smart

While companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others had been upfront about their efforts in AI, for years Apple had been silent. Now, finally, its executives were talking. I got an advance look one day. Eager to shed the 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…

Forty-seven years ago today, everything changed. True believers might already know what it was: On May 25, 1977, Star Wars hit movie theaters and irrevocably altered nearly everything pertaining to the act of moviegoing. Lines around the…

On Wednesday morning, a small group of people huddled over their phones at the foot of the giant glass skyscraper that houses Uber’s London headquarters. They were running an experiment in an attempt to solve one of the greatest mysteries…

Pulkit Agrawal, an assistant professor at MIT who works on AI and robotics, says Google's and OpenAI’s latest demos are impressive and show how rapidly multimodal AI models have advanced. OpenAI launched GPT-4V, a system capable of parsing…

In the conclusion of that same statement to the court, they point out that under Dutch law the maximum prison sentence for money laundering at the scale Pertsev allegedly committed is eight years, and they ask that Pertsev be sentenced to…

Joel Lewenstein, a head of product design at Anthropic, was recently crawling beneath his new house to adjust the irrigation system when he ran into a conundrum: The device’s knobs made no sense. Instead of scouring the internet for a…

Dumbphone life, as r/Dumbphones moderator Jose Briones told me, is about “recovering your time and attention for the things you actually value.” Of course, getting sucked into a subreddit because it was algorithmically suggested to me—based…

Once upon a time in Hollywood, Jon Favreau wrote a movie. It was called Swingers. It was about a group of twentysomething white dudes—played by Favreau, Vince Vaughn, and Ron Livingston—trying to make it as actors. Toward the movie’s end,…

Carol Pinchefsky has written almost 2,000 articles about geek culture for outlets such as Forbes.com, Playboy.com, and Syfy.com. Over the past 20 years, she’s watched fantasy and science fiction grow from a niche interest to a massive…