December 23, 2024

Will we ever trust robots?

The world might seem to be on the brink of a humanoid-robot heyday. New breakthroughs in artificial intelligence promise the type of capable, general-purpose robots previously seen only in science fiction—robots that can do things like assemble cars, care for patients, or tidy our homes, all without being given specialized instructions.  It’s an idea that…

LLMs become more covertly racist with human intervention

March 11, 2024
Since their inception, it’s been clear that large language models like ChatGPT absorb racist views from the millions of pages of the internet they are trained on. Developers have responded by trying to make them less toxic. But new research suggests that those efforts, especially as models get larger, are only curbing racist views that…

After losing access to Twitter’s API, Block Party pivots to privacy

March 11, 2024

Block Party, a startup developed by software engineer and tech diversity advocate Tracy Chou, was among the victims of Twitter’s (now X’s) API changes earlier this year, forcing it to pivot its business. At the SXSW conference in Austin this weekend, Chou presented a glimpse of what Block Party is now up to with its […]

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VR headsets can be hacked with an Inception-style attack

March 11, 2024
In the Christoper Nolan movie Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character uses technology to enter his targets’ dreams to steal information and insert false details into their subconscious.  A new “inception attack” in virtual reality works in a similar way. Researchers at the University of Chicago exploited a security vulnerability in Meta’s Quest VR system that allows…