AI news archive.

Intro I have a microscope. It can see hair. Humans have hair. Some of my friends are humans. How thick is my friends' hair? Apparently, if I go around asking my friends for a strand of their hair, about half will just gi…

Blake Mackenzie, a 12-year-old from Newcastle, has won the top youth prize at the Australian Poetry Slam for his reflections on artificial intelligence. The winning piece, performed at the Sydney Opera House on Sunday ni…

Consider reading Some Memories of Early Anthropic first to get a sense of my raw experience before you read my speculative interpretation. I’m writing these lines in Alamogordo, New Mexico. I’m about as close as a civili…

Data centres are the lifeblood of our digital world, but there are growing concerns about their environmental impact. The BBC explores their rise in charts.

This is part linkpost, and an expansion on a previous shortform posted on LW. I believe a massively undermade point in favour of the belief that AI will be a very big deal is that the AI buildout over the past four years…

You will agree that for a woman who has fought three duels, all of them kills, indulging in such fears is ludicrous. But what's around the corner now is a duel so big that I don't think I have the guts for it; in Faust's…

I am often skeptical of arguments about China that rely heavily on personal experience. The author may explicitly acknowledge that their experience is limited without appropriately treating their arguments with rigor bef…

I am often skeptical of arguments about China that rely heavily on personal experience. The author may explicitly acknowledge that their experience is limited without appropriately treating their arguments with rigor bef…

Tool: Seam Cutter I built this weird and very specific cropping tool - it lets you create a horizontal or vertical cut across an image, then slide the two sides relative to each other. Effectively it lets you crop out a…

We compiled a list of all the hottest AI wearables, including Muse Charm, Bee, Friend, Plaud, and more.

Actor’s storylines in the famous soap will be recut into vertical micro-episodes to be watched on phones – but her fellow cast members say they haven’t been consulted The long-running Australian soap opera Neighbours is…

The mods at r/opensource posted new submission rules that, among other things, banned projects that use AI. The post made Saturday evening opens by saying, "If your project uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI,…

I step into the warm moist air among the columns of the pines, their net of twigs and roots complex as any lines of code. The trees purify and anchor. Their branches balance my restlessness. Their calling is to be presen…

We all know the highlights of the tomb raider’s storied career – but what about the lowlights? We dig deep to unearth the archaeologist’s less glorious moments Happy birthday, Lara! This month marks 30 years since Ms Cro…

Context: I created this to share before the start of courses I facilitate to provide a refresher on recent events, but also as a hook to draw students into engaging with some of ideas we think about and debate in AI safe…

It's weird that AI agents are still so poor at communicating complex information to humans; that their mathematical proofs are correct yet gobbledygook, that their software dashboards overwhelm with irrelevant true infor…

BBC's Blue Planet III is looking to prove its authenticity by leaving in the less-than-perfect shots. Previous incarnations of the nature series were defined by their gorgeous, crystal-clear footage that seemed almost to…

The moment you realize the internet is "held together by glue and dreams."

A historian, a biologist and a physicist walk into a bar. The barista, a part-time epistemologist (like most), asks each of them: Can you please describe what it means for you to know something? Nothing very funny ensues…

TL;DR: SLOW DOWN YOUR DAMN ANIMATED DIAGRAMS . Every critical stage of the animation should a clear view that stays for at least 1 second , and 2 if it's intricate Diamond's strong because of its crystal structure (I thi…

I am developing an application in Unity using ARCore for Android, and I am looking for a way to perform real-time 3D object tracking locally on the device. I am not an expert in computer vision, but I have a good underst…

Continue reading...

Consumer AI launches, tools, and practical coverage.

Release: battledrones v14: Compass Rose, a four player map I added four player online mode to Battledrones - previous maps were limited to two. Here's the initial prompt I used: Add a new map for a four player battle - f…

The average person, presumably, just stumbles along in their relationships, without ever studying the science behind what makes them work. Imagine this : would you want a man, who didn’t go to medical school and doesn’t…

BBC series deliberately uses ‘more organic’ shots to assure viewers animals are not AI-generated, producers say The David Attenborough -narrated series Blue Planet III deliberately includes cloudier, less polished footag…

The robots, stomping their little feet and making tiny R2-D2 noises, sat, fell down dead for a "nap," and summersaulted on voice command.

Book Review: The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence, by Kevin Roose. This is a story of AI as seen through the eyes of the people who are creating it. My first impressi…

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more about AI's impact on the web, follow Emma Roth. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM…

Mainstream AI news from a large tech publication.

We gave the iPhone Duo a 7 /10. But that wasn't always the score we planned, and it might not be the right score forever. Such are the challenges of reviewing - and assessing - a big, new idea about the most popular smar…

We have a tendency to judge past societies more harshly than our own. That is partly because we tend to focus on the evils of past societies that many people at the time either weren’t aware of, or didn’t spend much time…

The closure of the studio responsible for some of the best games of the 21st century leaves the world of RPGs feeling smaller without the hope of another instalment of the much-loved sci-fi series Earlier this week, EA a…

Everything has become so frictionless and optimised that concerted efforts must be made to turn back towards beauty and individuality – even if it has no explicit market value By the time it’s 5pm on a Friday, the headac…

Retro video games are everywhere lately - especially in places where they aren't supposed to be. Halo in a web browser, Wind Waker on the iPhone, Super Smash Bros. in mixed reality. Over the past month or so, these kinds…

People under 35 are hunting for no-frills rides they can pay for in cash and fix themselves – defying expectations to take on steep loans Jack Price joined the marines in fall 2021 knowing he would need a car to get arou…

Mainstream AI news from a large tech publication.

Mainstream AI news from a large tech publication.

Biggest Apple smartwatch gets better health tracking and new readiness tools with a battery and chip boost in preparation for controversial audio AI As the Ultra enters its fourth year as Apple’s biggest and beefiest sma…

Context: AI can now program, draw, animate, create music, do math, write, and probably many more things, almost equally/equally/better than most/all humans, and at scale. Probably, soon it will close the last gaps. Since…

Activision; PC, PS5, Switch 2, Xbox From parkour over Manhattan rooftops and car chases in Paris to the climactic battle at a North Korean air base, the developers have thrown absolutely everything at the game And so we…

I’ve just finished reading Garrison Lovely’s recently released book, “Obsolete.” I wish I had time for a longer review, but I’ll give a brief one and highlight some particularly interesting sections below. I think it’s a…

Many social norms have the format ‘You shouldn’t do X. If you do X, people should punish you. If people don’t punish you, other people should punish them’. People mostly pick up the specific norms from observing one anot…

The next competitive advantage in enterprise AI has less to do with which model you choose than with what you build around it. That’s an important shift. For the past several years, much of the AI conversation has center…

Financial institutions have long treated employee communications as something to archive for regulators. During the Smarsh EDGE event, that archive was recast as a source of business intelligence. Artificial intelligence…

DE STAAT - FREEDOM (Official Music Video) OK well this is a first for me... at 00:44 in this new music video by Dutch alternative rock band De Staat : The visual effects are credited to Matties Grooten of Fake it or Leav…

Discord's latest update released today has a big improvement for Markdown previews: they should now render correctly instead of with "a bunch of symbols," according to the company. LLMs and AI agents often rely on Markdo…

Mainstream AI news from a large tech publication.

Hackers were already probing the bug before defenders were told it existed.

The Audacity is a fearless satire taking on Silicon Valley’s ‘egomaniac weirdos’. Its creator and stars talk ayahuasca ceremonies, mining kids for data – and punching CEOs Showrunner Jonathan Glatzer wanted the tagline o…