In the 60’s Years that ELIZA has been influencing computation and culture, conventional accounts portray it as the earliest example of what we now call chatbots, one that could converse as an automated psychologist. The deceptively simple program is known for “fooling” even the secretary who watched MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum create it. That’s how … Read more
“I don’t think an AI model should have that kind of power over people’s lives,” Pegram says. Photograph: Alice Zoo In response to WIRED’s public records requests, Avon and Somerset Police provided a huge trove of performance data for 13 risk models used between 2017 and 2024—including those used to predict missing people, antisocial behavior, … Read more
Weeks later, out of curiosity, I requested the transcripts of everything Sensi was recording in my father’s home. Reading his personal conversations, I suddenly felt like a spy, with the device as my silent conspirator. I’d pushed for the thing in the first place, but now I felt uneasy about it. My father, meanwhile, didn’t … Read more
In the fall of 2025, top executives from Alpha School gathered a group of wealthy New York City parents at a series of information sessions in Lower Manhattan to pitch them on the company’s new campus. The events, some of which were hosted by Alpha cofounder MacKenzie Price and its billionaire principal, Joe Liemandt, were … Read more
With $500 million in funding and a reported $2.5 billion valuation, Flourish wants to reinvent AI by putting real neurons under the microscope. Source link
What my mom lacks in healthy legs, she makes up for in a Claude Pro subscription. Having needled her repeatedly over the past couple years about AI’s environmental, political, and economic implications, I brushed all that aside on a recent Sunday and drove to her house. After a little tibia talk, I opened her computer … Read more
The polar bear video has millions of views. Set to a haunting piano score that’s become ubiquitous on TikTok, it shows a lone bear swimming between increasingly distant ice floe. The comments section overflows with teenage grief, rage, and helplessness. Beside my laptop screen lies the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. Same … Read more
Though things keep changing, some analyzes suggest that women are about 20 percent less likely than men to use generative AI. “It’s a function not of gender per se,” Rodgers suggests, “but of the occupations that women hold.” Women are disproportionately represented in jobs—education, health care, social services—that right now use AI less. The result … 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
Armed with some Python and a white-hot sense of injustice, one medical student spent six months trying to figure out whether an algorithm trashed his job application. Source link