MIT, will today reveal several new AI models based on a novel type of “liquid” neural network that has […]