AI is all the rage, and that includes on the toy shelves for this holiday season. Tempting though it may be to want to bless the kids in your life with the latest and greatest, advocacy organization Fairplay is begging you not to give children AI toys. “There’s lots of buzz about AI — but […]
DOGE Laid Off the Humans. Now the IRS Is Deploying AI Agents
Months after Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency stripped the Internal Revenue Service for parts and snagged as much taxpayer data as they could get their hands on, the agency is getting some support—just not from actual people. According to a report from Axios, the IRS is deploying AI agents for the first […]
Move Over Crypto Bros, the AI PACs Are Here to Buy the Next Election
The crypto community was able to help buy itself a friendly administration in the 2024 election by pouring money into political action committees, and now the AI industry looks like it is planning to follow the playbook heading into the midterms. According to CNBC, the biggest PAC in the game has already picked its first […]
ChatGPT Has Problems Saying No
If you’re looking for some real talk, there’s probably no reason to ask ChatGPT. Thanks to the web-scraping-for-good powers of the Internet Archive, The Washington Post got hold of 47,000 conversations with the chatbot and analyzed the back-and-forths with users. Among its findings are evidence that OpenAI’s flagship chatbot still has major sycophancy problems, telling […]
What’s Cooler Than Building a Literal God? Building the New Uber
An interesting shift seems to be happening in the language of OpenAI’s biggest hype people. The term “artificial general intelligence” and the idea of the do-it-all AI seem to have fallen out of favor a bit. In its place: personalized AI experiences and researchers. Perhaps the clearest example of this change can be seen in […]
OpenAI Will Lose $74 Billion the Same Year That Anthropic Breaks Even: Report
OpenAI has committed more than $1.4 trillion to building out its data center infrastructure in the next 8 years. It’s projected to lose $74 billion in 2028 alone, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal citing internal documents from the company. On the opposite end of the spectrum, AI startup Anthropic is […]
Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race
Palantir CEO Alex Karp talks so much that you’d think that he just likes the sound of his own voice—though you wonder if he actually hears what he’s saying. The subject of the recently published Michael Steinberger book “The Philosopher in the Valley” popped onto The Axios Show this week to talk about all kinds […]
AI Capabilities May Be Overhyped on Bogus Benchmarks, Study Finds
You know all of those reports about artificial intelligence models successfully passing the bar or achieving Ph.D.-level intelligence? Looks like we should start taking those degrees back. A new study from researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute suggests that most of the popular benchmarking tools that are used to test AI performance are often unreliable […]
Why Is the AI Czar Already Saying OpenAI Won’t Get a Bailout?
Is it a good sign or a bad sign that the biggest player in an emerging industry actively making trillion-dollar commitments that are artificially propping up the economy is asking for government support, and representatives of the government are weighing in on it? Asking for a friend. Yesterday, OpenAI’s CFO Sarah Friar made headlines when […]
Small Towns Are Betting That the Data Center Boom Will Never End
What happens when data centers come to town? A whole lot, wanted or not. Tech firms are promising to pour trillions of dollars into building new data centers to continue powering the rapid growth of AI models, which means they are asking communities across the country if they are looking for new neighbors. According to […]