fiction

When you think of SeaWorld, you most likely think of orcas, school trips to the aquarium, or eating chicken fingers while contemplating the ethics of marine mammal captivity. But this Halloween, the theme park franchise wants to make…

Seventy years ago last summer, a group of scientists met at Dartmouth College to discuss a wild idea—that machines might one day be capable of humanlike thought processes. One of those scientists, John McCarthy, had suggested a name for the…

The prevailing narrative in Silicon Valley is that Chinese AI models like Kimi K3 and DeepSeek R1 came out of nowhere. But the truth is that even if you never travel to China, there’s an easy way to get a sense of what Chinese AI…

Last year, when the novelist Laura Brooke Robson began writing Love Is an Algorithm—a love story between the cofounder of an AI dating app and a musician trying to survive in the age of large language models—she took extra care not to sound…

Imagine a tech company so visionary that it can take an idea public. A “concept IPO,” they called it.Picture the three founders, all former Apple employees, two of whom—software engineers Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson—were already…

If you read George Orwell’s classic political satire Animal Farm in seventh grade, you probably remember the basic contours of the plot: fed up with human rule, a group of well-intentioned barnyard animals set up their own egalitarian…

Elon Musk and Sam Altman appeared in a federal courtroom together for the first time on Tuesday as they fight over OpenAI’s decade-long evolution and what it means for the company’s future.The trial in Musk’s lawsuit against Altman could…

April might be springtime in the northern hemisphere, but some of the best streaming services seem to think it’s the perfect time for a dry run of spooky season. How else to explain the arrival of some exquisitely dark slices of horror,…

If you could travel back in time, what year would you choose? What would you change about history? For a surprising number of Chinese people, their answer turns out to be the same: Use what they know today to save China from its unglorious…

Holograms are a mainstay of science fiction, popping up across the great expanses of Star Wars, Star Trek, Halo, and The Expanse. If a story is set in the future, or in space, it’s probably got a hologram in it. Unfortunately, this is less…