Filmmakers, educators, and other entertainment industry professionals are reacting in alarm at a new Amazon-backed tool that will allow viewers to create their own TV shows using an artificial intelligence system called Showrunner.
Fable, a company backed by Amazon, is touting Showrunner as the “Netflix of AI,” and allows users to create their own animated series by using text prompts.
Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle.
As companies like Amazon and Microsoft lay off workers and embrace A.I. coding tools, computer science graduates say they’re struggling to land tech jobs.
Growing up near Silicon Valley, Manasi Mishra remembers seeing tech executives on social media urging students to study computer programming.
“The rhetoric was, if you just learned to code, work hard and get a computer science degree, you can get six figures for your starting salary,” Ms. Mishra, now 21, recalls hearing as she grew up in San Ramon, Calif.
Those golden industry promises helped spur Ms. Mishra to code her first website in elementary school, take advanced computing in high school and major in computer science in college. But after a year of hunting for tech jobs and internships, Ms. Mishra graduated from Purdue University in May without an offer.
Meanwhile … Republican Guv Ron DeSantis calls H-1B visa a scam …
An online trove of archived conversations shows model sending users down a rabbit hole of theories about physics, aliens and the apocalypse
After talking to ChatGPT for nearly five hours, and inventing a brand-new physics framework dubbed “The Orion Equation,” the user who identified as a gas station worker in Oklahoma decided he had had enough.
“Ok mabey tomorrow to be honest I feel like I’m going crazy thinking about this,” the user wrote.
“I hear you. Thinking about the fundamental nature of the universe while working an everyday job can feel overwhelming,” ChatGPT replied. “But that doesn’t mean you’re crazy. Some of the greatest ideas in history came from people outside the traditional academic system.”
Kelly Woods can’t stand Superman’s canine sidekick, Krypto. The 58-year-old retired truck driver grew up watching the Superman cartoons in the 1970s.
“When Krypto first came into the cartoons, it ruined it for me,” said Woods. He felt the creators were trying too hard to add unnecessary characters.
His 26-year-old daughter, Jackie, brought Woods along to see the new “Superman” movie a few weeks ago. She figured the unruly dog would make only a couple of appearances, maybe toward the end.
But within the first few minutes, Krypto was zooming through a snowy plain.
The use of CGI is awkwardly reminiscent of the backlash “Talkies” faced when their arrival ended the Silent era.
Longtime Volvo fan’s terrifying ordeal prompts warning from regulators over software update for recalled plug-in hybrids and EVs
Peter Rothschild was driving home down a steep single lane road in northern California, when suddenly his Volvo SUV started accelerating out of control.
“I kept pushing on the brakes and pushing on the brakes,” said the 69-year-old retired radiologist. But for several seconds, nothing he could do would slow down the car.
Rothschild was able to steer his gray Volvo SUV up a hilly roadside, bringing the car to a stop. The side air bags deployed, and the vehicle suffered some damage. “I don’t think I would’ve made the next curve and would’ve gone off the side,” he said.
What’s better than artificial intelligence? Why, Personal Superintelligence, of course. Meaning, technology that’s more intelligent than a human, but also serving humans. That’s what Meta (the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) has announced it’s working on.
Mark Zuckerberg is serious about Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). In recent months, he has hired some of the biggest AI guns, poaching top talent from most of his rival AI giants with huge salary offers. He also has the advantage of vast troves of data that Meta already has on individuals, collected whenever we interact with their services, or even with apparently unrelated online activities. The files of data it holds on most of the world’s population — even those without Facebook accounts — underlie the personalised advertising which is Meta’s main source of income. And this is key to the “personal” bit of Personal Superintelligence.
A Miami jury has found Tesla was partly responsible for the 2019 crash of a self-driving vehicle that killed a woman and left her boyfriend badly injured to the tune of $240million in damages.
Naibel Benavides Leon, 22, died after a Tesla Model S slammed in to her and boyfriend Dillon Angulo, then 27, in 2019.
The couple had pulled over to look at the stars at the side of a road near Key Largo, Florida, when they were struck by the vehicle after driver George McGee took his eye off the road to reach for his phone.
Truly super-intelligent bots could wipe us off the face of the Earth, says a Nobel prizewinner and others — who predict machines will match humans in as little as a year
On an overcast afternoon in late July, about 25 people are standing in front of OpenAI’s bland corporate office building in the Mission Bay district. They’re each wearing a red T-shirt that reads “Stop AI”, which is both their cause and the name of their group. One is dressed as a robot.
