In late April a video ad for a new AI company went viral on X. A person stands before a billboard in San Francisco, smartphone extended, calls the phone number on display, and has a short call with an incredibly human-sounding bot. The text on the billboard reads: “Still hiring …
Read More »Inside a Violent Gang's Ruthless Crypto-Stealing Home Invasion Spree
Cryptocurrency has always made a ripe target for theft—and not just hacking, but the old-fashioned, up-close-and-personal kind, too. Given that it can be irreversibly transferred in seconds with little more than a password, it's perhaps no surprise that thieves have occasionally sought to steal crypto in home-invasion burglaries and even …
Read More »French AI Startups Felt Unstoppable. Then Came the Election
French president Emmanuel Macron has spent years dreaming aloud of a homegrown artificial intelligence giant. The AI disruption is coming, he told WIRED in 2018, and “I want to be part of it.” After that interview, he campaigned hard to turn France into a startup nation, home to the kind …
Read More »He Helped Invent Generative AI. Now He Wants to Save It
In 2016, Google engineer Illia Polosukhin had lunch with a colleague, Jacob Uszkoreit. Polosukhin had been frustrated by a lack of progress in his project, using AI to provide useful answers to questions posed by users, and Uszkoreit suggested he try a technique he had been brainstorming that he called …
Read More »Deepfakes Are Evolving. This Company Wants to Catch Them All
Some Fortune 500 companies have begun testing software that can spot a deepfake of a real person in a live video call, following a spate of scams involving fraudulent job seekers who take a signing bonus and run. The detection technology comes courtesy of GetReal Labs, a new company founded …
Read More »Amazon Is Investigating Perplexity Over Claims of Scraping Abuse
Amazon’s cloud division has launched an investigation into Perplexity AI. At issue is whether the AI search startup is violating Amazon Web Services rules by scraping websites that attempted to prevent it from doing so, WIRED has learned. AWS spokesperson Patrick Neighorn confirmed the company's investigation of Perplexity following a …
Read More »OpenAI Wants AI to Help Humans Train AI
One of the key ingredients that made ChatGPT a ripsnorting success was an army of human trainers who gave the artificial intelligence model behind the bot guidance on what constitutes good and bad outputs. OpenAI now says that adding even more AI into the mix—to help assist human trainers—could help …
Read More »Rimac’s Super-Sleek Robotaxi Has More Room Than a Rolls-Royce
The Rimac Group describes Verne, its new autonomous ride-hailing service, as its “next impossible thing.” First, founder Mate Rimac established his eponymous electric hypercar company in Croatia, a country with no history of carmaking. That went well. Porsche, Hyundai, and Softbank all took stakes. The Volkswagen Group gifted him a majority …
Read More »Welcome to WIRED Travel
Hello, and welcome to WIRED Travel, WIRED’s new destination for coverage of all things transportation, aviation, vacation, and more. Of course, innovations in travel technology, from next-generation electric vehicles to fuel-sipping, climate-friendly aircraft, are all mainstays of WIRED’s coverage already. But we’re excited to pull it all together in one …
Read More »Activists Disrupt Amazon Conference Over $1.2 Billion Contract With Israel
A group of six activists disrupted the Amazon Web Services Summit in Washington, DC, on Wednesday to protest Project Nimbus, Amazon and Google’s $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government. The protest, which interrupted the keynote speech from Dave Levy, AWS worldwide public sector vice president, is the …
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