A fresh wave of anxiety about children and technology is cresting, with parents and pundits increasingly interrogating how kids use smartphones, social media, and screens. It hasn’t stopped teenagers from embracing generative AI. New research reveals what AI tools teenagers in the United States are using, and how often—as well …
Read More »I Stared Into the AI Void With the SocialAI App
The first time I used SocialAI, I was sure the app was performance art. That was the only logical explanation for why I would willingly sign up to have AI bots named Blaze Fury and Trollington Nefarious, well, troll me. Even the app’s creator, Michael Sayman, admits that the premise …
Read More »The Trumps Have Gone Full Crypto With World Liberty Financial
Eric and Donald Trump Jr., the sons of former president Donald Trump, have pledged to “make finance great again” with a new family-run crypto endeavor called World Liberty Financial. In a meandering livestream on X on Monday, the Trump family and their associates described World Liberty Financial as a crypto …
Read More »OpenAI Threatens to Ban Users Who Probe Its ‘Strawberry’ AI Models
OpenAI truly does not want you to know what its latest AI model is “thinking.” Since the company launched its “Strawberry” AI model family last week, touting so-called reasoning abilities with o1-preview and o1-mini, OpenAI has been sending out warning emails and threats of bans to any user who tries …
Read More »OpenAI Messed With the Wrong Mega-Popular Parenting Forum
Think of any topic vaguely related to raising kids imaginable, and there’s probably a post about it on Mumsnet, the long-running, enormously popular, controversy-spurring UK-based parenting forum for mothers. Over its more than two decade-long history, Mumsnet has amassed an archive of more than six billion words written by its …
Read More »AI Has Helped Shein Become Fast Fashion’s Biggest Polluter
This story originally appeared in Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In 2023, the fast-fashion giant Shein was everywhere. Crisscrossing the globe, airplanes ferried small packages of its ultra-cheap clothing from thousands of suppliers to tens of millions of customer mailboxes in 150 countries. Influencers’ “#sheinhaul” videos …
Read More »The Godmother of AI Wants Everyone to Be a World Builder
According to market-fixated tech pundits and professional skeptics, the artificial intelligence bubble has popped, and winter’s back. Fei-Fei Li isn’t buying that. In fact, Li—who earned the sobriquet the “godmother of AI”—is betting on the contrary. She’s on a part-time leave from Stanford University to cofound a company called World …
Read More »Yes, You Can Now Bet on Elections in the US
A federal judge has cleared the way for betting on election results in the US for the first time in the modern era, overturning a prohibition imposed on gambling companies by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, a financial regulator. In November, the CFTC was sued in the District of Columbia …
Read More »Amazon’s Shipping and Delivery Emissions Just Keep Going Up
Five years ago, in a splashy speech in Washington, DC, Jeff Bezos rolled out Amazon’s Climate Pledge, a series of commitments to show that the company was serious about addressing climate change. A core component of that pledge, one that Bezos touted in front of members of Congress during Amazon’s …
Read More »After Shark Tank, Mark Cuban Just Wants to Break Shit—Especially the Prescription Drug Industry
Mark Cuban was confident he wouldn’t be recognized in Boston Common. This was early June, and it happened to be the day of the Boston Dyke March, billed as an “anti-capitalist intersectional gender liberation” event. Earlier that day, outside of his hotel, people had bum-rushed the billionaire, angling for an …
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