The European Union today agreed on the details of the AI Act, a far-reaching set of rules for the people building and using artificial intelligence. It’s a milestone law that, lawmakers hope, will create a blueprint for the rest of the world. After months of debate about how to regulate …
Read More »Google’s NotebookLM Aims to Be the Ultimate Writing Assistant
Steven Johnson has written 13 books, on topics ranging from a London cholera outbreak to the value of video games. He’s been a television presenter and a podcast host. He’s a keynote speaker who doesn’t have to call himself that in his LinkedIn profile. And for over a year now, …
Read More »Can Rock Dust Soak Up Carbon Emissions? A Giant Experiment Is Set to Find Out
Mary Yap has spent the last year and a half trying to get farmers to fall in love with basalt. The volcanic rock is chock full of nutrients, captured as its crystal structure forms from cooling magma, and can make soil less acidic. In that way it’s like limestone, which …
Read More »The Generative AI Copyright Fight Is Just Getting Started
The biggest fight of the generative AI revolution is headed to the courtroom—and no, it’s not about the latest boardroom drama at OpenAI. Book authors, artists, and coders are challenging the practice of teaching AI models to replicate their skills using their own work as a training manual. The debate …
Read More »Why It Took Meta 7 Years to Turn on End-to-End Encryption for All Chats
Since 2016, the social behemoth now known as Meta has been working to deploy end-to-end encryption in its communication apps. CEO Mark Zuckerberg even promised in 2019 that the data privacy protection would roll out by default across all of the company's chat apps. In practice, though, it was a …
Read More »OpenAI Cofounder Reid Hoffman Gives Sam Altman a Vote of Confidence
OpenAI cofounder Reid Hoffman says the company is better off with Sam Altman restored as CEO, and he was shocked that board members he used to serve alongside would think otherwise. Hoffman, who left OpenAI’s board in March after cofounding the competitor Inflection AI, offered his first comments on the …
Read More »Google’s Gemini Is the Real Start of the Generative AI Boom
The history of artificial intelligence has been punctuated by periods of so-called “AI winter,” when the technology seemed to meet a dead end and funding dried up. Each one has been accompanied by proclamations that making machines truly intelligent is just too darned hard for humans to figure out. Google’s …
Read More »The Binance Crackdown Will Be an 'Unprecedented' Bonanza for Crypto Surveillance
One attraction of Binance, as the company grew from its 2017 founding into the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, was the firm's freewheeling flouting of rules. As it amassed well over 100 million crypto-trading users globally, it openly told the United States government that, as an offshore operation, it …
Read More »Women Buy More Cars, So Why Are the Designs So Macho?
It is very hard to think of an automotive design in recent memory so testosterone-fueled, so overtly male as Tesla’s Cybertruck. British car designer Adrian Clarke has described the EV’s styling as a “low polygon joke,” one “that only exists in the fever dreams of Tesla fans.” Indeed, on the …
Read More »How to Use Google’s Gemini AI Right Now in Its Bard Chatbot
Google just launched its Gemini AI model. Want to try it out for free? A version of the model, called Gemini Pro, is available inside of the Bard chatbot right now. Also, anyone with a Pixel 8 Pro can use a version of Gemini in their AI-suggested text replies with …
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