Google’s Pixel Camera chief, Isaac Reynolds, thinks year-to-year upgrades to smartphone cameras are still critical, even though some detractors think they’re passé. “A person who is a casual photographer and desperately wants to be a hobbyist—they’re never going to break that ceiling unless you give them the tools,” he says. “The features that others call…
It also carries obvious risk: He’s trusting that machines will be able to determine what is true, what is newsworthy, and what won’t get him sued. One of his agents runs an analysis on the legal risk a story poses and assigns it a score; he doesn’t publish anything deemed too dangerous. He isn’t the…
Jordan Zietz wants to be clear: He has never, and will never, force anyone to tattoo his startup’s logo on their body. The 24-year-old briefly became the internet’s most hated person after LemonLime, his AI-for-small-business startup, hosted a party following Y Combinator’s Startup School in late July. In a LinkedIn post, Zietz wrote that he…
For the last decade on social media, Ruby Thelot has asked himself the same questions when he encounters viral content online: Is this an ad? Is this account real? Is this an actual trend or just a fluke? While trends like “6-7” and “looksmaxxing” have recently broken containment, not every new term or subcultural phenomenon…
As AI models gain advanced capabilities to find vulnerabilities in software, develop ways to exploit them, and even carry out autonomous hacking sprees, researchers offered a sobering new example on Tuesday, disclosing vulnerabilities in the video conferencing platform Zoom that could have been exploited to take over targets’ devices. Anyone on a call that involved…
Computer scientists recently discovered a way to extract the hidden “thinking” that frontier AI models perform as they work through complex problems. The findings provide some evidence—although not conclusive proof—that certain Chinese models may have been trained by “distilling” reasoning information from US models that was supposedly hidden because of how closely some of their…
I’m going to let you in on a secret. Every cell in your body has the potential to get smarter. I don’t mean this metaphorically, or in a “body keeps the score” kind of way. I mean that if lab-coated biologists took a sample of your skin and very carefully manipulated the cells inside it,…
One of the greatest challenges in modern genetics is schizophrenia. Unlike diseases caused by a single mutation, this disorder appears to arise from a combination of hundreds of genetic variants, each with small effects on different brain processes. Some influence neural development, while others alter communication between neurons or the organization of brain connections. Together,…
I was recently digging through my Instagram settings, trying to disable Meta’s now-defunct feature that allowed anyone to create AI deepfakes of me without consent. Anger bubbled up inside as I tapped through the Kafkaesque opt-out process. Rather than throwing my phone across the room, I blurted to my partner that we should leave San…
When Tim Millard received an email about interviewing for a media relations job in January, six months into his job hunt, he assumed he’d speak to a human. When he was instead instructed to record himself answering a series of questions on camera, he felt a familiar pang of resignation—one that had followed him throughout…
