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AI is an energy hog. This is what it means for climate change.

As AI has become more integrated into our world, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about the technology’s rising electricity demand. You may have seen the headlines proclaiming that AI uses as... Read more »

Meta says AI-generated election content is not happening at a “systemic level”

As voters will head to polls this year in more than 50 countries, experts have raised the alarm over AI-generated political disinformation and the prospect that malicious actors will use generative AI... Read more »

The Download: how criminals use AI, and OpenAI’s Chinese data blunder

Artificial intelligence has brought a big boost in productivity—to the criminal underworld. Generative AI provides a new, powerful tool kit that allows malicious actors to work far more efficiently and internationally than... Read more »

OpenAI’s latest blunder shows the challenges facing Chinese AI models

In fact, among the few long Chinese tokens in GPT-4o that aren’t either pornography or gambling nonsense, two are “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and “People’s Republic of China.” The presence of these... Read more »

Five ways criminals are using AI

That’s because AI companies have put in place various safeguards to prevent their models from spewing harmful or dangerous information. Instead of building their own AI models without these safeguards, which is... Read more »

The Download: how to test AI, and treating paralysis

Humans are complicated beings. The ways we communicate are multilayered, and psychologists have devised many kinds of tests to measure our ability to infer meaning and understanding from interactions with each other. ... Read more »

Join me at EmTech Digital this week!

Between the world leaders gathering in Seoul for the second AI Safety Summit this week and Google and OpenAI’s launches of their supercharged new models, Astra and GPT-4o, the timing could not be better. AI... Read more »

A device that zaps the spinal cord gave paralyzed people better control of their hands

The stimulation won’t work in the small percentage of people who have no remaining connection between the brain and spine below their injury. But for people who still have a connection, the... Read more »

AI models can outperform humans in tests to identify mental states

Theory of mind is a hallmark of emotional and social intelligence that allows us to infer people’s intentions and engage and empathize with one another. Most children pick up these kinds of... Read more »

The Download: GPT-4o’s polluted Chinese training data, and astronomy’s AI challenge

Soon after OpenAI released GPT-4o last Monday, some Chinese speakers started to notice that something seemed off about this newest version of the chatbot: the tokens it uses to parse text were... Read more »