Katie Drummond: Right. Move fast and break things as we’ve been saying a lot at WIRED in the last few months. We’re going to take a short break, when we come back, what you need to read on WIRED today. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I’m Katie Drummond, WIRED’s global editorial director. I’m joined by…
The US government has imposed tariffs of 25 percent on all imports from Mexico and Canada. The measure promoted by Donald Trump threatens the free-trade system that the three countries have maintained for more than 30 years. Even before the confirmation that the tariffs went into effect on March 4, Marcelo Ebrard, head of the…
Mobile World Congress, better known as MWC, is an annual trade show in Barcelona, where many of the major players in mobile get together to unveil new devices, announce services, and make deals. It’s no longer the central hub of all the latest and greatest smartphone announcements as it used to be, but there were…
Budget and staffing cuts at the Food and Drug Administration orchestrated by President Donald Trump could prevent new drugs “from being developed, approved, or commercialized in a timely manner, or at all,” according to dozens of annual reports sent by pharmaceutical companies to the Securities and Exchange Commission in late February. “The Trump Administration has…
It chose a restaurant, but then couldn’t complete the process as the spot it chose required a credit card to confirm a reservation, at which point the user had to take over. You can be flexible in your query—in another example, asking it to book a “highly rated” restaurant meant it would look at reviews…
Because agencies sometimes get bulk or government-specific discounts, it can also be more affordable to buy software licenses on behalf of their private contractors. “It’s a very clear way for agencies to manage costs,” the ex-official says. Every government agency has its own unique structure, including many subagencies or units, each with their own software…
The day the Humane Ai Pin died, it was also reborn. Or at least, there was hope. On February 28, shortly after noon Pacific time, Humane switched off its servers supporting its contentious Ai Pin—essentially bricking a $700 device that was less than a year old. Minutes later, in a Discord voice chatroom with the…
This week on “Uncanny Valley,” our hosts talk about three big stories from February.
GPT-4.5 is here, and OpenAI’s newest generative AI model is bigger and more compute-intensive than ever—it’s supposedly also better at understanding what ChatGPT users mean with their prompts. Users who want to be part of the first wave to try GPT-4.5, labeled as a research preview, will be required to pay for OpenAI’s $200-a-month ChatGPT…
Reinforcement learning is a decades-old way of having a computer learn to do something through experimentation combined with positive or negative feedback. It came to the fore last decade when Google DeepMind showed it could produce algorithms capable of superhuman strategy and gameplay. More recently, AI engineers have used the technique to get large language…