nature

Pretty much every online lurker knows the image: A man gawks at a passing woman making the kind of “How you doin’?” face that would make Joey Tribbiani blush. Ever since it landed in 2017, the “distracted boyfriend” meme, which took that…

In 2016, Google engineer Illia Polosukhin had lunch with a colleague, Jacob Uszkoreit. Polosukhin had been frustrated by a lack of progress in his project, using AI to provide useful answers to questions posed by users, and Uszkoreit…

“These dogs will be an extra set of eyes and ears while computing large amounts of data at strategic locations throughout Tyndall Air Force Base,” Major Jordan Criss, 325th Security Forces Squadron commander, said of the systems during…

Right now, they’re my favorite pair of workout headphones, because I only have to grab one accessory instead of two when I head out the door. My poor ears are the coat hooks of my head—now, instead of trying to thread my earbuds around my…

Leah Feiger: That are coming our way, that is so ominous.Vittoria Elliott: Woof.Leah Feiger: And probably so true. Nilesh, thank you so much for joining us today. Listeners, again, if you are seeing instances of generative AI out in the…

A week after its algorithms advised people to eat rocks and put glue on pizza, Google admitted Thursday that it needed to make adjustments to its bold new generative AI search feature. The episode highlights the risks of Google’s aggressive…

One night this past February, over drinks and moody bar lighting, Eric Green and his friends were swapping stories of their recent hookups when one mentioned they’d used the app Sniffies to have public sex. A 30-year-old tattoo artist who…

When ChatGPT was released in November 2023, it could only be accessed through the cloud because the model behind it was downright enormous.Today I am running a similarly capable AI program on a Macbook Air, and it isn’t even warm. The…

The book currently topping the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list is The Anxious Generation, a jeremiad against social media and its impact on young people. Its thesis is that apps like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have unleashed…

Google spent much of the past year hustling to build its Gemini chatbot to counter ChatGPT, pitching it as a multifunctional AI assistant that can help with work tasks or the digital chores of personal life. More quietly, the company has…