Zoë Schiffer: Deviants and freaks, the new name of our podcast. And this is, I mean, just going back to red teaming, that’s work that a trust and safety team typically does. And those teams— Leah Feiger: We don’t have those anymore. Zoë Schiffer: They’re not as big as they used to be. There’s just … Read more
As public backlash to the seeming omnipresence of artificial intelligence intensifies, the collective quest to weed out—and reject—the telltale signs of its use continues. One of the first casualties, to my dismay, was em dashes—which are a great, and very human form of punctuation, by the way! There’s also the “rule of threes,” which is … Read more
If you were to ding Apple’s privacy credentials in one move, you could do worse than to launch AirPods with cameras. Whether or not they come to market, all of Apple’s existing ubiquitous earbuds would become a question mark for everyone in their vicinity: Are they recording me right now? According to Bloomberg’s well-sourced Mark … Read more
You went down the coding agent rabbit hole last November along with everyone else? It was an intense time for the nerds. I spent a lot of time talking to coding agents during that holiday. And it’s been an absolute rocket ship of a ride since then. Claude Code seems to have gotten the thunder … Read more
Meta has been quietly stashing dormant face recognition code on more than 50 million phones, WIRED reported this week, tucked inside the companion app that pairs with its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. If activated, the feature—known internally as NameTag—would let wearers identify people in front of them by matching captured faces against a biometric … Read more
These potato-salad-slinging AI chefs aren’t taking anyone’s jobs. Not yet, anyway. They’re just here as volunteers. Project Open Handa nonprofit founded in 1985 by local grandmother and HIV-awareness advocate Ruth Brinkerprepares and packages meals to meet the diverse nutritional requirements of people who need them. The effort began in response to the AIDS crisis, but … Read more
It’s been 17 years since I sat in on the iconic weekly search quality meeting in the Ouagadougou conference room at Google’s Mountain View campus. That Thursday morning, around three dozen engineers, product managers, and executives sat at a table or sprawled on the floor to discuss why certain search queries or categories didn’t yield … Read more
The Gulf’s AI The ambitions depend on something surprisingly fragile: a handful of undersea cables running through some of the world’s most volatile waterways. Countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE have spent billions building AI infrastructure, attracting hyperscalers and positioning themselves as future exporters of compute capacity. But as the region shifts from oil … Read more
Three months ago, OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman told me his concerns about a mounting public relations crisis facing artificial intelligence companies: Despite the popularity of tools like ChatGPT, an increasingly large share of the population said they viewed AI negatively. Since then, the backlash has only intensified. College commencement speakers are now getting booed for … Read more
Leah FeigerYes, definitely. Brian Barrett: Delightful. OpenClaw, a little agent that can just run autonomously, has access to all your stuff. Gemini Spark is Google’s answer to OpenClaw. It’s the same sort of autonomous assistant that can do all the things, but because it’s Google, it has access to everything that you do on Google … Read more