Brian Barrett: This is the first time I’ve thought about contact tracing in many years, and I was so happy not thinking about it for so long, because it is such a complicated process and something that is really hard work to do. Emily, given all of that, what is the level of concern here, … Read more
Are you even? online in 2026 if you haven’t experienced the verbal tics of ChatGPT? It loves goblins, em dashes, and “it’s not A; it’s B” sentence constructions. But what you might not know is that the chatbot also has plenty of strange phrases it loves to say in Chinese, and they are driving Chinese … Read more
As AI increasingly takes over the work of modern programmers, the cybersecurity world has warned that automated coding tools are sure to introduce a new bounty of hackable bugs into software. When those same vibe-coding tools invite anyone to create applications hosted on the web with a click, however, it turns out the security implications … Read more
The California-based reggae The band Stick Figure has been around for 20 years, eight albums, and countless hours on the road, but lead vocalist and guitarist Scott Woodruff has never seen a track take off like “Angels Above Me” did this past week. The six-year-old song hit number one on the iTunes sales charts in … Read more
The complaint sounds familiar. “I’m disappointed that you are working to incorporate AI garbage into the site,” one annoyed person, posting anonymously, said in an online message. “No-one is asking for this—we want you to improve the site, stop charging for new features.” Only, this is not a regular internet user moaning about AI being … Read more
A few months before Elon Musk left OpenAI’s board of directors in February 2018, he tried to recruit Sam Altman to join a “world-class AI lab” within Tesla. Musk went as far as offering the OpenAI CEO a Tesla board seat, according to emails and testimony presented in federal court on Wednesday during the Musk … Read more
Using AI chatbots for even just for 10 minutes may have a shockingly negative impact on people’s ability to think and problem-solve, according to a new study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Oxford, and UCLA. Researchers tasked people with solving various problems, including simple fractions and reading comprehension, through an online platform that paid … Read more
Anthropic just announced a new feature called “dreaming” at the company’s developer conference in San Francisco. It’s part of Anthropic’s recently launched AI agent infrastructure designed to help users manage and deploy tools that automate software processes. This “dreaming” aspect sorts through the transcript of what an agent recently completed and attempts to glean insights … Read more
Hasan Piker spends seven to eight hours a day, seven days a week, streaming on Twitch. The far-left political commentator got his start in 2013 interning for (and sometimes hosting) the Young Turks. More than a decade later, he’s a powerhouse newsfluencer with the number-one channel in Twitch’s Politics and Commentary category. More than 3 … Read more
Apple has agreed to pay $250 million to settle a false advertising class-action lawsuit accusing the company of overhyping its Apple Intelligence features—specifically a promised AI overhaul of Siri that plaintiffs say never materialized and, according to their lawyers, may not arrive for years. The announcement comes just before Apple is supposedly set to finally … Read more