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AI is already making online crimes easier. It could get much worse.

Cherepanov and Strýček were confident that their discovery, which they dubbed PromptLock, marked a turning point in generative AI, showing how the technology could be exploited to create highly flexible malware attacks.... Read more »

Why EVs are gaining ground in Africa

But there are some signs of progress. I just finished up a story about the economic case: A recent study in Nature Energy found that EVs from scooters to minibuses could be... Read more »

AI is already making online swindles easier. It could get much worse.

Cherepanov and Strýček were confident that their discovery, which they dubbed PromptLock, marked a turning point in generative AI, showing how the technology could be exploited to create highly flexible malware attacks.... Read more »

What’s next for Chinese open-source AI

DeepSeek’s breakout moment wasn’t China’s first open-source success. Alibaba’s Qwen Lab had been releasing open-weight models for years. By September 2024,  well before DeepSeek’s V3 launch, Alibaba was saying that global downloads... Read more »

Is a secure AI assistant possible?

It’s important to note here that prompt injection has not yet caused any catastrophes, or at least none that have been publicly reported. But now that there are likely hundreds of thousands... Read more »

The Download: inside the QuitGPT movement, and EVs in Africa

The popularity of commercial nuclear reactors has surged in recent years as worries about climate change and energy independence drowned out concerns about meltdowns and radioactive waste. The problem is, building nuclear... Read more »

EVs could be cheaper to own than gas cars in Africa by 2040

In some African countries, however, political instability and uncertain economic conditions make borrowing money more expensive. To some extent, the high financing costs affect the purchase of any vehicle, regardless of how... Read more »

A “QuitGPT” campaign is urging people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions

For Stephen, who had already been tinkering with other chatbots, learning about Brockman’s donation was the final straw. “That’s really the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he says. When he canceled... Read more »

The Download: Making AI Work, and why the Moltbook hype is similar to Pokémon

Are you interested in learning more about the ways in which AI is actually being used? We’ve launched a new weekly newsletter series exploring just that: digging into how generative AI is... Read more »

Why the Moltbook frenzy was like Pokémon

The whole experiment reminded our senior editor for AI, Will Douglas Heaven, of something far less interesting: Pokémon. Back in 2014, someone set up a game of Pokémon in which the main... Read more »