When Meta released its large language model Llama 3 for free this April, it took outside developers just a couple days to create a version without the safety restrictions that prevent it from spouting hateful jokes, offering instructions for cooking meth, or misbehaving in other ways. A new training technique …
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Donald Trump is an unlikely crypto ally. The power of bitcoin, embodied in Satoshi Nakamoto’s founding document, is that it frees participants from murky assessments of trust, instead relying on the bedrock of proof. Bitcoin is truth. So it was cosmically weird last week to hear the attendees of the …
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In March 2019, TikTok agreed to a US federal court order barring the social media giant from collecting personal information from its youngest users without their parents’ consent. According to a new lawsuit filed by US authorities, TikTok immediately breached that order and now faces penalties of $51,744 per violation …
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In a move likely to raise a few taxpayer eyebrows, Intel said today that it will cut 15 percent of its workforce, or more than 15,000 jobs, as it struggles to rebound from disappointing results. In March, the US government said it would give Intel no less than $8.5 billion …
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One thing that US politicians seem to agree on, despite a great many other differences, is that the country needs to lead technologically to maintain a position of economic and geopolitical preeminence. How to ensure such leadership will be a critical question for the next US president and his or …
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A few weeks ago, a Google search for “deepfake nudes jennifer aniston” brought up at least seven high-up results that purported to have explicit, AI-generated images of the actress. Now they have vanished. Google product manager Emma Higham says that new adjustments to how the company ranks results, which have …
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Amazon failed to adequately alert more than 300,000 customers to serious risks—including death and electrocution—that US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) testing found with more than 400,000 products that third parties sold on its platform. The CPSC unanimously voted to hold Amazon legally responsible for third-party sellers' defective products. Now, …
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When former US president Donald Trump announced a plan to establish a national “bitcoin stockpile” if he is reelected, the crowd at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, Tennessee, erupted into a fit of celebration. The frontrunner in the upcoming election was speaking their language. “For too long, the government …
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Several of the most prominent alt-weekly newspapers in the United States are running search-engine-optimized listicles about porn performers, which appear to be AI-generated, alongside their editorial content. If you pull up the homepage for the Village Voice on your phone, for example, you’ll see reporting from freelancers—longtime columnist Michael Musto …
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The death of the US government's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) is starting to result in disconnection of internet service for Americans with low incomes. On Friday, Charter Communications reported a net loss of 154,000 internet subscribers that it said was mostly driven by customers canceling after losing the federal discount. …
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