words

In June, on the final day of CSX—demo day—the founders were set to deliver a short pitch to a room full of investors. As the setting, a16z had chosen a flashy basement venue on the edge of Soho, normally for live music and clubbing. A…

The Eiffel Tower is 330 meters tall, and the nearest pizza parlor is 1.3 miles from my house. These facts were astoundingly easy to ascertain. All I had to do was type some words into Google, and I didn’t even have to spell them right.For…

In R. C. Sherriff’s novel The Hopkins Manuscript, readers are transported to a world 800 years after a cataclysmic event ended Western civilization. In pursuit of clues about a blank spot in their planet’s history, scientists belonging to a…

When a new episode of AMC’s Interview With the Vampire aired the Sunday before last, a particular sort of fuse was lit in online conversations around the show. The fifth installment of the second season, “Don’t Be Afraid, Just Start the…

It’s 10 pm on a Wednesday night and I’m standing in Blessed, a south London takeaway joint, half-listening to a fellow customer talking earnestly about Jesus. I’m nodding along, trying to pay attention as reggae reverberates around the…

So, inevitably, we talk a lot more, and meta-ly, about language, words, meaning—though Sloan doesn’t think it was inevitable that language would be the breakthrough AI technology. Could’ve been vision, he says; could’ve been something else.…

ChatGPT developer OpenAI’s approach to building artificial intelligence came under fire this week from former employees who accuse the company of taking unnecessary risks with technology that could become harmful.Today, OpenAI released a…

Have you ever thought you’d be good at hawking digital meatballs or helping someone pick out the perfect Lack? Do you find yourself frequently lost in the haunted furniture store of the Roblox game 3008? If you live in the UK and are 18 or…

Today, OpenAI released its first threat report, detailing how actors from Russia, Iran, China, and Israel have attempted to use its technology for foreign influence operations across the globe. The report named five different networks that…

Allen, a data scientist, and Massachi, a software engineer, worked for nearly four years at Facebook on some of the uglier aspects of social media, combating scams and election meddling. They didn’t know each other but both quit in 2019,…