The current balance in the LOCCS system, according to a record reviewed by WIRED, is over $100 billion—money Congress has approved for HUD projects but which has yet to be drawn down. Much of this money has been earmarked to cover disaster assistance and community development work, a source at the agency says. Normally, those…
While working on internet-of-things security in the mid-2010s, Alex Zenla realized something troubling. Unlike PCs and servers that touted the latest, greatest processors, the puny chips in IoT devices couldn’t support the cloud protections other computers were using to keep them siloed and protected. As a result, most embedded devices were attached directly to the…
The difference between a conventional model and a reasoning one is similar to the two types of thinking described by the Nobel-prize-winning economist Michael Kahneman in his 2011 book Thinking Fast and Slow: fast and instinctive System-1 thinking and slower more deliberative System-2 thinking. The kind of model that made ChatGPT possible, known as a…
Strictly speaking, God’s Eye is the camera, ultrasonic radar, and lidar array alone, split into A, B, and C variants, with A being best. The system’s operating software is known as DiPilot, introduced in 2020 on the BYD Han, and now with the good, better, and best tiers of DiPilot 100, 300, and 600. God’s…
Elon Musk is once again leaving his fingerprints on official communications from the federal government. In an email to staff Saturday afternoon, the Office of Personnel Management, which is stacked with Musk loyalists, told employees to send five bullet points detailing what they accomplished last week and cc their manager. “Failure to respond will be…
The story of the infamous Humane Ai Pin is coming to an end. This week, the company announced that HP—known for its computers and printers that always seem to need a refill—will acquire several assets from Humane in a $116 million deal expected to close at the end of the month. HP will get more…
There is some precedent for corporate executives to simultaneously work in the US government. When the US was at war in the early 1900s, the federal government recruited business leaders to fill key posts. They retained their private sector jobs and wages; the government pitched in a $1 annual salary to the executives who became…
Sitting in Lincoln Center awaiting the curtain for Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal—a much anticipated theater production starring Robert Downey Jr., with ChatGPT in a supporting role—I mused how playwrights have been dealing with the implications of AI for over a century. In 1920—well before Alan Turing devised his famous test and decades before the 1956 summer…
Sweeping layoffs architected by the Trump administration and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency may be coming as soon as this week at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a nonregulatory agency responsible for establishing benchmarks that ensure everything from beauty products to quantum computers are safe and reliable. According to several current…
Chemonics spokesperson Payal Chandiramani says USAID has indicated that Fews Net should qualify for a waiver, and it is working with the agency to determine how it should apply. USAID and the US State Department did not respond to requests for comment. From the beginning, Fews Net was notable for the sheer range of variables…