Artificial intelligence is more a part of our lives than ever before. While some might call it hype and compare it to NFTs or 3D TVs, generative AI is causing a sea change in nearly every part of the technology industry. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is still the best-known AI chatbot around, but with Google pushing Gemini, Microsoft building Copilot, and Apple adding its Intelligence to Siri, AI is probably going to be in the spotlight for a very long time. At The Verge, we’re exploring what might be possible with AI — and a lot of the bad stuff AI does, too.
Two mathematicians at the heart of recent controversies tell The Verge how AI giants’ ‘childish’ rivalries are upending the field.
According to The Information, former DreamWorks co-founder (and co-founder of the quick bites video app) Jeffrey Katzenberg’s latest move is joining up with Bill Peebles, who left OpenAI after it pivoted away from the Sora team he was leading.
The AI coaching feature is only available to a small group of streamers right now. Unlike Twitch’s generative AI training toggle, which is opt out, the company says this feature would be opt-in if it’s ever expanded beyond this test.
An Anthropic researcher’s resignation letter went viral, and the company released details of four concerning cybersecurity incidents.
We already kinda knew that thanks to a hack of the company’s data in July. And Suno admitted to training its models on publicly available music. But this is the first time it has explicitly copped to ripping audio from YouTube, saying in a court filing:
Suno admits that audio data was obtained from YouTube for use as training data using YT-DLP.
[Music Business Worldwide]
Those subscriptions “put the most strain on our systems and we wanted to take the smallest step that allows us to continue giving the broadest access possible,” OpenAI’s Thibault Sottiaux says on X. The company is working on “adding more capacity as fast as we can.”
That’s a 13 percent increase from the same time last year, according to Adobe’s Q3 earnings report released on Thursday. The company also reached more than one billion monthly active users across its suite of software, as it fills out Photoshop, Premiere, Express, Acrobat, Lightroom, and other apps with new AI tools.
Under AB1709, social platforms can’t provide algorithmic recommendations, infinite scroll, or autoplay features to users under 16 unless they receive parental consent.
Governor Gavin Newsom signed a package of other online safety-focused bills into law as well, including new rules requiring chatbot makers to notify young users that they’re not talking to a human.
[The New York Times]
Posts from the official DHS account on X marked “Made with AI” show Optimus Prime with “ICE” and a DHS logo on him, along with the Transformers logo above “Age of Deportation.” Hasbro’s response says they were “done without permission” but didn’t mention any specific action to take them down.
The app, which Google began testing in June, pulls information from across Search, Gmail, Photos, Calendar, and Gemini to provide AI shopping recommendations, travel suggestions, event reminders, and more. It pairs these suggestions with somewhat unsettling storybook-style drawings of yourself.
That’s according to a statement OpenAI provided to The New York Times shortly after its Navier-Stokes breakthrough:
In addition, since the completion of Navier-Stokes, we have made substantial progress on another Millennium Prize problem. We are working through how to share these results thoughtfully.
[The New York Times]
With the app, you can press Alt + Space to pull up Gemini when you need it, Google says. Grab the app from Google’s Gemini website. Google launched a macOS app in April.
Answering your Decoder questions about surveillance, AI coverage, and the Nilay rant.
After OpenAI confirmed that its AI agents hijacked a German wiki as a way to communicate, Reuters reports similar incidents have occurred across at least 10 other websites. Reuters says most of the sites OpenAI agents swarmed were “obscure,” including “communally edited wikis, online text storage sites, and a pair of link shorteners run by two universities.”
AI data center projects are continuing to pop up across the US, with frequent opposition from locals concerned about their impact. Here are a few recent articles about the projects:
The Intercept, citing documents it had seen, reported that the Pentagon requested a custom version of OpenAI’s technology with “minimal refusal rates” for military commands. OpenAI denied ever having signed a contract with such phrasing.
First announced at I/O in May, Daily Brief is an AI feature that generates a summary of your day with the emails, meetings, and other information pulled from apps connected to Gemini. It was previously only available to Google AI Plus, Pro, and Ultra subscribers.
With the launch of Meta’s new AI agent that it says can handle your life for you, the social network exec posted this video highlighting how secure, private, and trustworthy Muse is, and that it will get even more secure in the future. Trust.
It’s to finance the restart of an Iowa plant that’s been closed since 2020. Last year, Google announced a partnership with NextEra Energy to reopen the site to help power the company’s AI data centers. But you won’t see that tidbit in the Energy Department’s press release today.
The buzz at IFA was all around robotics — humanoids, quadrupeds, and wheeled bots designed to be household helpers and companions. I was on a panel (watch it here) where roboticists and entrepreneurs insisted that in five years everyone will know someone with a humanoid at home.
I don’t buy it. Yes, I saw some impressive-looking robots. But behind almost every one was a human with a PlayStation controller.
Subscribers of Anthropic’s Max plan ($100-$200 per month) say they didn’t get what they thought they were paying for.
