Facebook is done with news. First, there was a multiday standoff with the Australian government on news payments, followed by the quiet removal of a revenue-sharing News tab from Facebook in the US. And then came an all-out news link ban in Canada. And now, Meta is killing off the …
Read More »These Prisoners Are Training AI
Across a sterile white table in a windowless room, I’m introduced to a woman in her forties. She has a square jaw and blonde hair that has been pulled back from her face with a baby-blue scrunchie. “The girls call me Marmalade,” she says, inviting me to use her prison …
Read More »TikTok Is Spending $1.3 Billion to Dodge Bans in Europe
When Grant Shapps was appointed as the UK’s defense minister this month, one of the first questions he faced was about his social media use. Shapps, previously energy minister, was one of the most prolific users of TikTok in the British government, and military experts and the media wanted to …
Read More »AI Chatbots Are Invading Your Local Government—and Making Everyone Nervous
The United States Environmental Protection Agency blocked its employees from accessing ChatGPT while the US State Department staff in Guinea used it to draft speeches and social media posts. Maine banned its executive branch employees from using generative artificial intelligence for the rest of the year out of concern for …
Read More »Sundar Pichai on Google’s AI, Microsoft’s AI, OpenAI, and … Did We Mention AI?
Earlier this month, Sundar Pichai was struggling to write a letter to Alphabet’s 180,000 employees. The 51-year-old CEO wanted to laud Google on its 25th birthday, which could have been easy enough. Alphabet’s stock market value was around $1.7 trillion. Its vast cloud-computing operation had turned its first profit. Its …
Read More »The US Is Finally Challenging Google's Search Dominance in Court
A family member’s hurried Google search for a last-second visa to visit New Zealand recently caused a headache—and provided a timely reminder of why Google faces a landmark US antitrust trial next week. Tapping on the first link took us off to a website that after a few swipes charged …
Read More »Senators Want ChatGPT-Level AI to Require a Government License
The US government should create a new body to regulate artificial intelligence—and restrict work on language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 to companies granted licenses to do so. That’s the recommendation of a bipartisan duo of senators, Democrat Richard Blumenthal and Republican Josh Hawley, who launched a legislative framework yesterday to …
Read More »Trump Squeezed America's Geek Squad. Biden Built It Back Stronger
Mina Hsiang returned to the United States Digital Service, the US government's rapid digital fix-it squad, on January 26, 2021, when the streets of Washington, DC, had hardly been cleared after Joe Biden’s inauguration. She was one of the group’s founding members but had spent the past few years working …
Read More »Big Batteries Are Booming. So Are Fears They'll Catch Fire
People don’t take electricity for granted in Raquette Lake, New York, in the remote high peaks of the Adirondacks. In winter, when ice and wind often down the power line into the hamlet, the 100 or so year-round residents stay warm by cranking up diesel generators. Prep for the busy …
Read More »The Generative AI Boom Could Fuel a New International Arms Race
Governments around the world are rushing to embrace the algorithms that breathed some semblance of intelligence into ChatGPT, apparently enthralled by the enormous economic payoff expected from the technology. Two new reports out this week show that nation-states are also likely rushing to adapt the same technology into weapons of …
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