tests

In late April a video ad for a new AI company went viral on X. A person stands before a billboard in San Francisco, smartphone extended, calls the phone number on display, and has a short call with an incredibly human-sounding bot. The text…

Network Rail did not answer questions about the trials sent by WIRED, including questions about the current status of AI usage, emotion detection, and privacy concerns.“We take the security of the rail network extremely seriously and use a…

Turning to a friend or coworker can make tricky problems easier to tackle. Now it looks like having AI chatbots team up with each other can make them more effective.I’ve been playing this week with AutoGen, an open source software framework…

Last week, an AI Overview search result from Google used one of my WIRED articles in an unexpected way that makes me fearful for the future of journalism.I was experimenting with AI Overviews, the company’s new generative AI feature…

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…

Last week Google introduced a radical shake-up of search that presents users with AI-generated answers to their queries. Now the company says it will soon start including ads inside those AI Overviews, as the automatic answers are…

When can you expect your query to trigger an AI-generated summary of the results? “AI Overviews appear for complex queries,” says Mallory De Leon, a Google spokesperson. “You'll find AI Overviews in your Google Search results when our…

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…

The White House has issued new rules aimed at companies that manufacture synthetic DNA after years of warnings that a pathogen made with mail-order genetic material could accidentally or intentionally spark the next pandemic.The rules,…

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is confident that Google will find a way to make money selling access to generative AI tools. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says his company is already doing it.Both companies reported better-than-expected quarterly…