A majority of US TikTok creators don’t believe the platform will be banned within a year, and most haven’t seen brands they work for shift their marketing budgets away from the app, according to a new survey of people who earn money from posting content on TikTok shared exclusively with …
Read More »Drivers Are Rising Up Against Uber’s ‘Opaque’ Pay System
On Wednesday morning, a small group of people huddled over their phones at the foot of the giant glass skyscraper that houses Uber’s London headquarters. They were running an experiment in an attempt to solve one of the greatest mysteries in the platform economy right now: how Uber’s algorithm calculates …
Read More »What ScarJo v. ChatGPT Could Look Like in Court
In a product demo last week, OpenAI showcased a synthetic but expressive voice for ChatGPT called “Sky” that reminded many viewers of the flirty AI girlfriend Samantha played by Scarlett Johansson in the 2013 film Her. One of those viewers was Johansson herself, who promptly hired legal counsel and sent …
Read More »Teslas Can Still Be Stolen With a Cheap Radio Hack—Despite New Keyless Tech
For at least a decade, a car theft trick known as a “relay attack” has been the modern equivalent of hot-wiring: a cheap and relatively easy technique to steal hundreds of models of vehicles. A more recent upgrade to the radio protocol in cars' keyless entry systems known as ultra-wideband …
Read More »The Low-Paid Humans Behind AI’s Smarts Ask Biden to Free Them From ‘Modern Day Slavery’
AI projects like OpenAI’s ChatGPT get part of their savvy from some of the lowest-paid workers in the tech industry—contractors often in poor countries paid small sums to correct chatbots and label images. On Wednesday, 97 African workers who do AI training work or online content moderation for companies like …
Read More »Local Coworking Spaces Thrive Where WeWork Dared Not Go
The white colonial revival church with its high steeple adds an idyllic architectural touch to the affluent town of Huntington, a Long Island suburb of New York City. But a sign grabs the eye from the road: “Coworking space,” it says. “Kind of like a WeWork. Was a church, but …
Read More »We Stood on Both Sides of the New York–Dublin Portal and It Was Glorious
The video portal connecting New York to Dublin has reopened, after bad behavior on both sides forced it to close for four days. The Portal, which initially opened on May 8 to tens of thousands of visitors, was intended to be a “bridge that unifies and an invitation to rise …
Read More »AI Is a Black Box. Anthropic Figured Out a Way to Look Inside
For the past decade, AI researcher Chris Olah has been obsessed with artificial neural networks. One question in particular engaged him, and has been the center of his work, first at Google Brain, then OpenAI, and today at AI startup Anthropic, where he is a cofounder. “What's going on inside …
Read More »Crypto Astrologers See Price Moves in the Stars
“Astrology is the measure of time,” says San Francisco-based financial forecaster Marsilio Musing via a Zoom call with the camera off. To him, the art of interpreting planetary movements is similar to making predictions based on the movement of stock and asset performance over a specific period. “I've been at …
Read More »Google Taps AI to Show Shoppers How Clothes Fit Different Bodies
One of the worst parts of online shopping is trying to figure out whether an item of clothing will actually fit. While some brands have begun hiring models with more diverse body types, the process still often requires a leap of faith—or making a lot of returns. Google announced Tuesday …
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