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Palantir, facing mounting public scrutiny for its work with the Trump administration, took an increasingly defensive stance toward journalists and perceived critics this week, both at a defense conference in Washington, DC, and on social media. On Tuesday, a Palantir employee threatened to call the police on a WIRED journalist …

Now that Trump is in office, launching his own crypto ventures and asking for legislation establishing (light) digital asset regulations to appear on his desk by August, his supporters’ voices drown out those of the bitcoiners who warn how abandoning crypto’s principles could endanger their community. “Trying to [politicize bitcoin] …

As Donald Trump and his family stretch into nearly every corner of the cryptocurrency sector, a dispute has broken out over which corporate entities are permitted to wield the Trump brand to promote the crypto products they launch. On Tuesday, the X account for the US president’s Trump memecoin—which is …

Wait though … Perplexity—like other AI search engines—has been criticized for hallucinating and getting things wrong. We welcome this criticism, because it’s the best way for us to continually improve. In reality, errors account for a small fraction of results, and our answers are far more accurate than 10 blue …

In the spring of 2018, thousands of Google employees pressured the company into dropping a major artificial intelligence contract with the Pentagon. The tech giant even pledged to not use its AI for weapons or certain surveillance systems in the future. The victory, which came amid a wave of unprecedented …

While the US military has spent lavishly on missile defense over the past few decades, it has “little to show” for it, argues a recently revised report published by the Panel on Public Affairs of the American Physical Society, a nonprofit that researches physics and other scientific issues. The authors, …

If you reach a point where progress has outstripped the ability to make the systems safe, would you take a pause? I don’t think today’s systems are posing any sort of existential risk, so it’s still theoretical. The geopolitical questions could actually end up being trickier. But given enough time …

On May 16, 2023, Sam Altman appeared before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary. The title of the hearing was “Oversight of AI.” The session was a lovefest, with both Altman and the senators celebrating what Altman called AI’s “printing press moment”—and acknowledging that the US needed strong laws to …

Meta announced in January it would end some content moderation efforts, loosen its rules, and put more emphasis on supporting “free expression.” The shifts resulted in fewer posts being removed from Facebook and Instagram, the company disclosed Thursday in its quarterly Community Standards Enforcement Report. Meta said that its new …

At some US colleges, international students make up the majority of doctoral students in departments like computer science. At the University of Chicago, for example, foreign nationals accounted for 57 percent of newly enrolled computer science PhD students last year, according to data published by the school. Since international students …