One day this fall, I watched an electronic sign outside the Broadway-Lafayette subway station in Manhattan switch seamlessly between an ad for makeup and one promoting the website Pickyourbaby.com, which promises a way for potential parents to use genetic tests to influence their baby’s traits, ...

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. AI chatbots can sway voters better than political advertisements The news: Chatting with a politically biased AI model is more effective than political ads at ...

In January 2024, the phone rang in homes all around New Hampshire. On the other end was Joe Biden’s voice, urging Democrats to “save your vote” by skipping the primary. It sounded authentic, but it wasn’t. The call was a fake, generated by artificial intelligence. Today, the technology behind that ...

In 2024, a Democratic congressional candidate in Pennsylvania, Shamaine Daniels, used an AI chatbot named Ashley to call voters and carry on conversations with them. “Hello. My name is Ashley, and I’m an artificial intelligence volunteer for Shamaine Daniels’s run for Congress,” the calls began. ...

Most organizations feel the imperative to keep pace with continuing advances in AI capabilities, as highlighted in a recent MIT Technology Review Insights report. That clearly has security implications, particularly as organizations navigate a surge in the volume, velocity, and variety of security ...

Sometimes geothermal hot spots are obvious, marked by geysers and hot springs on the planet’s surface. But in other places, they’re obscured thousands of feet underground. Now AI could help uncover these hidden pockets of potential power. A startup company called Zanskar announced today that it’s ...

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. OpenAI has trained its LLM to confess to bad behavior What’s new: OpenAI is testing a new way to expose the complicated processes at work inside large language ...

OpenAI is testing another new way to expose the complicated processes at work inside large language models. Researchers at the company can make an LLM produce what they call a confession, in which the model explains how it carried out a task and (most of the time) owns up to any bad behavior. ...

As many of us are ramping up with shopping, baking, and planning for the holiday season, nuclear power plants are also getting ready for one of their busiest seasons of the year. Here in the US, nuclear reactors follow predictable seasonal trends. Summer and winter tend to see the highest ...

aMeta lready sells VR headsets and Ray-Ban smart glasses, but these new glasses sound a bit different. Their format factor would reportedly be similar to the Apple Vision Pro, with a puck-like power source.