Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wants you to know he’s not an AI “doomer.” At least, that’s my read of the “mic drop” of a ~15,000 word essay Amodei published to his blog late Friday. (I tried asking Anthropic’s Claude chatbot whether it concurred, but alas, the post exceeded the free plan’s length limit.) In broad […]
Anthropic CEO goes full techno-optimist in 15,000-word paean to AI Read More »
How do machine learning models do what they do? And are they really “thinking” or “reasoning” the way we understand those things? This is a philosophical question as much as a practical one, but a new paper making the rounds Friday suggests that the answer is, at least for now, a pretty clear “no.” A
In late September, Shield AI cofounder Brandon Tseng swore that weapons in the U.S. would never be fully autonomous — meaning an AI algorithm would make the final decision to kill someone. “Congress doesn’t want that,” the defense tech founder told TechCrunch. “No one wants that.” But Tseng spoke too soon. Five days later, Anduril
Silicon Valley is debating if AI weapons should be allowed to decide to kill Read More »
As AI-generated slop takes over increasing swathes of the user-generated Internet thanks to the rise of large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT, spare a thought for Wikipedia editors. In addition to their usual job of grubbing out bad human edits, they’re having to spend an increasing proportion of their time trying to weed out
How AI-generated content is upping the workload for Wikipedia editors Read More »
Geoffrey Hinton accepted a Nobel Prize this week, recognizing the foundational work on artificial neural networks that earned him the nickname “godfather of AI.” In a speech Tuesday, Professor Hinton praised one student – alluding to OpenAI’s former Chief Scientist, Ilya Sutskever – for revolting against OpenAI’s CEO. “I was particularly fortunate to have many
Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. This week in AI, synthetic data rose to prominence. OpenAI last Thursday introduced Canvas, a new way to interact with ChatGPT, its AI-powered chatbot platform. Canvas opens a window with a workspace for writing and coding
This Week in AI: Tech giants embrace synthetic data Read More »
Amazon announced on Wednesday the upcoming addition of new AI-powered package retrieval technology to its electric vehicle fleet. The vision-based tech is designed help drivers prioritize packages. Vision-Assisted Package Retrieval (VAPR) works by highlighting packages with either a green circle or red light, denoting which are designated for delivery at the current stop. The company
Amazon’s new AI-powered vision tech tells drivers which packages to deliver Read More »
Amazon is revamping its subscription offerings for its Ring video doorbells and cameras. A new service, called Ring Home Premium, will include features like 24/7 recording and AI-powered video search, starting at $19.99 per month when it launches on November 5 in the U.S. Less-expensive tiers, Ring Home Standard and Ring Home Basic, will bundle
Amazon revamps Ring subscriptions with AI video search Read More »
Startup employees often go on to found interesting ventures, basing their new work on the experience gained from their time building a company from scratch. But not all of those experiences are positive, and sometimes, a less-than-satisfactory exit can do more to fuel a founder’s fervor than anything else. In the case of Forward Earth’s
It has been a big week for Nobel Prizes in the world of artificial intelligence. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences today announced the Nobel Prize in Chemistry winners for 2024, with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Director John Jumper sharing one-half of the prize, with David Baker — who is head of the Institute for Protein Design at
DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis and John Jumper scoop Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold Read More »
