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…
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…