Google figured out early on that video would be a great addition to its search business, so in 2005 it launched Google Video. Focused on making deals with the entertainment industry for second-rate content, and overly cautious on what users could upload, it flopped. Meanwhile, a tiny startup run by a handful of employees working […]
Distillation Can Make AI Models Smaller and Cheaper
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. The Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a chatbot earlier this year called R1, which drew a huge amount of attention. Most of it focused on the fact that a relatively small and unknown company said it had built a chatbot that rivaled the performance of […]
Donald Trump Is Saying There’s a TikTok Deal. China Isn’t
US efforts to ban TikTok started during Trump’s first term in 2020. Months before he left office, Trump threatened to ban TikTok and another Chinese app WeChat. The Biden administration rescinded Trump’s executive orders on the topic but continued to scrutinize TikTok. The US congress eventually passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications […]
Move Aside, Chatbots: AI Humanoids Are Here
Michael Calore: Yeah. That’s a whole other topic. Kylie Robison: Yes, it is. Will, what do you recommend? Will Knight: I’m going to recommend what I think is a genuinely useful home robot. I have a cat, Leono. He’s very nice but will bring in various animals, dead or alive, into our house overnight. Often […]
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Is Bananas for Google Gemini’s AI Image Generator
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is in London, standing in front of a room full of journalists, outing himself as a huge fan of Gemini’s Nano Banana. “How could anyone not love Nano Banana? I mean Nano Banana, how good is that? Tell me it’s not true!” He addresses the room. No one responds. “Tell me […]
US Tech Giants Race to Spend Billions in UK AI Push
Microsoft and Nvidia have unveiled plans to invest up to $45 billion dollars into the UK economy, in a move that will bolster the building of more data centers as well as research and development into artificial intelligence. The investment comes as US president Donald Trump travels to Britain, where he is expected to announce […]
How AI Is Upending Politics, Tech, the Media, and More
In an increasingly divided world, one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that artificial intelligence is a hugely disruptive—and sometimes downright destructive—phenomenon. At WIRED’s AI Power Summit in New York on Monday, leaders from the worlds of tech, politics, and the media came together to discuss how AI is transforming their intertwined worlds. […]
Join Us for WIRED’s AI Power Summit
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 […]
Charlie Kirk Was Shot and Killed in a Post-Content-Moderation World
Another TikTok video Degeling shared with WIRED showed a slow-motion, close-up angle of the bullet hitting Kirk’s neck. The tone of the video was conspiratorial: The user who uploaded it added spooky music and a digitally narrated voice, asking, “What is the black thing on his shirt and why did it move like this before […]
I Wasn’t Sure I Wanted Anthropic to Pay Me for My Books—I Do Now
A billion dollars isn’t what it used to be—but it still focuses the mind. At least it did for me when I heard that the AI company Anthropic agreed to an at least $1.5 billion settlement for authors and publishers whose books were used to train an early version of its large language model, Claude. […]