I was entering the miseries of seventh grade in the fall of 1980 when a friend dragged me into a dimly lit second-floor room. The school had recently installed a newfangled Commodore PET computer, a squat and angular box that glowed in the corner. “You gotta try this,” he told …
Read More »People Are Using Memecoins to Bet on the US Election
On July 13, as word spread that a would-be assassin had narrowly missed killing Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a trading frenzy began. Within an hour of the shooting, the price of TRUMP, a cryptocurrency inspired by the former president, had jumped up by more than a …
Read More »Instagram Will Let You Make Custom AI Chatbots—Even Ones Based on Yourself
Meta announced today that it will offer people a tool called AI Studio to build virtual characters with custom personalities, traits, and interests—including ones based on their own personalities. If you're a creator, you'll also be able to have your digital doppelgänger interact with fans in the DMs. “Every creator …
Read More »Major Sites Are Saying No to Apple’s AI Scraping
Less than three months after Apple quietly debuted a tool for publishers to opt out of its AI training, a number of prominent news outlets and social platforms have taken the company up on it. WIRED can confirm that Facebook, Instagram, Craigslist, Tumblr, The New York Times, The Financial Times, …
Read More »Bitcoin Bros Go Wild for Donald Trump
People line up to take their picture next to a cardboard cutout of former President Donald Trump; fist in the air, blood on his face post assassination attempt. Above them a second copy of the cutout rotates atop a tower of bitcoin mining equipment. Superimposed over his clenched hand is …
Read More »Donald Trump Backs ‘Strategic Bitcoin Stockpile’ in Speech to Crypto Faithful
Former president Donald Trump outlined a plan to turbocharge crypto growth and make the US a crypto mining powerhouse in his keynote address to the 2024 Nashville Bitcoin Conference on Saturday. Trump announced that if elected, he would create a strategic bitcoin reserve in the US. “It will be the …
Read More »Steve Jobs Knew the Moment the Future Had Arrived. It's Calling Again
Steve Jobs is 28 years old, and seems a little nervous as he starts his speech to a group of designers gathered under a large tent in Aspen, Colorado. He fiddles with his bow tie and soon removes his suit jacket, dropping it to the floor when he finds no …
Read More »Open Source AI Has Founders—and the FTC—Buzzing
Y Combinator is famed for its Demo Days, where portfolio companies pitch their apps and wares in hopes of growing from a fledgling company into the next Airbnb. But on Thursday, the startup incubator hosted a mélange of founders, venture capitalists, and US policymakers in its airy industrial space in …
Read More »Class Action Lawsuit Alleges T-Mobile Broke Its Lifetime Price Guarantee
Angry T-Mobile customers have filed a class action lawsuit over the carrier's decision to raise prices on plans that were advertised as having a lifetime price guarantee. "Based upon T-Mobile's representations that the rates offered with respect to certain plans were guaranteed to last for life or as long as …
Read More »Google DeepMind’s Game-Playing AI Tackles a Chatbot Blind Spot
Several years before ChatGPT began jibber-jabbering away, Google developed a very different kind of artificial intelligence program called AlphaGo that learned to play the board game Go with superhuman skill through tireless practice. Researchers at the company have now published research that combines the abilities of a large language model …
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