Computers

For a while in the mid-2000s, a refrigerator-sized box in Abu Dhabi was considered the greatest chess player in the world. Its name was Hydra, and it was a small super-computer—a cabinet full of industrial-grade processors and specially…

Nvidia already sells boatloads of computer chips to every major company building proprietary artificial intelligence models. But now, at a moment when public interest in open source and do-it-yourself AI is soaring, the company announced it…

To learn any programming language is to learn how to debug it. But a malformed command in Python usually returns an error message that keeps the code from running, not something that fails brilliantly yet monstrously, outpacing its…

Meta has dominated online social connections for the past 20 years, but it missed out on making the smartphones that primarily delivered those connections. Now, in a multiyear, multibillion-dollar effort to position itself at the forefront…

According to market-fixated tech pundits and professional skeptics, the artificial intelligence bubble has popped, and winter’s back. Fei-Fei Li isn’t buying that. In fact, Li—who earned the sobriquet the “godmother of AI”—is betting on the…

The Friend gets around 15 hours of battery life and comes in an array of colors that look almost exactly like the color palette of the first Apple iMac computers. (Schiffmann says that wasn’t intentional.) The design comes from a…

You put a stake in the ground with your book The Singularity Is Near. This one is called The Singularity Is Nearer. How do you define the singularity?To me it’s when a human will not only be able to do everything that other people can do,…

At the same time, I understood almost immediately why Haskell was—and still is—considered a language more admired than used. Even one of its most basic concepts, that of the “monad,” has spawned a cottage industry of explainers, analogies,…

Elon Musk last week sued two of his OpenAI cofounders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, accusing them of “flagrant breaches” of the trio’s original agreement that the company would develop artificial intelligence openly and without chasing…

The most famous virtual valets around today—Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant—are a lot less impressive than the latest AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT or Google Bard. When the fruits of the recent generative AI boom get properly…