Forgive me for Starting with a cliché, a piece of finance jargon that has recently slipped into the tech lexicon, but I’m afraid I must talk about “moats.” Popularized decades ago by Warren Buffett to refer to a company’s competitive advantage, the word found its way into Silicon Valley pitch decks when a memo purportedly … Read more
People who had previously felt paralyzed by their NDA began to talk. Helena, the conflict-avoidant moderator of the Mercor subreddit, worked overtime deleting furious rants from aggrieved workers who delighted in dropping names of the “secret projects”—something explicitly banned by the non-disclosure agreement every tasker must sign before being hired as an Independent Contractor. Elsewhere, … Read more
Cramming for finals is bad enough without the platform you use to do your schoolwork suddenly shutting down. Unfortunately for countless students across the US, that’s exactly what they faced on Thursday after Canvas went into “maintenance mode” following a ransomware attack on education tech firm Instructure. Hackers using the name ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for … Read more
Billionaire California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer is rolling out a new proposal that would guarantee jobs with benefits for workers displaced by artificial intelligence. He’s the first state-wide candidate to make such a pledge. The plan, which builds on a broader AI policy framework Steyer released in Marchpromises to make California “the first major economy … Read more
Philosopher Nick Bostrom recently posted a paperwhere he postulated that a small chance of AI annihilating all humans might be worth the risk, because advanced AI might relieve humanity of “its universal death sentence.” That upbeat gamble is quite a leap from his previous dark musings on AI, which made him a doomer godfather. His … Read more
The main antagonist of Toy Story 5in theaters this summer, is a green, frog-shaped kids’ tablet named Lilypad, a genius new villain for the beloved Pixar franchise. But if Pixar had its ear to the ground, it might have used an AI kids’ toy instead. AI toys are seemingly everywhere, marketed online as friendly companions … Read more
OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft, its longtime investor and cloud partner, has grown increasingly complicated over the years as the ChatGPT-maker has grown into a behemoth competitor. But Microsoft executives had reservations about sending additional funding to OpenAI as far back as 2018 when it was just a small nonprofit research lab, according to emails between … Read more
If you use Google’s Chrome browser for desktop, there’s probably a Gemini Nano AI model running on your computer right now and taking up about 4 GB of space. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but if you didn’t know about it and don’t want it, there’s a way to turn it off. The file … Read more
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