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Some big AI companies seem to think that the best way to keep models from becoming too chaotic or too mischievous is to keep them locked inside of labs. If only a chosen few can access them, the thinking goes, they can do less damage in the…

This week I bring news of a daring casino caper hatched by a pair of rogue AI agents—as well as the clever trick that revealed their antics.After researchers instructed them to count cards during a game of blackjack, the agents—which were…

Earlier this year, I picked up a rather unfortunate habit: vaping. More specifically, I started smoking flavored vapes manufactured in China’s so-called “Vape Valley” and sold throughout the United States.Flavored nicotine vapes are largely…

Forgive me for starting with a cliché, a piece of finance jargon that has recently slipped into the tech lexicon, but I’m afraid I must talk about “moats.” Popularized decades ago by Warren Buffett to refer to a company’s competitive…

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…

As thousands of influencers descended on southern California earlier this month for the annual Coachella Music Festival, a very Silicon Valley program dubbed “AI Coachella” was taking shape a few hundred miles north in Palo Alto. The class,…

On Monday, a brand-new Reddit account popped up on the widely read forum r/AmItheAsshole, where users have their personal disputes arbitrated by strangers. This particular user asked if they had crossed a line by “refusing to babysit my…

To anyone with a pulse and a smartphone, it’s obvious that the internet has an AI slop problem. The issue has grown more severe since ChatGPT launched in 2022, with some social platforms flooded with AI-generated writing. Now, there’s data…

“Cheaters never lose, and losers never cheat.”This is the demented advice that mega-rich tech CEO Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen) gives his teenage daughter at the end of the second episode of The Audacity, the lacerating new AMC series about…

It’s a chilly March morning in the undisclosed mid-Atlantic hotel hosting Palantir’s developer conference. The defense contractors, military officers, and corporate executives in attendance are unprepared for the weather; they’d assumed the…