Politico became one of the first newsrooms last year to win a union contract that included rules on how the media outlet can deploy artificial intelligence. The PEN Guild, which represents Politico and its sister publication, environment and energy site E&E News, is now gearing up for another first. The …
Read More »Business
Who’s to Blame When AI Agents Screw Up?
Over the past year, veteran software engineer Jay Prakash Thakur has spent his nights and weekends prototyping AI agents that could, in the near future, order meals and engineer mobile apps almost entirely on their own. His agents, while surprisingly capable, have also exposed new legal questions that await companies …
Read More »The Epic Rise and Fall of a Dark-Web Psychedelics Kingpin
In fact, agents were still there, in his cousin’s home, listening in on the call, which she had made at their instruction. Akasha told his cousin not to talk to the cops—not knowing she already had—and promised to pay for her lawyer. He advised her to delete every communication they …
Read More »Esoteric Programming Languages Are Fun—Until They Kill the Joke
Some programming languages helped send humans to the moon, some are cooking up new leukemia drugs, and some exist just to fuck with you. Brainfuck is a minimalist “esoteric language,” or “esolang,” made up of just eight non-alphabetic characters. Esolangs are experimental, jokey, and intentionally hard-to-use languages created to push …
Read More »OpenAI’s Big Bet That Jony Ive Can Make AI Hardware Work
OpenAI has fully acquired Io, a joint venture it cocreated last year with Jony Ive, the famed British designer behind the sleek industrial aesthetic that defined the iPhone and more than two decades of Apple products. In a nearly 10-minute video posted to X on Wednesday, Ive and OpenAI CEO …
Read More »Jack Dorsey’s Block Made an AI Agent to Boost Its Own Productivity
At a company-wide hackathon this month, developers at finance firm Block built a dizzying number of prototype tools including a database debugger, a program for identifying duplicated code, and an app that automates Bitcoin support. The sudden productivity boost was driven by Goose, an artificial intelligence agent developed by Block …
Read More »The Time Sam Altman Asked for a Countersurveillance Audit of OpenAI
Dario Amodei’s AI safety contingent was growing disquieted with some of Sam Altman’s behaviors. Shortly after OpenAI’s Microsoft deal was inked in 2019, several of them were stunned to discover the extent of the promises that Altman had made to Microsoft for which technologies it would get access to in …
Read More »Google’s AI Boss Says Gemini’s New Abilities Point the Way to AGI
Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, says that reaching artificial general intelligence or AGI—a fuzzy term typically used to describe machines with human-like cleverness—will mean honing some of the nascent abilities found in Google’s flagship Gemini models. Google announced a slew of AI upgrades and new products at its annual …
Read More »How Peter Thiel’s Relationship With Eliezer Yudkowsky Launched the AI Revolution
Two members of the Extropian community, internet entrepreneurs Brian and Sabine Atkins—who met on an Extropian mailing list in 1998 and were married soon after—were so taken by this message that in 2000 they bankrolled a think tank for Yudkowsky, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. At 21, Yudkowsky moved …
Read More »What to Expect When You’re Convicted
From Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud-ridden crypto empire to Elizabeth Holmes’ sham biotech company to deepfakers on the internet bilking grandmas of their retirement savings, white-collar crime seems to touch every last corner of tech. For the business titan who may one day end up in custody and can’t count on a …
Read More »