Philosopher Nick Bostrom is surprisingly cheerful for someone who has spent so much time worrying about ways that humanity might destroy itself. In photographs he often looks deadly serious, perhaps appropriately haunted by the existential dangers roaming around his brain. When we talk over Zoom, he looks relaxed and is …
Read More »
Jerome Pesenti has a few reasons to celebrate Meta’s decision last week to release Llama 3, a powerful open source large language model that anyone can download, run, and build on. Pesenti used to be vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta and says he often pushed the company to …
Read More »
It seems as though we’ve arrived at the moment in the AI hype cycle where no idea is too bonkers to launch. This week’s eyebrow-raising AI project is a new twist on the romantic chatbot—a mobile app called AngryGF, which offers its users the uniquely unpleasant experience of getting yelled …
Read More »
Forget artificial intelligence breaking free of human control and taking over the world. A far more pressing concern is how today’s generative AI tools will transform the labor market. Some experts envisage a world of increased productivity and job satisfaction; others, a landscape of mass unemployment and social upheaval. Someone …
Read More »
Most artificial intelligence experts seem to agree that taking the next big leap in the field will depend at least partly on building supercomputers on a once unimaginable scale. At an event hosted by the venture capital firm Sequoia last month, the CEO of a startup called Lightmatter pitched a …
Read More »
Electrical engineer Gilbert Herrera was appointed research director of the US National Security Agency in late 2021, just as an AI revolution was brewing inside the US tech industry. The NSA, sometimes jokingly said to stand for No Such Agency, has long hired top math and computer science talent. Its …
Read More »
This week a startup called Cognition AI caused a bit of a stir by releasing a demo showing an artificial intelligence program called Devin performing work usually done by well-paid software engineers. Chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini can generate code, but Devin went further, planning how to solve a problem, …
Read More »
Elon Musk last week sued two of his OpenAI cofounders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, accusing them of “flagrant breaches” of the trio’s original agreement that the company would develop artificial intelligence openly and without chasing profits. Late on Tuesday, OpenAI released partially redacted emails between Musk, Altman, Brockman, and …
Read More »
Google was forced to turn off the image-generation capabilities of its latest AI model, Gemini, last week after complaints that it defaulted to depicting women and people of color when asked to create images of historical figures that were generally white and male, including vikings, popes, and German soldiers. The …
Read More »
When veteran engineer and executive Pat Gelsinger returned to Intel as CEO in 2021, the once-great chipmaker was in a slump. After failing to adapt to the mobile era and then missing several steps in cutting-edge microprocessor manufacturing, it was now also falling behind in supplying chips to feed the …
Read More »