A Columbia University student recently shone a light on a disturbing corner of today’s job market. Roy Lee, 21, was fed up with the antiquated way that large tech firms were testing job candidates with computer coding riddles you had to memorize, so he created a tool that his peers could use to beat the system.
Last year, the chief executive officer of a leading AI firm was asked at a private Silicon Valley dinner about how his company differentiated from others building “foundation models,” the systems underpinning chatbots like ChatGPT.
When Mark Zuckerberg earnestly looked at a camera and told the world (or President-elect Donald Trump) that he was shutting down all fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram, he left out some important context.
The AI boom of the past two years has largely been a two-horse race. Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft Corp.-funded OpenAI have duked it out for customers, while Amazon.com Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. have nibbled at the margins for market share.
Recommend reading that provides a bed of knowledge for the key themes we think will define 2025. Ours differs from other lists you might see elsewhere at this time of year in that we focus on relevance rather than recency, though there are new books here, too.
Saturday marks two years since OpenAI posted an oddly named widget called ChatGPT to the web. Its staffers placed bets on how many users it would accumulate, the highest estimate being 100,000. How wrong they were.
News broke this week that the US Department of Justice wants to force Alphabet Inc.’s Google to sell Chrome, its dominant web browser. That has led to much head scratching in the tech industry.
The multi-trillion-dollar artificial intelligence boom was built on certainty that generative models would keep getting exponentially better. Spoiler alert: they aren’t.
One of the memorable moments of Nvidia Corp.’s most recent conference for developers came toward the end of the chip giant’s semi-annual event.
A middle-aged man who works in emergency services in the US had been battling depression and suicidal thoughts for 17 years, unable to sleep most nights and leaving his wife and teen daughter walking on eggshells because of his irritability, before he opted for a shot in the dark.
Sam Altman has his hands in countless projects while also building “mankind’s last invention”: artificial general intelligence, or AI systems that surpass our own cognitive abilities. These galactic aspirations were reinforced on Monday when Altman published a dramatic blog post reminding us that superintelligence will bring prosperity for everyone. It’s just a “few thousand days” away, he added.
In the frothy business of selling artificial intelligence service, Salesforce Inc. has been punching above its own weight. “Salesforce?” I hear you wonder. The folks in the dull business of selling customer relationship management software?
Tech companies of a certain size have long expected an easy ride from authorities, and for good reason. They always got it. Apple Inc. for years abused loopholes to pay virtually zero tax in the European Union while generating record profits there, thanks to special treatment from Ireland, where it bases its European headquarters.
Mark Zuckerberg may have a history of copying of others’ ideas, but when it comes to navigating the generative AI hype cycle, he’s the one forging a smarter path.
For a technology that promises to help businesses cut costs, artificial intelligence has had a big problem with being so costly.
Is generative AI worth the money?
Money talks, but even $23 billion didn’t convince the founders of Wiz Inc. to sell to Alphabet Inc.
The artificial intelligence hype that made Nvidia Corp. the world’s biggest company has come with a price for the world’s climate. Data centers housing its powerful chips are gorging power and belching carbon dioxide, and sobering figures now reveal the extent of the problem.
Does anyone in Silicon Valley know the saying, “The bigger they are, the harder they fall?” Perhaps it’s just a matter of time before they will.
You have to hand it to Apple Inc. After an embarrassing, tone-deaf ad last month that made the company look oblivious to AI’s impact on the world, its marketing department has now rebranded AI as “Apple Intelligence.” It’s a feat of superiority only the company could pull off.
When Microsoft Corp. invested more than $10 billion for a chunk of OpenAI, scientists inside its storied research division were rankled about being shoved aside for a newer player from outside the company.
There’s a persistent mystery about Mark Zuckerberg, and it’s not the one about his new chain necklace. The chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc. has spent billions of dollars building powerful artificial intelligence models and is giving that technology away for free.
Innovation only gets hindered when AI startups find themselves on an assembly line to Big Tech. Here’s hoping the open-source movement continues to thrive.
