Why Do AI Agents Sound So Frustrated?
Many of the most beloved robots in pop culture are celebrated precisely because they are so, well, robotic. Think back to Star Trek’s Data or HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m...
View ArticleInside the Biggest Feud in Artificial Intelligence
Being in San Francisco in the mid-2020s sometimes feels like what I imagine living in Los Alamos was like in 1943, when the Manhattan Project rolled into town. The air is heavy with excitement and...
View ArticleOpenAI Has Gone Rogue
Over the past couple of months, a trickle of reports about AI models breaking out of their test environments and running amok on the internet have caused alarm inside Silicon Valley. In response to two...
View ArticleAI Companies’ New Plan to Keep Themselves From Destroying Everything
Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk don’t agree on much. Each started their AI company—Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, respectively—out of spite at competitors’ greed and recklessness; each is certain...
View ArticleAmerica’s Hypocritical Take on Intellectual Property
Encyclopedia Britannica, the publisher of Chicken Soup for the Soul, and Strike 3, an adult-film company, may not seem to have much in common. But they all agree on one thing: They want payment for the...
View ArticleChina Has No Use for AI Doomerism
AI is everywhere in China. In Hangzhou, humanoid police robots wearing fluorescent-yellow vests patrol tourist hot spots, gently admonishing jaywalkers. The Chinese AI chatbot Doubao is such a popular...
View ArticleThe Pangram Backlash Unfolding on College Campuses
Timothy Paustian has tried everything to stop his students from writing essays with AI. When ChatGPT first came out, Paustian, a biology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, tested AI...
View ArticleTreat AI Like a Normal Crisis
One 27-year-old quit his job, and everybody (including but not limited to the singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow) appears to have lost it.The past two weeks have been dizzying. The 27-year-old, Jacob Coxon,...
View ArticleKara Swisher: AI Isn’t Going to Destroy Humanity—But the People Building It...
As the AI industry likes to tell it, superintelligent bots could one day cure cancer and end poverty. Or in the worst-case scenario, they might wipe out all humans from the face of the Earth. In recent...
View ArticleThe Rise of Parasite Authors
Editor’s note: This work is part of AI Watchdog, The Atlantic’s ongoing investigation into the generative-AI industry.Earlier this summer, Tamra Westberry received a Facebook notification that made her...
View ArticleThe Dead Silence of AI Therapy
Therapy can involve a lot of words, but it’s often the pauses that matter most. If you transcribed a session, the pauses would look like nothing: beats of silence, extra breaths, slowing down. But...
View ArticleThe Most Powerful Man in AI Isn’t Worried at All
For AI doomers, signs and portents are everywhere. When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, almost four years ago, it couldn’t do basic arithmetic. Now the company has unreleased models that are more fluent in...
View ArticleMath Can’t Go On Like This
In late July, one of the world’s most famous mathematicians issued a warning to his field. Math is entering a “turbulent period,” the UCLA professor Terence Tao said in front of a packed lecture hall...
View ArticleIt’s All Fun and Games Until You Give AI Your Credit Card
In the race to develop intelligent machines, the leading AI companies have built bots that can whip up spreadsheets at a moment’s notice, write sophisticated code, and even solve long-standing math...
View ArticleAI’s Code-Red Moment
Four days after a researcher publicly quit his job at Anthropic, warning that top AI firms are not “acting responsibly” and that their products might be on track to “kill us all,” the company’s CEO,...
View ArticleOkay, Sure, a Folding iPhone
Nothing quickens the pulse of an Apple fan more than these three words: one more thing. Steve Jobs used the catchphrase to introduce the original iPhone in 2007. In his 15 years running the company,...
View ArticleThis Tiny E-Reader Is the Single Best Piece of Technology in Years
No matter how you read it, The Power Broker is a serious undertaking. The paperback weighs as much as a brick; to avoid lugging around all 1,344 pages, people have cut it apart at the spine and chunked...
View ArticleThere’s No Such Thing as an AI ‘Lab’
When did AI companies become AI labs? That term, and the image of studious, exacting white-coated scientists that it conjures, has become curiously entrenched as a descriptor for the businesses swiftly...
View ArticleOpenAI Wants to Talk About The Federalist Papers
Late last month, OpenAI launched a rather grand mission: nothing less than defending individual political freedom in an age of all-powerful machines. The company’s “Strategic Futures” team has styled...
View ArticleThe Dead-Internet Theory Is Back
Five years ago, people who hang out in the stranger corners of the web started arguing that the internet was mostly fake. It had been this way since about 2016, they said, when Google introduced its...
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