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For years, experts have warned that deepfakes—AI-generated videos, images, or audio recordings of people doing or saying things they haven’t actually done in real life—could be deployed in malicious ways. These dangers are now here. Improvements in deepfake technology, and the widespread availability of easy-to-use and cheap (or free) generative models, have made it easier […]
Weaponized deepfakes Read More »
AI systems have already gained impressive mastery over the digital world, but the physical world is still humanity’s domain. As it turns out, building an AI system that can compose a novel or code an app is far easier than developing one that can fold laundry or navigate a city street. To get there, many
When ChatGPT was released to the public in late 2022, it opened people’s eyes to how easily generative AI could churn out vast amounts of human-seeming text from simple prompts. This quickly caught the attention of criminals, who soon began using large language models to produce malicious emails—both the untargeted spam kind and more sophisticated,
Supercharged scams Read More »
When ChatGPT launched as an experimental prototype in late 2022, OpenAI’s chatbot became an everyday everything app for hundreds of millions of people. LLMs like ChatGPT were the new future: The entire tech industry was consumed by the inferno, with companies racing to spin up rival products. The ashes of the old tech world still
In the past, even with an icebreaker and during peak melt season, getting to the North Pole wasn’t a sure bet. It took favorable winds to crack the frozen ocean surface, and ships had to fight through ice that had grown many meters thick over several winters. In the summer of 2025, though, Jochen Knies
Digging for clues about the North Pole’s past Read More »
If you want to capture something wolflike, it’s best to embark before dawn. So on a morning this January, with the eastern horizon still pink-hued, I drove with two young scientists into a blanket of fog. Forty miles to the west, the industrial sprawl of Houston spawned a golden glow. Tanner Broussard’s old Toyota Tacoma
Colossal Biosciences said it cloned red wolves. Is it for real? Read More »
Tech workers in China are being instructed by their bosses to train AI agents to replace them—and it’s prompting a wave of soul-searching among otherwise enthusiastic early adopters. Earlier this month a GitHub project called Colleague Skill, which claimed workers could use it to “distill” their colleagues’ skills and personality traits and replicate them with
Chinese tech workers are starting to train their AI doubles–and pushing back Read More »
Roboticists used to dream big but build small. They’d hope to match or exceed the extraordinary complexity of the human body, and then they’d spend their career refining robotic arms for auto plants. Aim for C-3P0; end up with the Roomba. The real ambition for many of these researchers was the robot of science fiction—one
How robots learn: A brief, contemporary history Read More »
The handsome new book Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, by the tech industry legend Stewart Brand, promises to be the first in a series offering “a comprehensive overview of the civilizational importance of maintenance.” One of Brand’s several biographers described him as a mainstay of both counterculture and cyberculture, and with Maintenance, Brand wants us
The case for fixing everything Read More »
