One night in May, Mikol Ayala stood in an empty parking lot in Florida with his arms out to his side and legs akimbo as two people covered him in isopropyl alcohol. “Get ready to put me out,” Ayala told them. Then the fireworks began. The scene, illuminated by a …
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OpenAI made the last big breakthrough in artificial intelligence by increasing the size of its models to dizzying proportions, when it introduced GPT-4 last year. The company today announced a new advance that signals a shift in approach—a model that can “reason” logically through many difficult problems and is significantly …
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A new “empathic voice interface” launched today by Hume AI, a New York–based startup, makes it possible to add a range of emotionally expressive voices, plus an emotionally attuned ear, to large language models from Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral, and OpenAI—portending an era when AI helpers may more routinely get …
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On a good day, the stretch of highway from Dallas to Corsicana takes an hour to drive. The route passes gleaming white water towers that stand over single-story towns, cowboy churches, and DW’s Adult Video, a porno pitstop that still—if the billboard can be believed—does a roaring trade in DVDs. …
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It always seemed difficult for the newspaper where I used to work, The Garden Island on the rural Hawaiian island of Kauai, to hire reporters. If someone left, it could take months before we hired a replacement, if we ever did. So, last Thursday, I was happy to see that …
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Data centers powering the generative AI boom are gulping water and exhausting electricity at what some researchers view as an unsustainable pace. Two entrepreneurs who met in high school a few years ago want to overcome that crunch with a fresh experiment: sinking the cloud into the sea. Sam Mendel …
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Apple has been ordered to pay €13 billion ($14.4 billion) of back taxes to the Irish state, in a court ruling that ended a decade-long fight between Europe and the big tech company. In a judgment handed down on Tuesday, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) agreed with a European …
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When Elon Musk shared an image showing Kamala Harris dressed as a “communist dictator” on X last week, it was quite obviously a fake, seeing as Harris is neither a communist nor, to the best of our knowledge, a Soviet cosplayer. And, as many observers noted, the woman in the …
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Apple’s just-announced iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro will likely go down in the books as the “AI” iPhone, the one that’s supposed to power all kinds of new generative artificially intelligent features, and in a very Apple-y way. But some analysts are predicting that these new phones will catalyze …
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In 2015, Elon Musk and Sam Altman cofounded OpenAI based on a seemingly ethical ethos: to develop AI technology that benefits humanity, rather than systems controlled by big-money corporations. Fast-forward a decade that included a spectacular falling out between Musk and Altman, things look very different. Amid legal battles with …
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