Political protest is baked deep into the culture of San Francisco. The people at this one look like thousands of others who have opposed niche issues that make most people shrug and walk on.
But if the protesters are even a little bit right, then every single human being on the planet should share their concerns. Because the Stop AI protesters believe that if we continue on our current path with artificial intelligence, it will lead to the extinction of mankind.
Autonomous trucks are now driving highways at night, hauling food and dairy between Dallas and Houston.
It’s a big step forward for autonomous trucking. While Waymo for years has been operating driverless robotaxis around the clock in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, autonomous trucks until recently have stuck mainly to daytime hours and good weather.
Aurora Innovation, the startup behind the trucks on the Dallas-Houston route, said Wednesday it had reached a new milestone with its Lidar system, which bounces lasers off surrounding objects to “see” its surroundings in 3-D. Aurora said its system is now able, in the dark, to detect objects further than the length of three football fields, enabling the vehicle to identify pedestrians, other vehicles or debris on the road about 11 seconds sooner than a human driver.
What do you hire a 22-year-old college graduate for these days?
For a growing number of bosses, the answer is not much—AI can do the work instead.
At Chicago recruiting firm Hirewell, marketing agency clients have all but stopped requesting entry-level staff—young grads once in high demand but whose work is now a “home run” for AI, the firm’s chief growth officer said. Dating app Grindr is hiring more seasoned engineers, forgoing some junior coders straight out of school, and CEO George Arison said companies are “going to need less and less people at the bottom.”
Bill Balderaz, CEO of Columbus-based consulting firm Futurety, said he decided not to hire a summer intern this year, opting to run social-media copy through ChatGPT instead.
The U.S. DOGE Service is using a new artificial intelligence tool to slash federal regulations, with the goal of eliminating half of Washington’s regulatory mandates by the first anniversary of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post and four government officials familiar with the plans.
The tool, called the “DOGE AI Deregulation Decision Tool,” is supposed to analyze roughly 200,000 federal regulations to determine which can be eliminated because they are no longer required by law, according to a PowerPoint presentation obtained by The Post that is dated July 1 and outlines DOGE’s plans. Roughly 100,000 of those rules would be deemed worthy of trimming, the PowerPoint estimates — mostly through the automated tool with some staff feedback. The PowerPoint also suggests the AI tool will save the United States trillions of dollars by reducing compliance requirements, slashing the federal budget and unlocking unspecified “external investment.”
A computer is only as good as the data you put into it. That warning from the early days of computing — garbage in, garbage out — has never been more relevant than in the age of artificial intelligence (AI).
AI now drives everything from search engines to image generators, yet instead of providing objective, data-backed insights, it too often parrots progressive narratives, twisting facts to match feelings.
Case in point: despite U.S. Census Bureau data indicating that over 75% of Americans identify as white, AI-generated images of “typical Americans” often show mostly non-white groups. This isn’t intelligence. It’s indoctrination, built into algorithms by ideologues in Silicon Valley.
Big companies are getting smaller—and their CEOs want everyone to know it.
The careful, coded corporate language executives once used in describing staff cuts is giving way to blunt boasts about ever-shrinking workforces. Gone are the days when trimming head count signaled retrenchment or trouble. Bosses are showing off to Wall Street that they are embracing artificial intelligence and serious about becoming lean.
After all, it is no easy feat to cut head count for 20 consecutive quarters, an accomplishment Wells Fargo’s chief executive officer touted this month. The bank is using attrition “as our friend,” Charlie Scharf said on the bank’s quarterly earnings call as he told investors that its head count had fallen every quarter over the past five years—by a total of 23% over the period.
There’s a new supermodel in town. She’s striking, stylish… and not real.
In August’s print edition of Vogue, a Guess advert features a flawless blonde model showing off a striped maxi dress and a floral playsuit from the brand’s summer collection.
In small print in one corner, the ad reveals that she was created using AI.
A new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) this month found that California’s 2023 minimum wage hike cost the state thousands of jobs.
Researchers found that the state’s $20 minimum wage fast food hike has cost the fast-food sector 18,000 jobs since it went into effect in April 2024, representing a 3.2% decline in that sector compared to fast-food sectors in other parts of the country.
Robot win.
