The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Large language models work well because they’re so large. The latest models from OpenAI, Meta, and DeepSeek use hundreds of billions of “parameters”—the adjustable knobs that determine connections among data and get tweaked during the training process. With more parameters, the models are better able…
Palantir, the software company cofounded by Peter Thiel, is part of an effort by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to build a new “mega API” for accessing Internal Revenue Service records, IRS sources tell WIRED. For the past three days, DOGE and a handful of Palantir representatives, along with dozens of career…
At the same time, the risk is immediate and present with agents. When models are not just contained boxes but can take actions in the world, when they have end-effectors that let them manipulate the world, I think it really becomes much more of a problem. We are making progress here, developing much better [defensive]…
Silicon Valley let out a sigh of relief on Wednesday when it learned that President Donald Trump’s tariff bonanza included an exemption for semiconductors, which, at least for now, won’t be subject to higher import duties. But just three days later, some US tech companies may be finding that the loophole actually creates more problems…
Executives at artificial intelligence companies may like to tell us that AGI is almost here, but the latest models still need some additional tutoring to help them be as clever as they can. Scale AI, a company that’s played a key role in helping frontier AI firms build advanced models, has developed a platform that…
Libertarians often take these mechanisms for granted and refuse to consider where they come from. For example, you have electricity and drinking water in your home. When you go to the bathroom and flush the water, the sewage goes into a huge sewage system. That system is created and maintained by the state. But in…
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI has acquired his social media platform X in an all-stock transaction that values the company at $33 billion, including $12 billion worth of debt, the centibillionaire announced Friday. The sale comes just weeks after Musk reportedly raised an additional roughly $1 billion in debt financing for X that valued…
If we all start opting out of our posts being used for training models, doesn’t that reduce the influence of our unique voice and perspectives on those models? Increasingly, the models will be everyone’s primary window into the rest of the world. It seems like the people who care the least about these things will…
“This signal on the oscilloscope may seem simple at first glance, but it demonstrates a key building block for our platform, representing the birth of the world’s first scalable, mass-manufacturable, and energy-efficient probabilistic computing platform,” says Guillaume Verdon, CEO of Extropic and the man behind the wildly popular, provocative, and sometimes controversial online persona Based…
Databricks, a company that helps big businesses build custom artificial intelligence models, has developed a machine-learning trick that can boost the performance of an AI model without the need for clean labeled data. Jonathan Frankle, chief AI scientist at Databricks, spent the past year talking to customers about the key challenges they face in getting…