It’s almost impossible for an artificial-intelligence startup to build anything as good as ChatGPT, but Inflection was getting there.
For many people, Facebook is the internet, and the number of its users is still growing, according to Meta Platforms Inc.’s latest financial results. But Mark Zuckerberg isn’t just celebrating that continuing growth.
There’s a price to pay for all the generative AI tools that professionals are using to make themselves more efficient. It’s not just a subscription fee to OpenAI, Microsoft Corp. or some other AI company — it’s their privacy too.
Avi Schiffmann is an entrepreneur with a crazy idea that might become our new reality. Recently, he went on a podcast and then wondered afterwards about how he’d presented himself.
When news stories emerged last week that OpenAI had been working on a new AI model called Q* (pronounced “q star”), some suggested this was a major step toward powerful, humanlike artificial intelligence that could one day go rogue.
Elon Musk announced his new artificial intelligence company xAI on Wednesday, stating that its aim was to “understand the true nature of the universe.”
It seems fitting that one of Google’s most important inventions — one that would come back to haunt the company — was initially devised over lunch.
Chatbots aren’t just useful for writing essays and emails. Those designed to show empathy and retain memories about their users are already acting as personal guides.
When OpenAI’s Sam Altman spoke to U.S. senators in May, he made a startling admission. He didn’t really want people to use ChatGPT. “We’d love it if they use it less,” he said. The reason? “We don’t have enough GPUs.”
Today, a similar phenomenon goes on behind the scenes in developing artificial intelligence: Humans label much of the data used to train AI models and they often babysit those models in the wild too, meaning our modern-day machinery isn’t as fully automated as we think.
As Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc., and — now — Amazon.com Inc. blaze ahead in the race to deploy advanced chatbots like ChatGPT, one rival remains nowhere to be seen. Apple Inc. may be biding its time for the technology to mature...
Following a great deal of hype last year, companies now seem to be reining back their investments in the metaverse.
Just as we were getting used to the idea of ChatGPT writing emails and conducting research, OpenAI has upgraded it with capabilities that make it even more of a threat to big tech companies such as Google.
Elon Musk and an array of public figures have signed their names to an open letter that went viral this week, calling for a six-month pause on training language models more powerful than GPT-4, the technology underpinning ChatGPT.
Of all the questions that ChatGPT has raised about the future of artificial intelligence, one still reverberates through Silicon Valley: Why couldn’t the industry’s largest technology firms breed an innovative service with a similar kind of impact, especially after amassing some of the world’s largest AI teams?
The tech bubble has finally popped.
OpenAI isn’t publicly speculating about its future applications, but if its new chatbot starts sharing links to other websites, particularly those that sell things, that could spell real danger for Google.
Restructuring is a horrible time for the staff of any company, but it’s also an opportunity to concentrate on what reliably makes money.
Elon Musk has wasted no time in showing the world that Twitter Inc.’s new sheriff is in town — or rather its “chief twit” is. That was his new Twitter bio last week when he walked into the company’s San Francisco headquarters holding a sink, a gag prop for a tweet.
As Mark Zuckerberg spoke to the camera in a pre-recorded presentation on Tuesday to kick off Meta Platforms Inc.’s annual virtual reality conference, he needed to address the elephant in the room: Enormous skepticism had grown around his vision for the metaverse.
Elon Musk is reviving his original $54.20 takeover bid for Twitter Inc., perhaps because he doesn’t want to go through a legal process that divulges more embarrassing text messages.
Big Tech founders like Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet Inc.’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page have fashioned themselves as modern-day autocrats of business, thanks to the way they have structured their initial public offerings and voting shares over the past decade.
Greta Thunberg threw the “greenwashing” charge at financial officials at COP26 last week in what has become a regular problem for companies grappling to become more environmentally friendly. But here’s one reason the slur is so widespread: measuring a carbon footprint is hard.
At a congressional hearing on Tuesday, former Facebook Inc. product manager Frances Haugen didn’t need to convince lawmakers that the company has a big problem.
