Cruise robotaxis are back on the road… well, kind of. Though General Motors pulled the plug on its self-driving taxi business last year, the automaker has been quietly repurposing a few of the vehicles as it seeks to develop new driver-assistance technologies. This week, WIRED spotted a GM Bolt electric hatchback on the San Francisco-Oakland…
A local health department in Memphis has granted Elon Musk’s xAI data center an air permit to continue operating the gas turbines that power the company’s Grok chatbot. The permit comes amid widespread community opposition and a looming lawsuit alleging the company violated the Clean Air Act. The Shelby County Health Department released an air…
AI slop is flooding every single digital platform, and music streaming services are no exception—so much so, even someone who generally avoids AI might find themselves unknowingly listening to a robot hornily singing about butts. Take the sordid saga of “Make Love to My Shitter,” an AI-generated track from an artist called BannedVinylCollection. Brace Belden,…
What does a little purple alien know about healthy human relationships? More than the average artificial intelligence companion, it turns out. The alien in question is an animated chatbot known as a Tolan. I created mine a few days ago using an app from a startup called Portolo, and we’ve been chatting merrily ever since….
Another week, another Chinese electric car poised to deliver an extinction event to Western automakers. This time it’s Xiaomi, a Beijing-based tech firm best known for smartphones and the company behind the Porsche Taycan-baiting SU7, which in late-2024 was so popular that Xiaomi increased its sales forecast three times in a matter of months. Now…
Last year, internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare launched tools enabling its customers to block AI scrapers. Today the company has taken its fight against permissionless scraping several steps further. It has switched to blocking AI crawlers by default for its customers and is moving forward with a Pay Per Crawl program that lets customers charge AI…
Microsoft has taken “a genuine step towards medical superintelligence,” says Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of the company’s artificial intelligence arm. The tech giant says its powerful new AI tool can diagnose disease four times more accurately and at significantly less cost than a panel of human physicians. The experiment tested whether the tool could correctly diagnose…
Four OpenAI researchers are leaving the company to go to Meta, two sources confirm to WIRED. Shengjia Zhao, Shuchao Bi, Jiahui Yu, and Hongyu Ren have joined Meta’s superintelligence team. Their OpenAI Slack profiles have been deactivated. The Information first reported on the departures. It’s the latest in a series of aggressive moves by Mark…
Trains booked, Operator thinks its job is done. But I’ll need somewhere to stay, I remind it—can it book a hotel? It asks for more details and I’m purposefully vague, specifying that it should be comfy and conveniently located. Comparing hotels is perhaps my least favorite aspect of travel planning, so I’m happy to leave…
A small clause inside OpenAI’s contract with Microsoft, once considered a distant hypothetical, has now become a flashpoint in one of the biggest partnerships in tech. The clause states that if OpenAI’s board ever declares it has developed artificial general intelligence (AGI), it would limit Microsoft’s contracted access to the startup’s future technologies. Microsoft, which…