Mistral AI has released a new family of AI models that it claims will clear the path to seamless conversation between people speaking different languages. On Wednesday, the Paris-based AI lab released two new speech-to-text models: Voxtral Mini Transcribe V2 and Voxtral Realtime. The former is built to transcribe audio files in large batches and…
Peter Thiel—the billionaire venture capitalist, PayPal, and Palantir cofounder, and outspoken commentator on all matters relating to the “Antichrist”—appears at least 2,200 times in the latest batch of files released by the Department of Justice related to convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. The tranche of records demonstrate how Epstein managed to cultivate…
Jonathan Nolan saw this coming. As a screenwriter, he’s worked on several of his brother Christopher Nolan’s films, from Interstellar to the Dark Knight movies. Partnered with his wife Lisa Joy, he created HBO’s Westworld and executive produced Amazon Prime’s Fallout. But before that, he cut his TV teeth creating Person of Interest, a CBS…
It was November 12, 2016, four days after Donald Trump won his first presidential election. Aside from a few outliers (looking at you, Peter Thiel), almost everyone in the tech world was shocked and appalled. At a conference I attended that Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it was “a pretty crazy idea” to think…
As the standoff between the United States government and Minnesota continues this week over immigration enforcement operations that have essentially occupied the Twin Cities and other parts of the state, a federal judge delayed a decision this week and ordered a new briefing on whether the Department of Homeland Security is using armed raids to…
The first Trump administration, and the tech industry that stood up to it, are both looking quainter by the day. Here’s one example: In 2017, when President Trump issued a series of executive orders instituting a travel ban on foreigners from certain countries (predominantly Muslim-majority ones), people from across the United States vigorously protested the…
Brian Barrett: And also the kind of thing that people readily click through and don’t realize is happening, right? TikTok also now tracking data. Anything you put into any of its AI tools, if you put in a prompt or any kind of info you give it there, it’s going to track that data, it’s…
Dan Peguine, a tech entrepreneur and marketing consultant based in Lisbon, lets a precocious, lobster-themed AI assistant called Moltbot run much of his life. Peguine, a self-professed early adopter and trendspotter, discovered Moltbot several weeks ago—back then it was Clawdbot—after discussing a vibe-coding side project with friends on WhatsApp. He installed it on his computer,…
Data centers have caused the demand for gas-fired power in the US to explode over the past two years, according to new research released Wednesday. More than a third of this new demand, the research found, is explicitly linked to gas projects that will power data centers—the equivalent of energy that would power tens of…
On cue, the room fell silent. A man seated to my left at a long wooden table began to scratch at a piece of paper with a coloring pencil. To my right, another guy picked up a book. Across the way, someone buried themselves in a puzzle. We had gathered to take part in an…