The first wave of major generative AI tools largely were trained on “publicly available” data—basically, anything and everything that could be scraped from the internet. Now, sources of training data are increasingly restricting access and pushing for licensing agreements. With the hunt for additional data sources intensifying, new licensing startups …
Read More »Can GPT-4o Be Trusted With Your Private Data?
On May 13, OpenAI unveiled a new GPT-4o AI model to power its ChatGPT chatbot. The newest version is wildly capable and much more humanlike, with the ability to solve equations, tell bedtime stories, and claims to identify emotions from facial expressions. OpenAI has made a big deal about wanting …
Read More »Major Sites Are Saying No to Apple’s AI Scraping
Less than three months after Apple quietly debuted a tool for publishers to opt out of its AI training, a number of prominent news outlets and social platforms have taken the company up on it. WIRED can confirm that Facebook, Instagram, Craigslist, Tumblr, The New York Times, The Financial Times, …
Read More »A Former Google Engineer Built a Search Engine for Finding Every Privacy Violation You Face Online
“It’s not a level playing field,” says Tim Libert, becoming animated as he shifts in his seat in his sparse home office in Sunnyvale, glancing between hulking monitors and clicking around on his desktop. “In fact it’s the furthest fucking thing from a level playing field.” The thing that is …
Read More »How to Use an eSIM for International Travel
An international vacation is a nice opportunity to cut down on your excessive smartphone screen time and be present to soak up all those adventures. (Don’t let life pass you by!) But even if you’re spending less time doomscrolling and more time exploring a new city, you’ll probably still want …
Read More »AI's Energy Demands Are Out of Control. Welcome to the Internet's Hyper-Consumption Era
Right now, generative artificial intelligence is impossible to ignore online. An AI-generated summary may randomly appear at the top of the results whenever you do a Google search. Or you might be prompted to try Meta’s AI tool while browsing Facebook. And that ever-present sparkle emoji continues to haunt my …
Read More »Britain’s Brewing Battle Over Data Centers
As mayor of Newham, Rokhsana Fiaz has plenty of problems to reckon with. Her London borough is wrestling with entrenched poverty and the capital's highest rate of residents stuck in temporary housing. But midway through her second term, Fiaz has a new plan to turn things around. She believes that …
Read More »The Big-Tech Clean Energy Crunch Is Here
Big Tech’s appetite for energy is just about visible from the east coast of Scotland. Some 12 miles out to sea sits a wind farm, where each of the 60 giant turbines has blades roughly the length of an American football field. The utility companies behind the Moray West project …
Read More »How a Scrappy Cryptominer Transformed Into the Multibillion-Dollar Backbone of the AI Boom
Brian Venturo and a couple of fellow hedge fund buddies bought their first GPUs as part of an elaborate joke. It was late 2016, and for the fun of playing with something volatile that could be either trash or treasure, they had been staking their pool and fantasy football games …
Read More »A Breakthrough Online Privacy Proposal Hits Congress
Congress may be closer than ever to passing a comprehensive data privacy framework after key House and Senate committee leaders released a new proposal on Sunday. The bipartisan proposal, titled the American Privacy Rights Act, or APRA, would limit the types of consumer data that companies can collect, retain, and …
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