Love it or hate it, you have to admit Temu had a banger year. Launched in late 2022, the Chinese-owned ecommerce site, known for selling a vast array of astonishingly affordable goods, took only two years to become a household name in the US. Over the past 12 months, it has topped download charts, surpassing…
Many pieces of AI-generated content were used to express support for or fandom of certain candidates. For instance, an AI-generated video of Donald Trump and Elon Musk dancing to the BeeGees song “Stayin’ Alive” was shared millions of times on social media, including by Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican. “It’s all about social signaling….
Buttu, who regularly travels to the city of Ramallah in the West Bank from her home in Haifa, Israel, for work and to visit friends, says Google Maps has led her astray many times in recent years. “I’ve been told to drive right into a wall that’s been up since 2003,” she says. Others have…
In 2025, it will be commonplace to talk with a personal AI agent that knows your schedule, your circle of friends, the places you go. This will be sold as a convenience equivalent to having a personal, unpaid assistant. These anthropomorphic agents are designed to support and charm us so that we fold them into…
In 2025 we will see AI and machine learning leveraged to make real progress in understanding animal communication, answering a question that has puzzled humans as long as we have existed: “What are animals saying to each other?” The recent Coller-Dolittle Prize, offering cash prizes up to half-a-million dollars for scientists who “crack the code”…
I asked Amko Leenart, director of design for Ford Europe, about why Ford used VW’s woeful controls in both the Explorer and the Capri, and he told me Ford worked with a partner to better the response on the sliders (but wouldn’t tell me how), then admitted that “we tried to improve it a bit—and…
If Google’s generative AI Gemini Assistant chatbot is to surpass OpenAI’s ChatGPT in popularity in the coming years, it may have to do so without some of the promotional partnerships that helped thrust Google search front and center into Americans’ lives. In a US federal court filing on Friday, Google proposed a series of restrictions…
OpenAI today announced an improved version of its most capable artificial intelligence model to date—one that takes even more time to deliberate over questions—just a day after Google announced its first model of this type. OpenAI’s new model, called o3, replaces o1, which the company introduced in September. Like o1, the new model spends time…
In May 2020, the media and technology conglomerate Thomson Reuters sued a small legal AI startup called Ross Intelligence, alleging that it had violated US copyright law by reproducing materials from Westlaw, Thomson Reuters’ legal research platform. As the pandemic raged, the lawsuit hardly registered outside the small world of nerds obsessed with copyright rules….
It’s an interesting idea, and it is fun to see the idea of an AI agent explored within the relatively benign realm of artistic expression. That said, Botto still poses some ethical conundrums. Many working artists rightly worry about the impact AI is having on their profession, as models trained on millions of copyrighted works…