Imagine for a moment you are a child in 1941, sitting the common entrance exam for public schools with nothing but a pencil and paper. You read the following: “Write, for no more than a quarter of an hour, about a British author.” Today, most of us wouldn’t need 15 minutes to ponder such a question.…

You can only throw so much money at a problem. This, more or less, is the line being taken by AI researchers in a recent survey. Asked whether "scaling up" current AI approaches could lead to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), or a general purpose AI that matches or surpasses human…

OpenAI’s recently launched o3 and o4-mini AI models are state-of-the-art in many respects. However, the new models still hallucinate, or make things up — in fact, they hallucinate more than several of OpenAI’s older models. Hallucinations have proven to be one of the biggest and most difficult…

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that one of the reasons why tech companies are so enthusiastic about shoving AI into every product and service is that they fundamentally do not understand why people dislike AI. I will elaborate. I was recently made aware of the Jetbrains developer ecosystem…

The generative AI revolution shows no sign of slowing as OpenAI recently rolled out its GPT-4.5 model to paying ChatGPT users, while competitors have announced plans to introduce their own latest models—including Anthropic, which unveiled Claude 3.7 Sonnet, its latest language model, late last…

Founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg the company is in the midst of a recruitment drive to ensure customers always have a human to talk to. “[I]t’s so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will be always a human if you want,” he said. The apparent turnaround comes…

The university says it has no confidence in a widely circulated paper by an economics graduate student May 16, 2025 at 9:46 am ET The Massachusetts Institute of Technology didn’t give details on what it believes is wrong with the paper. Photo: Simon Simard/Bloomberg The Massachusetts Institute of…

Sign up for Big Think on Substack The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free. Subscribe A few years ago, in 2022, Google engineer Blake Lemoine was fired for claiming that the chatbot he was working on was sentient. He believed that it could feel…

CYBERUK Peter Garraghan – CEO of Mindgard and professor of distributed systems at Lancaster University – asked the CYBERUK audience for a show of hands: how many had banned generative AI in their organizations? Three hands went up. "And how many, in your deepest of hearts, actually have a good grasp…

If you've been worried about the AI singularity taking over every job and leaving you out on street, you can now breathe a sigh of relief, because AI isn't coming for your career anytime soon. Not because it doesn't want to — but because it literally can't. A recent experiment by researchers at…

In this post I’ll show you how I found a zeroday vulnerability in the Linux kernel using OpenAI’s o3 model. I found the vulnerability with nothing more complicated than the o3 API – no scaffolding, no agentic frameworks, no tool use. Recently I’ve been auditing ksmbd for vulnerabilities. ksmbd is “a…

The new hire had a simple task. All they had to do was assign people to work on a new web development project based on the client's budget and the team's availability. But the staffer soon ran into an unexpected problem: They couldn't dismiss an innocuous pop-up blocking files that contained…

The latest fad amongst tech CEOs is no longer "founder mode", or taking drugs that they would fire you for taking, or telling everybody to return to the office — it's demanding that all work be AI-first! This is a great idea if you think nobody at your company is great at what they do. It may…

Published May 16, 2025 | Comments (208) | © Alex Wong/Getty Images Thanks to a new breed of chatbots, American stupidity is escalating at an advanced pace. The AI industry has promised to “disrupt” large parts of society, and you need look no further than the U.S. educational system to see how…

And yet, one of the first studies to look at AI use in conjunction with employment data finds the technology’s effect on time and money to be negligible. “AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation,” economists Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard…

This might be the highest leverage period for AI security in our generation New technology paradigms emerge faster than security can clean up their mess; consider the rise of personal computing and the Internet, where security fought a rear-guard action during and after mass adoption (and is still…

If and when AI will start replacing human labor has been the subject of numerous debates. While it’s still hard to say with certainty if AI is beginning to take over roles previously done by humans, a recent survey from the World Economic Forum found that 40% of employers intend to cut staff where…

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who helms the company behind ChatGPT rival Claude, has warned that artificial intelligence could wipe out a staggering 50% of all entry-level white collar jobs, while spiking unemployment by up to 20% in the next five years, in a new interview with Axios. Amodei…

You’ll have noticed how previously normal people start acting like addicts to their favourite generative AI and shout at you like you’re trying to take their cocaine away. Matthias Döpmann is a software developer. He’s been trying out AI autocomplete for coding. He was very impressed at how good the…

Artificial Intelligence began as a quest to simulate the human brain. Is it now in the process of transforming the human brain’s role in daily life? The Industrial Revolution diminished the need for manual labor. As someone who researches the application of AI in international business, I can’t help…

