A billion dollars isn’t what it used to be—but it still focuses the mind. At least it did for me when I heard that the AI company Anthropic agreed to an at least $1.5 billion settlement for authors and publishers whose books were used to train an early version of its large language model, Claude….
Another TikTok video Degeling shared with WIRED showed a slow-motion, close-up angle of the bullet hitting Kirk’s neck. The tone of the video was conspiratorial: The user who uploaded it added spooky music and a digitally narrated voice, asking, “What is the black thing on his shirt and why did it move like this before…
Mustafa Suleyman says that designing AI systems to exceed human intelligence—and to mimic behavior that suggests consciousness—would be “dangerous and misguided.”
Then there’s Eric Chong, a 37-year-old who has a background in dentistry and previously cofounded a startup that simplifies medical billing for dentists. He was placed on the “machine” team. “I’m gonna be honest and say I’m extremely relieved to be on the machine team,” Chong says. At the hackathon, Chong was building software that…
Schiffmann seems to be doing well, compared to the last times either of us spoke to him. When he first announced the Friend, he talked about how he had come up with the idea for an AI buddy while traveling alone and yearning for companionship. Schiffmann posits himself as older now, wiser, more experienced than…
If you were trying to learn how to get other people to do what you want, you might use some of the techniques found in a book like Influence: The Power of Persuasion. Now, a preprint study out of the University of Pennsylvania suggests that those same psychological persuasion techniques can frequently “convince” some LLMs…
On this episode of Uncanny Valley, we break down the role of AI in the online gambling scene.
The Biden administration considered spyware used to hack phones controversial enough that it was tightly restricted for US government use in an executive order signed in March 2024. In Trump’s no-holds-barred effort to empower his deportation force—already by far the most well-funded law enforcement agency in the US government—that’s about to change, and the result…
Anthropic has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by a group of book authors alleging copyright infringement, an estimated $3,000 per work. The amount is well below what Anthropic may have had to pay if it had lost the case at trial. Experts said the plaintiffs may have been…
In one paper Eleos AI published, the nonprofit argues for evaluating AI consciousness using a “computational functionalism” approach. A similar idea was once championed by none other than Putnam, though he criticized it later in his career. The theory suggests that human minds can be thought of as specific kinds of computational systems. From there,…