November 20, 2024

AI can now create a replica of your personality

Imagine sitting down with an AI model for a spoken two-hour interview. A friendly voice guides you through a conversation that ranges from your childhood, your formative memories, and your career to your thoughts on immigration policy. Not long after, a virtual replica of you is able to embody your values and preferences with stunning…

August 2024

Ray Kurzweil: Technology will let us fully realize our humanity

August 27, 2024
By the end of this decade, AI will likely surpass humans at all cognitive tasks, igniting the scientific revolution that futurists have long imagined. Digital scientists will have perfect memory of every research paper ever published and think a million times faster than we can. Our plodding progress in fields like robotics, nanotechnology, and genomics…

This designer creates magic from everyday materials

August 27, 2024
Around 2012, at a bakery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Skylar Tibbits noticed someone wearing a shirt with the logo of a 3D-printing company. Tibbits, a designer and computer scientist, approached her and posed a question: “Why can’t I print something that walks off the machine?” The idea kicked off a multiyear collaboration between the industrial 3D-printing…

What will AI mean for economic inequality?

August 27, 2024
Prominent AI researchers expect the arrival of artificial general intelligence anywhere between “the next couple of years” and “possibly never.” At the same time, leading economists disagree about the potential impact of AI: Some anticipate a future of perpetually accelerating productivity, while others project more modest gains. But most experts agree that technological advancement, however…

A skeptic’s guide to humanoid-robot videos

August 27, 2024
This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first, sign up here. We are living in “humanoid summer” right now, if you didn’t know. Or at least it feels that way to Ken Goldberg, a roboticist extraordinaire who leads research in the field at the University of…

TechCrunch Space: The Starliner saga comes to a close — for now

August 26, 2024

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. NASA leadership have made their decision: Starliner will be coming back to Earth — empty. More on that below. Want to reach out with a tip? Email Aria at aria.techcrunch@gmail.com or send a message on Signal at 512-937-3988. You also can send a note to the whole TechCrunch […]

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Polaris Dawn will push the limits of SpaceX’s human spaceflight program – here’s how to watch it launch live

August 26, 2024

After a nearly three-year interlude, Jared Isaacman is returning to space. The billionaire entrepreneur first went to orbit as part of the Inspiration4 mission, which made history for having a crew composed entirely of private citizens, not professional astronauts. But with this next mission, Polaris Dawn, he and mission partner SpaceX have set their sights […]

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OpenAI supports California bill requiring watermarks on AI content

August 26, 2024

OpenAI threw its support behind a California bill requiring tech companies to label AI-generated content, according to a letter from OpenAI’s chief strategy officer viewed by Reuters. The bill is headed for a final vote in August. AB 3211 requires watermarks in the metadata of AI-generated photos, videos, and audio clips. Lots of AI companies […]

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Apple will replace CFO Luca Maestri next year

August 26, 2024

Apple announced today that Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri will step away from his executive role, effective January 1. Kevan Parekh, Apple’s current VP of Financial Planning, will be promoted to CFO after 11 years at Apple. Maestri has been CFO at Apple since 2014, and he’s now transitioning to a different role in the […]

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Anthropic publishes the ‘system prompts’ that make Claude tick

August 26, 2024

Generative AI models aren’t actually human-like. They have no intelligence or personality — they’re simply statistical systems predicting the likeliest next words in a sentence. But like interns at a tyrannical workplace, they do follow instructions without complaint — including initial “system prompts” that prime the models with their basic qualities, and what they should […]

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