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Assemblymember Buffy Wicks announced a first-of-its-kind partnership involving the State of California, news publishers, tech companies, and philanthropy to support local journalism and launch a National AI Accelerator. The partnership will provide nearly $250 million in funding over five years, with the majority allocated to newsrooms, especially those in underserved areas. Continue Reading →

Microsoft's "Recall" is an upcoming Windows 11 feature that will create a searchable timeline of your activities, allowing you to easily retrieve and review ("recall") past work. It accomplishes this by capturing and storing screenshots of nearly everything you see or do on your PC. What could possibly go wrong? Continue Reading →

Condé Nast has signed a multi-year deal with OpenAI, allowing the AI company to use content from its publications, such as The New Yorker, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. This partnership aims to generate revenue and ensure proper attribution for the media company’s content, amidst challenges posed by changes in traditional search engines. Details of the deal are undisclosed. Continue Reading →

Today, just seven years after the term deepfake was coined, absolutely anyone who is interested in making a photorealistic image or video of anything has the ability to do so at no (or very low) cost, in real (or very near-real) time. Continue Reading →

We've reached an era where summarizing any meeting, lecture, or event is as simple as hitting “record.” While this technological convenience is undeniably appealing, particularly in our fast-paced world, there’s a growing concern that something crucial is being lost as people abandon the art of personal note-taking in favor of AI-generated summaries. Continue Reading →

For those of you not of a certain age, at the climax of the original Ghostbusters movie, Gozer the Gozerian (an ancient Sumerian demigod, aka Google) offers the Ghostbusters a choice (albeit, not a great one): they get to choose the form of the monster that will annihilate humanity. As Hollywood movies often do, this worked out okay; evil marshmallow monsters can end up toasted. Even though Google isn't a giant Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, the choice it's offering publishers is absolutely existential. Continue Reading →

X announced the latest iterations of its Grok AI models, Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini. The company says these models bring enhanced reasoning capabilities and new functionalities to the platform, including the ability to generate images directly on X. Access to Grok-2 is currently restricted to Premium and Premium+ users. Continue Reading →

Do we need AI regulation? Can we articulate a specific danger? If so, how far should the regulations go? Who will they protect? How will they be enforced? How can we accomplish the protections we need and still foster and encourage innovation? These are all rational questions that, one would hope, lawmakers are asking themselves as they craft our laws. Continue Reading →

I read this study before bed last night: "Conversational AI Powered by Large Language Models Amplifies False Memories in Witness Interviews." It scared me more than I thought it would. The study explores how chatbots powered by LLMs can influence the formation of false memories for users; in other words, they can literally make users hallucinate. Continue Reading →

With all that is going on in the world -- real problems, real wars, real issues that are happening in real time -- it's easy to understand why we don't hear much about the potential socioeconomic impact of AI. There's lots of talk about regulations, privacy, safety, ethics, and intellectual property rights, but not much talk about how AI is going to truly impact how we spend our day. Let's explore. Continue Reading →