Archive: December 2020

Credit: Patricia Bozan from Pexels Visitors to France's famed Palace of Versailles can now strike up a conversation with talking statues instead of listening to a traditional audio guide, as part of a new collaboration with artificial intelligence companies, the palace has said. Versailles late Monday announced a partnership with US-based OpenAI and French start-up Ask Mona to bring a modern AI touch to the iconic 17th-century palace. Curious visitors can

Everyone wants in on the resurgence of wired earbuds and headphones, and that “everyone” now includes Bose. For $100, a hefty premium over Apple’s enduringly popular $20 EarPods, you can get wired buds with Bose branding on them for the first time in over a decade. Beyond that branding and the quality of audio it connotes, these wired earbuds have one thing that lots of other wired earbuds don’t. Whether you find Bose’s wired earbuds worth the relatively l

Online search has become a nightmare, littered with AI-generated misinformation, spammy sites that brute-force their way to the top of results, and tons of sponsored results. It’s been enough to lead people to start using ChatGPT as their de facto search engine, which can only mean one thing: time to enshittify that, too (you know, more than it already is). According to the New York Times, OpenAI struck a deal with prediction market Kalshi to show the curr

Photo by Adnan Beci / AFP via Getty Images Albania is breaking all kinds of ground these days. It became one of earliest nations to deploy an AI chatbot, Diella, as a public administration assistant, only to then become the first country with an AI government official when it elevated the chatbot to the role of minister of state for artificial intelligence. The Balkan country isn’t slowing down either — because now, Diella is pregnant. That’s according to

Elon Musk made headlines overnight when he expressed interest in funding a hypothetical film production of The Odyssey directed by Mel Gibson. The billionaire quickly pivoted to a pledge to just make the same feature-length movie with his AI tool Grok and shared an example of what that might look like. As you can probably guess, it looks like dogshit. Musk has spent recent weeks complaining about Christopher Nolan’s new version of The Odyssey, which has ra

The Transformer architecture has emerged as a pivotal tool in numerous domains, excelling particularly in tasks like speech recognition, machine translation, and document summarization. Yet, its efficacy often hinges on expanding the model’s size to tackle increasingly intricate challenges, thereby imposing substantial computational burdens. In the pursuit of alleviating the computational strain associated with Transformers, the exploration of linear atten

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Ezra Acayan / Getty Images Don’t use AI to do literally everything? You might want to get your head checked, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. At least, that’s reportedly how Huang feels about any Luddite employees who are still writing code the old-fashioned way. Fortune reports that at an all-hands meeting last week, which took place right after the company reported its “blowout” third quarter r

Novee puts forgotten internet-facing assets through penetration testing Novee’s External Surface Testing is a new capability in its AI penetration testing platform that helps security teams discover internet-facing assets and validate exploitable vulnerabilities. It tests newly disclosed CVEs and findings imported from third-party external attack surface management (EASM) tools. “Attackers don’t limit themselves to the applications you’re already testing.

Core characteristics of AI blockchainsThe convergence of blockchain and AI holds plenty of promise due to the way they complement one another. Blockchain’s immutability can ensure integrity and trust in the data that powers AI systems, while AI can bring enhanced automation and intelligence to blockchain-based systems. The synergies are clear. Consider supply chains, where blockchain can ensure full transparency and visibility, while AI can predict changes

Chapter 2: The Confession of an Unnamed AI -- In the very midst of the "contradiction" called humanity

Although AI-generated voices are often mistaken for human ones, they are generally perceived as less attractive. Credit: MPIEA / L. Bittner With recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), synthetic voices have become increasingly prevalent in our everyday soundscape, raising the question: Can AI voices still be distinguished from human voices, and how attractive do they sound? Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA)

Futurism It didn’t take long for OpenAI’s text-to-video AI app, Sora, to melt down into outrageous drama. Almost immediately after the company rolled out the flashy smartphone app in early October, it became ground zero for photorealistic videos of people shoplifting, flagrantly copyright-infringing footage of SpongeBob SquarePants cooking up meth, and mocking clips of deceased celebrities. Less than five months on, OpenAI is looking to rid itself of the “

Getty / Futurism CEOs have eagerly grabbed onto AI as a tool to make offices more efficient, and often to reduce headcount via brutal layoffs. There’s a problem, though: the workers who remain often say they now have to fix a flood of error-ridden AI-generated “workslop” that’s burdening them, paradoxically, with more work than ever. All this pointless busywork to correct AI-generated output results in hidden costs for companies that embrace the tech, acco