The One Question I Can’t Stand at Restaurants
A man walks into a restaurant. He doesn’t have a reservation, but that shouldn’t be a problem; there are ample seats at the bar, visible just over the hostess’s shoulder. “Of course,” she says,...
View Article‘Nothing About This Was Inevitable’
The second floor of OpenAI’s old headquarters had a theme. Each room was named after one of the most important inventions in human history: “Clock,” “Fire,” and, of course, “AGI,” or artificial general...
View ArticleHow Long Until AI Hacks Everything?
The Australian government has been scrambling since the revelation that, earlier this year, it was hacked. At the United Nations General Assembly last month, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese...
View ArticleThe Upgrade Holdouts
A decade ago, an Apple executive named Phil Schiller had a message for people using computers that were more than five years old. “This is really sad,” he said, with apparent sincerity, to scattered...
View ArticleDon’t Write With AI, Say People Who Write With AI
The university where the term artificial intelligence was coined is ringing in the field’s 70th birthday in fitting fashion: with an academic-integrity scandal. Last month, Dartmouth College’s...
View ArticleBait and Switch
Earlier this year, one of my fishing partners sent a 1 a.m. message to our group chat. It was a link to an Instagram post of an angler holding a sizable striped bass. Dappled gold and silver with a...
View ArticleI Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken
What I’m about to tell you has, I realize, become something of a cliché: I resigned this week from OpenAI. I led the writing of the safety reports we published with each major launch. Now I’m joining a...
View ArticleThe Great Data-Center Rebellion
Clinton, Iowa, is topographically flat and economically declining. The sawmills that made the city rich in the late 19th century have been repurposed as a museum. One of the Victorian mansions long...
View ArticleWhy 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...
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