“This signal on the oscilloscope may seem simple at first glance, but it demonstrates a key building block for our platform, representing the birth of the world’s first scalable, mass-manufacturable, and energy-efficient probabilistic computing platform,” says Guillaume Verdon, CEO of Extropic and the man behind the wildly popular, provocative, and sometimes controversial online persona Based […]
Trump Admin Plans to Cut Team Responsible for Critical Atomic Measurement Data
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is discussing plans to eliminate an entire team responsible for publishing and maintaining critical atomic measurement data in the coming weeks, as the Trump administration continues its efforts to reduce the US federal workforce, according to a March 18 email sent to dozens of outside scientists. […]
Hot New Thermodynamic Chips Could Trump Classical Computers
Guillaume Verdon stands before me with a new kind of computer chip in his hand—a piece of hardware he believes is so important to the future of humanity that he’s asked me not to reveal our exact location, for fear that his headquarters could become the target of industrial espionage. This much I can tell […]
OpenAI’s Sora Is Plagued by Sexist, Racist, and Ableist Biases
Despite recent leaps forward in image quality, the biases found in videos generated by AI tools, like OpenAI’s Sora, are as conspicuous as ever. A WIRED investigation, which included a review of hundreds of AI-generated videos, has found that Sora’s model perpetuates sexist, racist, and ableist stereotypes in its results. In Sora’s world, everyone is […]
A Mysterious Startup Is Developing a New Form of Solar Geoengineering
Stardust’s prospective clients seem to be governments: As countries consider geoengineering, Stardust could be poised to sell them tools to meet those goals, several experts said. In an emailed answer to questions about its business model, Yedvab described the company’s approach as “founded on the premise” that solar geoengineering “will play a critical role in […]
Yahoo Is Still Here—and It Has Big Plans for AI
In September 2021, Jim Lanzone took over a company whose name once embodied the go-go spirit of the internet but had, over the years, become a joke: Yahoo. He accepted the CEO post from the new private-equity owner Apollo Global Management, which had bought the property from Verizon, the most recent and possibly most clueless […]
Who’s Elon Musk’s Biggest Fan? His Mom
She sits in on his business meetings, defends him on X, and travels to give talks about how she raised him, the richest man in the world—but who is Elon Musk’s mother? Today on the show, we learn all about the model, influencer, and author, Maye Musk, while dissecting her most recent travels to China […]
Meta Tries to Bury a Tell-All Book
It was Meta itself that first told me about the new book attacking Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and the allegedly bankrupt morals of their company. On March 7, a Meta PR person contacted me to ask if I’d heard about Careless People, a presumed takedown of the company that was due for release in a […]
Under Trump, AI Scientists Are Told to Remove ‘Ideological Bias’ From Powerful Models
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued new instructions to scientists that partner with the US Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute (AISI) that eliminate mention of “AI safety,” “responsible AI,” and “AI fairness” in the skills it expects of members and introduces a request to prioritize “reducing ideological bias, to enable human flourishing […]
DOGE’s Cuts at the USDA Could Cause US Grocery Prices to Rise and Invasive Species to Spread
Navigating the workforce cuts has “been absolute chaos,” says Armando Rosario-Lebrón, a vice president of the National Association of Agriculture Employees, which represents workers in Plant Protection and Quarantine program. “These ports were already strained in how they process cargo, and now some of them have been completely decimated,” Rosario-Lebrón says. “We could be back […]