February 9, 2025

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admits that AI’s benefits may not be widely distributed

In a new essay on his personal blog, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company is open to a “compute budget,” among other “strange-sounding” ideas, to “enable everyone on Earth to use a lot of AI” and ensure the benefits of the technology are widely distributed. “The historical impact of technological progress suggests that most […]

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Why we should all be rooting for boring AI

August 22, 2023
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. I’m back from a wholesome week off picking blueberries in a forest. So this story we published last week about the messy ethics of AI in warfare is just the antidote, bringing my…

Why salt marshes could help save Venice

August 22, 2023
Venice, Italy, is suffering from a combination of subsidence—the city’s foundations slowly sinking into the mud on which they are built—and rising sea levels. In the worst-case scenario, it could disappear underwater by the year 2100. Alessandro Gasparotto, an environmental engineer, is one of the many people trying to keep that from happening. Standing on…

Dipp uses AI to fix bottlenecks between marketing and design teams

August 22, 2023
Before founding dipp, Jennifer Chen and Mikhail Abramov spent 15 years working as art directors in New York City. During that time, Chen says they realized that the marketing, sales and design process have stayed the same, despite new technology and tools being introduced to the market, and is often riddled with bottlenecks. “Salespeople have […]

How ubiquitous keyboard software puts hundreds of millions of Chinese users at risk

August 21, 2023
For millions of Chinese people, the first software they download on a new laptop or smartphone is always the same: a keyboard app. Yet few of them are aware that it may make everything they type vulnerable to spying eyes. Since dozens of Chinese characters can share the same latinized phonetic spelling, the ordinary QWERTY…

Triller’s S-1 filing claims 550M users, but its app installs fall far short, new data shows

August 21, 2023
TikTok competitor Triller is preparing to go public, but estimates from Apptopia call its self-reported user numbers into question. Per Triller’s S-1 filing, the short form video app has had 550 million lifetime signups. But market intelligence firm Apptopia estimates that Triller has been downloaded just 73.2 million times since launch in 2015 — that’s […]

Teeny EV startup Arcimoto hooks up with defense contractor

August 21, 2023
What happens when a maker of tiny electric vehicles dips its wheels into the military industrial complex? We’re about to find out. On Monday, Arcimoto said it is diversifying beyond its usual business via a partnership with Department of Defense contractor Matbock. That’s a first for the EV startup, which is best known for its […]

The human costs of the AI boom

August 21, 2023
AI companies are using online labor to outsource the large amounts of hidden manual work needed to build their applications.