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 return for its investment. The…

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 to Atlanta and began drawing…

Blocked From Selling Off-Brand Ozempic, Telehealth Startups Embrace a Less Effective Drug

After telehealth startups recently lost the ability to sell exact copies of patented GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, some firms have begun turning to a different, less effective medication that has been on the market in the United States since 2010. Often considered a precursor to blockbuster products like Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Eli Lilly’s Zepbound, liraglutide…

Microsoft Cuts Off Access to Bing Search Data as It Shifts Focus to Chatbots

Through the Bing APIs, Microsoft helped other search engines save on the cost and time of crawling billions of web pages and developing a searchable index of all available content. The tools allowed them to automatically submit queries and get back results that they could present to their own users for what had been an…