Far above your head, constellations of satellites are working constantly to provide the positioning, navigation, and timing systems that quietly run modern life. Known as the global navigation satellite system, or GNSS, signals from these satellites provide the foundation for mobile networks, energy grids, the internet, and GPS. And increasingly, their dependability is under threat….
The Biden administration announced a bold and controversial new export control scheme today, designed to prevent the advanced chips and artificial intelligence models themselves from ending up in the hands of adversaries such as China. The administration’s new “AI Diffusion rule” divides the world into nations that are allowed relatively unfettered access to America’s most…
“Meta has treated the so-called ‘public availability’ of shadow datasets as a get-out-of-jail-free card, notwithstanding that internal Meta records show every relevant decision-maker at Meta, up to and including its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, knew LibGen was ‘a dataset we know to be pirated,’” the plaintiffs allege in this motion. (Originally filed in late 2024, the…
Using a series of prompts six days before he died by suicide outside the main entrance of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, Matthew Livelsberger, a highly decorated US Army Green Beret from Colorado, consulted with an artificial intelligence on the best ways to turn a rented Cybertruck into a four-ton vehicle-borne explosive. According…
Nvidia announced today it’s releasing a family of foundational AI models called Cosmos that can be used to train humanoids, industrial robots, and self-driving cars. While language models learn how to generate text by training on copious amounts of books, articles, and social media posts, Cosmos is designed to generate images and 3D models of…
Recent AI models are surprisingly humanlike in their ability to generate text, audio, and video when prompted. However, so far these algorithms have largely remained relegated to the digital world, rather than the physical, three-dimensional world we live in. In fact, whenever we attempt to apply these models to the real world even the most…
Whether any of them will implement chatbots and agents well or in new and exciting ways is much harder to say. While the addition of AI may have been enough to garner the investment needed to build a device, it may not be enough to get people to actually buy the thing. Chatbots and AI…
Fable, a popular social media app that describes itself as a haven for “bookworms and bingewatchers,” created an AI-powered end-of-year summary feature recapping what books users read in 2024. It was meant to be playful and fun, but some of the recaps took on an oddly combative tone. Writer Danny Groves’ summary for example, asked…
Over the holiday weekend, all but one member of the editorial board of Elsevier’s Journal of Human Evolution (JHE) resigned “with heartfelt sadness and great regret,” according to Retraction Watch, which helpfully provided an online PDF of the editors’ full statement. It’s the 20th mass resignation from a science journal since 2023 over various points…
2024 was another year defined by generative AI, with software features put into the hands of millions of people worldwide and unavoidably built into popular services, like Google Search. While some AI tools, like ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode and Google’s NotebookLM, were delightful to interact with, the prevailing narrative remained on the technology’s inherent flaws,…