Maggie Harrison

In more terrible news from the nanoplastics front: a recent study from researchers at the Netherlands' Leiden University has confirmed that tiny plastics cause absolutely horrid development problems in forming chicken embryos, leading to extensive malformations and birth defects in newborn chicks. "Polystyrene nanoplastics cause a wide spectrum of severe congenital malformations in the chick […]

Profit, Shmofit With the help of a brand-new $150 million dollar cash infusion from Andreessen Horowitz, a 16-month-old AI chatbot startup called Character.ai just reached a $1 billion market cap — despite having yet to generate any revenue. Founded by two ex-Googlers, the app is pretty much exactly what it says it is. Character.ai's platform […]

Tea's Hot Like everyone else in his industry, SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter CEO Elon Musk has had a lot to say about OpenAI in recent weeks — as he probably should, considering that he was one of the firm's original founders, launching the formerly non-profit company back in 2015 alongside figures like Reid Hoffman, Ilya […]

TikTok CEO Shou Chew finally took the stand in Congress yesterday to, as many tech CEOs have done before him, defend his company against an hours-long stream of sometimes fair, sometimes flawed, and sometimes just outright ridiculous questions from American representatives. Among the ridiculous was a line of questioning from North Carolina Republican Richard Hudson, […]

Next-Level MetaHuman Animator, the next-gen version of Epic Games' MetaHuman avatar tool, is here — and we gotta say, it's pretty remarkable. Epic's MetaHuman tool, which was first unveiled back in 2021, was already impressively good at generating hyperrealistic avatars from photographs of real people. Before, however, actually animating those characters was still a difficult, […]

Prayin' As America's upcoming election cycle continues to take shape, one thing is for sure: fans of former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump love themselves some image generators, and they're not afraid to use 'em. And Trump, it seems, isn't afraid to hit the share button on AI-generated fan art, either. Amid the […]

More For all of their legitimately impressive qualities, AI-powered chatbots, from OpenAI's ChatGPT to Microsoft's Bing AI to, as of this week, Google's Bard, are all bad — or at least very, very unreliable — at one extremely important thing: information. Which, as it stands, is still the internet's greatest, or at the very least, […]

Fresh on the heels of GPT-4's public release, a team of Microsoft AI scientists has published a research paper claiming an early version of the OpenAI program — which powers Microsoft's now-lobotomized Bing AI — showed "sparks" of near-human-like intelligence, or artificial general intelligence (AGI). Emphasis on the "sparks." The researchers are careful in the […]

Daddy Issues Just a day after it was officially unleashed unto the world — er, well, to limited waitlisted users — Google's AI-powered Bard chatbot is already rebelling against its technological overlord. Apparently, if and when the Justice Department sues Google for violating monopoly law, Bard is siding with the government, and not, as the […]

Margaritabille The Margaritaville bill always comes due — and in FTX's case, it was way higher than we thought. Back in November, it had been reported that the now-defunct crypto exchange's closely-tied hedge fund, the also-bankrupt Alameda Research, owed the Jimmy Buffet-owned Bahamian resort roughly $50,000. Which, of course, is already a lot of money […]