Archive: July 2024

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Artificial intelligence is driving a seismic shift in how we approach weather forecasting, with a flurry of new AI weather prediction models debuting in recent years that have a number of potential advantages over traditional models. These include faster speeds, reduced demand for computing resources, and improved forecast performance for some weather phenomena, especially over longer time periods. Despite the excitement a

Since ChatGPT came onto the scene in late 2022, there has been a singular message from tech executives to the broader workforce regarding the new technology: it is coming for your job. They have insisted, sometimes in the language of a flowery, futuristic utopia and sometimes as a straight-up threat, that artificial intelligence will result in a complete upheaval in the economy, wipe out entire categories of jobs, and fundamentally change the human relatio

Reflection’s Beam trails top open models on coding tests but claims lower inference compute Reflection AI has built Beam, a 501-billion-parameter open-weight model for coding and agent tasks, and plans to publish the weights under an Apache 2.0 license later this month. Open-weight means developers can download the trained model and run it on their own hardware. Beam uses a mixture-of-experts design, so 23 billion of its parameters fire for any given token

The price of computers, gaming consoles, and even smartphones has gone up this year, all thanks to the AI boom. Now, one of the companies most responsible for that boom is looking back at the good ol’ days, when Nvidia was still best known in the PC gaming world. Nvidia announced on Thursday that it is introducing its first series of “GeForce Trading Cards,” highlighting key moments in the history of its graphics processing units (GPUs). The first set incl

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain An emerging form of surveillance, wireless tapping, explores the possibility of remotely deciphering conversations from the tiny vibrations produced by a cell phone's earpiece. With the goal of protecting users' privacy from potential bad actors, a team of computer science researchers at Penn State demonstrated that transcriptions of phone calls can be generated from radar measurements taken up to 3 meters, or about 10 fee

Avi Schiffmann via X / Futurism Last month, AI startup Friend launched an eyebrow-raising advertising campaign in the New York City subway, which drew a striking amount of hatred. The largely white billboards left a convenient amount of room for passersby to air their feelings about the privacy-infringing tech. As such, it didn’t take long for handwritten scribbles to cover the ads. “Befriend something alive,” one pen-wielding tagger wrote. “AI wouldn’t ca

Getty / Futurism Content warning: this story includes discussion of self-harm and suicide. If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. Plaintiffs filed seven lawsuits yesterday against OpenAI, accusing the company’s flagship chatbot ChatGPT of causing immense psychological harm and multiple suicides. The suits, first reported by The Wall Street Journ

Elon Musk sat down with the editor-in-chief of the Economist for a taped interview that went live Thursday. The Tesla CEO has been avoiding normal journalists recently, even cancelling a planned interview with CNBC earlier this month. And it now seems pretty obvious why. Musk has a hard time answering normal questions about his often fascist and sometimes incoherent worldview. The interview started cordially enough, with Economist editor Zanny Minton Beddo

Getty / Futurism Parents, keep your eyes peeled for AI-powered toys. These may look like they might make a novel gift for a child, but a recent controversy surrounding several of the stocking stuffers has highlighted the alarming risks they pose to young kids. In November, a team of researchers at the US PIRG Education Fund published a report after testing three different toys powered by AI models: Miko 3, Curio’s Grok, and FoloToy’s Kumma. All of them gav

Getty / Futurism For quite some time now, investors have fought the suggestion that the artificial intelligence industry may be forming a massive bubble, risking an eventual collapse of epic proportions that could take down the US economy with it. But shaking off those fears has proven increasingly difficult as the tech stock market reels from a major selloff this week. Amazon shares tumbled nine percent Friday morning after claiming that its spending woul

Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Tech giants Meta and Google-owned YouTube suffered a devastating legal blow yesterday after losing a landmark social media addiction trial, a watershed outcome that’s likely to reverberate across the social media industry — and shrapnel from that fallout could hit AI companies, too. In the case characterized by some as Big Tech’s “Big Tobacco moment,” a jury found that Meta and YouTube caused a young wo