The ancient Greeks used the term “ouroboros” to symbolize the three fundamental phases in the cycle of life: life, death, and renewal. The cycle was visually represented as a serpent swallowing its own tail. As the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs)…

Image by Annie Ruygt A heartfelt provocation about AI-assisted programming. Tech execs are mandating LLM adoption. That’s bad strategy. But I get where they’re coming from. Some of the smartest people I know share a bone-deep belief that AI is a fad — the next iteration of NFT mania. I’ve been…

Gift a 404 Media subscription to a friend. The federal government is working on a website and API called “ai.gov” to “accelerate government innovation with AI” that is supposed to launch on July 4 and will include an analytics feature that shows how much a specific government team is using AI,…

Notes Paris Marx is joined by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna to discuss the harms of generative AI, how the industry keeps the public invested while companies flounder under the weight of unmet promises, and what people can do to push back. Guest Emily M. Bender is a Professor in the Department of…

For some people, it seems, AI is an amazing machine which - while fallible - represents an incredible leap forward in productivity. For other people, it seems, AI is wrong more often than right and - although occasionally useful - requires constant supervision. Who is right? I recently pointed out a…

The Meta chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, called it “the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use”. But Barry Smethurst, 41, a record shop worker trying to travel by rail from Saddleworth to Manchester Piccadilly, did not agree. Waiting on the platform for a morning train that was…

Using AI chatbots actually reduces activity in the brain versus accomplishing the same tasks unaided, and may lead to poorer fact retention, according to a new preprint study out of MIT. Seeking to understand how the use of LLM chatbots affects the brain, a team led by MIT Media Lab research…

Does ChatGPT harm critical thinking abilities? A new study from researchers at MIT’s Media Lab has returned some concerning results. The study divided 54 subjects—18 to 39 year-olds from the Boston area—into three groups, and asked them to write several SAT essays using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s…

Congratulations, you’re still breathing. That’s simultaneously the best and worst thing that could have happened to you. Contents You know what’s perverse about apocalypses? You expect fire, brimstone, and dramatic explosions. Instead, you get a gentle erosion of reality, served with a friendly…

Jun 19, 2025 - Business Christine Wang Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince speaks with Sara Fischer onstage at an Axios event in Cannes. Photo: Anthony Bourgeois on behalf of Axios Publishers face an existential threat in the AI era and need to take action to make sure they are fairly compensated for…

A new study by researchers at Dartmouth Health highlights the potential risks of artificial intelligence in medical imaging research, showing that algorithms can be taught to give correct answers but for illogical reasons. The study, published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, used a cache of 5,000…

Infinite Scroll Recent studies suggest that tools such as ChatGPT make our brains less active and our writing less original. June 25, 2025 Illustration by Ariel Davis You’re reading Infinite Scroll, Kyle Chayka’s weekly column on how technology shapes culture. In an experiment last year at the…

Press Release Gartner Predicts Over 40% of Agentic AI Projects Will Be Canceled by End of 2027 SYDNEY, Australia, June 25, 2025 Analysts to Explore Agentic AI Trends During Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo, September 8-10 on the Gold Coast Over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027,…

Companies that develop generative AI always make it a point to say that they include links to websites in the answers that their chatbots generate for users. But Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has revealed to Axios that search traffic referrals keep plummeting. Publishers are facing an existential…

Microsoft has revealed details of an artificial intelligence system that performs better than human doctors at complex health diagnoses, creating a “path to medical superintelligence”. The company’s AI unit, which is led by the British tech pioneer Mustafa Suleyman, has developed a system that…

Published June 30, 2025 | Comments (17) | The ChatGPT app logo displays on the screen of a smartphone Photo byJaque Silva/NurPhoto via Getty Images An employee's public lament over poached colleagues and a company-wide shutdown reveal a difficult truth: the human cost of building AI is reaching a…

Ford chief predicts AI will replace ‘literally half of all white-collar workers’ July 2, 2025 at 9:00 pm ET Testifying before the Senate Banking Committee, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said generative artificial intelligence “has enormous capabilities to make really significant changes in the…

“Things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.” - Rudiger Dornbusch I’ve had a lot of discussions on my podcast where we haggle out timelines to AGI. Some guests think it’s 20 years away - others 2 years. Here’s where my thoughts…

Alex.Party Home About RSS Mastodon Twitch 5/5/2025Editor’s Note: previous titles for this article have been added here for posterity. The future of web development is blockchain. Get on or get left behind. The future of web development is CSS-inJS. Get on or get left behind. The future of web…