Not only did Ma land an official partnership with Beijing’s CDC, the agency later invited him to the 2012 conference where he unexpectedly connected with Li and told the political leader to his face that he ran a website for gay people. Li, widely seen as one of the more liberal members of China’s ruling…
An insurrectionist robot unleashed by a mad inventor in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. HAL 9000 sabotaging a manned mission to Jupiter in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Skynet, the self-aware global defense network that seeks to exterminate humanity throughout the Terminator franchise. Hollywood has never wanted for audacious depictions of artificial intelligence or the ways in which…
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,…