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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has some bad news to share: AI will never lead to a shorter work week — despite having already ushered in the singularity, in his dubious telling.During an appearance on the “Relentless” podcast, the billionaire reflected that “somehow we never get the promise of the four-hour work week at mass scale in society,” despite tech “promising people that they’re going to work less and they’re going to have all this leisure.”“And I don’t expect AI to change that,” Altman added.Instead of striving for a healthier work-life balance, one of the rare positive — albeit entirely hypothetical…
Back in the mid-2000s, Mark Zuckerberg had a pretty awesome product: a site called Facebook, which was still widely loved and not polluted with endless ads and scams.The interceding years have been hard on Zuckerberg’s empire. From a disastrous, multibillion-dollar foray into a pandemic-era virtual reality world nobody wanted to step a foot into to effectively abandoning content moderation and allowing demented AI slop to flood its social media platforms, Meta now feels more like a dilapidated strip mall than a hot tech property. Lately, it almost feels like Zuckerberg is trying to destroy his own company. He’s burning through…
Earlier this month, we brought you the story of a data center in the sleepy Michigan town of Dowagiac. Beset by the 30 megawatt tech facility, residents in the otherwise quiet burg were forced to live under the relentless screech of a massive cooling operation, prompting a lawsuit over excessive noise.At the time, footage from a TikTok video — showing volume readings reaching 60 decibels in one resident’s front yard — captured a portion of the noise, a horrible whine emitted by the data center 24/7.Now, fresh audio recorded by ABC7‘s apparently more sensitive noise equipment demonstrates the full extent…
The infamous dead internet theory was originally a conspiracy that posited that the vast majority of the internet was run by bots and thinking machines. Most accounts you saw online were really bots masquerading as people — all part of some nefarious scheme to control humankind by keeping us isolated and divided.That last part is far-fetched, but the core of the idea — that bots outnumber humans online — is inexorably starting to feel weirdly grounded. Fortune did a roundup of the latest data on the makeup of internet traffic, and most of it points to humans now being a…
If you’re among the millions of US citizens against power-hungry data centers going up in your town, you may want to be careful about how you exercise your First Amendment right to protest.Last week, high school physics teacher Lux Claridge was hauled out of a public meeting by four police officers for the baffling crime of clapping in support of an anti-data center speaker. During the public comment portion of the meeting, held by the Emporia City Commission in Lyon County, Kansas, residents who showed up to voice opposition to a 1,000-acre data center project were warned against “clapping” and…
What would you do if you were unfathomably wealthy? Collect superyachts, throw extravagant parties, and just generally live a care-free existence? Not if you’re Elon Musk. The former trillionaire is busy as ever waging his war on all-things “woke” — and it’s devolved into a performance which, even by his extreme standards, is a meltdown for the ages. Or a few of them simultaneously, involving entities as diverse as an esteemed journal, a chef, a Greek epic and Anne Hathaway.It all started over the weekend when The Economist released a lengthy interview with Musk, who displayed none of the irreverent charm…
Last week, ChatGPT maker OpenAI issued what seems like a frightening memo about an “unprecedented cyber incident” involving cutting-edge AI models breaking loose and hacking another company.As the AI lab tells it, a group of next-generation AI models — including one that hasn’t even been disclosed to the public yet — had busted out of their secure testing environment and into a production database owned by the machine learning startup Hugging Face.“It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!” Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue tweeted, seemingly backing the story. “The investigation is ongoing, and we’ll share more learnings from…
Was SpaceX’s recent Starship flight test a success or a failure? Many are hailing it as a victory, but several of the megarocket’s booster’s engines failed after re-entry, causing it to explode.SpaceX has had many similarly ambiguous tests before. But this was the first one since its much-hyped IPO earlier this summer — and it’s already clear that it wasn’t a convincing enough display to reverse the company’s fortunes on the stock market.After hitting an all time low before the weekend and closing at $115, SpaceX shares endeavored to plummet even further on Monday, briefly dipping to $108.66 — a…
A trove of chat logs and projects created with Anthropic’s Claude — some including sensitive personal and company information — have been left exposed to Google, making them them searchable to anyone on the web.The artifacts appear to have been made public when Claude users opted to distribute a given chat or project to colleagues or associates using the chatbot’s “share” feature. After hitting a “share” button in the top right corner, Claude notes that sharing will create a “public” link, and “anyone with the link can view.” The warning, though, doesn’t alert users that shared content could wind up being…
The “singularity” is here — according to Sam Altman, who we’d wager has an ulterior motive behind promoting this claim.The OpenAI CEO harbingered this sea-changing paradigm shift on a podcast over the weekend.“We are now, like, in the singularity,” Altman said on the latest episode of “Relentless,” as spotted by Business Insider.Definitions vary, but the singularity is generally defined as the moment that the capabilities of thinking machines might start to accelerate at a pace beyond humankind’s control, possibly leading to the creation of a powerful superintelligence.