Imagine you’re walking your dog. It interacts with the world around you—sniffing some things, relieving itself on others. You walk down the Embarcadero in San Francisco on a bright sunny day, and you see the Ferry Building in the distance as you look out into the bay. Your dog turns to you, looks you in…
A new study from MIT suggests the biggest and most computationally intensive AI models may soon offer diminishing returns compared to smaller models. By mapping scaling laws against continued improvements in model efficiency, the researchers found that it could become harder to wring leaps in performance from giant models whereas efficiency gains could make models…
The GHF was created in early 2025, having emerged from conversations between individuals such as Eisenberg, Tancman, and consultant Yotam HaCohen—who, like Tancman, is a part of COGAT. They were reportedly concerned that Hamas was stealing aid meant for civilians, however, an analysis by a USAID agency found no evidence of this. Through conversations with…
OpenAI has announced a number of projects this year with foreign governments to help build out what it has called their “sovereign AI” systems. The company says the deals, some of which are being coordinated with the US government, are part of a broader push to give national leaders more control over a technology that…
Rollercoaster Tycoon wasn’t the most fashionable computer game out there in 1999. But if you took a look beneath the pixels—the rickety rides, the crowds of hungry, thirsty, barfing people (and the janitors mopping in their wake)—deep down at the level of the code, you saw craftsmanship so obsessive that it bordered on insane. Chris…
In this episode of Uncanny Valley, we talk about one author’s journey to flee the US, social media surveillance, chatbots and the world of AI, and conspiracy theories for an autism cure.
The following sentence might make a globalist cry out for joy: A toy that is manufactured by a Chinese company in Vietnamese factories, designed by a Dutch artist in Belgium, inspired by indie toy culture in Hong Kong, and made viral thanks to a Thai K-pop star, has turned into the biggest Gen-Z cultural trend…
In July, just after receiving an email pitch about the “perfect” AI girlfriend, content creator Harrison Stewart made a TikTok skit using the anti-AI slur “clanker.” Pretending to be a disapproving father, he confronted his daughter’s robot boyfriend in the year 2044. “What’s your name? No it’s not. It’s model number 626 S Series. That’s…
Ever since DeepSeek burst onto the scene in January, momentum has grown around open source Chinese artificial intelligence models. Some researchers are pushing for an even more open approach to building AI that allows model-making to be distributed across the globe. Prime Intellect, a startup specializing in decentralized AI, is currently training a frontier large…
Allan Thygesen, the CEO of Docusign, was not particularly concerned when he saw the news last week that OpenAI had created an internal tool called DocuGPT. He might have preferred that OpenAI choose a different name for its contracting tool. But still, he thought, DocuGPT barely scratched the surface of what Docusign can do. “This…