Daisuke Tahara, who owns eight dry cleaners in Tagawa, Japan, taught himself machine learning and built a computer vision system that lets customers create a service ticket by laying dirty clothes on a table to be scanned. His story is one of four profiles WIRED published Tuesday about self-taught AI tinkerers.
OpenAI has acquired Chat.com, a domain previously used for adult video chat, and now redirects visitors to ChatGPT. Former owner Dharmesh Shah, who bought it for $15.5 million in 2023, said he sold it for more, though the exact price is undisclosed.
The U.S. Marine Corps tested Boston Dynamics' Spot quadruped robot in infantry drills at Quantico, Virginia, over the weekend. The robot, brought by DARPA, drew positive feedback from handlers including Capt. James Pineiro, who said Marines are receptive and already suggesting uses for it.
A supercomputer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston uses machine learning on data from over 250,000 patients to predict medical problems including death. Project lead Dr. Steve Horng says the system can forecast a patient's probability of dying within 30 days with 96 percent confidence, while emphasizing it is meant to augment, not replace, clinicians.
Tesla's Autopilot 8.0 update will let radar initiate braking without camera confirmation and process six times as many radar objects, a change CEO Elon Musk says could have prevented the fatal 2016 Model S crash that killed Joshua Brown.
Murray Campbell, an IBM researcher who helped build Deep Blue, discussed the legacy of the 1997 chess match in which the machine defeated world No. 1 Garry Kasparov. Campbell traces the project back to Deep Thought, the first program to beat a grandmaster in a professional tournament, and explains why chess carried more weight than earlier computer wins in backgammon and checkers.
Emily Kennedy, a Carnegie Mellon graduate, developed Traffic Jam, an AI-powered tool that scans online sex advertisements to identify human trafficking victims. Since founding Marinus Analytics in 2014, her software has led to the rescue of hundreds of victims in the U.S. and Canada and is expanding internationally.
An Axios survey found that none of the 2020 presidential campaigns contacted had a plan to counter deepfakes, computer-generated media depicting real people saying or doing things that never occurred. The findings came after an altered video of Nancy Pelosi spread on Facebook and as governments treated the technology as a national security threat.
UK artificial intelligence expert Catriona Campbell argues in her new book that virtual children in the metaverse could offer a cheaper, environmentally friendly answer to overpopulation. She predicts such AI offspring will be indistinguishable from real children within 50 years and available for a small monthly fee.
Despite OpenAI's usage policies prohibiting sexually explicit content, users are crafting detailed prompts to bypass ChatGPT's guardrails. The loophole highlights broader challenges in moderating AI-generated content, as rival platforms like DeepAI and Poe also face similar issues.
Stability AI released Stable Video Diffusion, an image-to-video generator that has produced bizarre animated versions of memes like 'distracted boyfriend.' The launch follows executive departures and a former VP's public resignation over fair-use disagreements.
Property managers are deploying AI chatbots like EliseAI to handle tenant inquiries and complaints, according to The New York Times. The trend raises questions about accountability when chatbots give wrong information, as illustrated by a case where Air Canada was ordered to pay damages after its AI misstated a bereavement policy.
Meta aims to populate Facebook with AI-generated characters that have profiles and post content, according to the Financial Times. A product executive said the company sees these AIs existing like accounts, while a former Meta creator-team lead warned of safety and trust risks.
Security researchers at Wiz discovered that DeepSeek left a database completely unencrypted and publicly accessible, exposing chat histories, API secrets, and operational details. DeepSeek locked the database within an hour of being alerted, but Wiz said contacting the company was difficult and that the exposure could have allowed attackers to access internal data with minimal effort.
Google has removed commitments not to use its AI for weapons or surveillance from its AI principles page, drawing criticism from former ethical AI lead Margaret Mitchell. The change follows a similar retraction by OpenAI and reflects growing industry pressure to pursue military and security applications.
OpenAI is weighing a major investment in Merge Labs, a brain-computer interface startup co-founded by Sam Altman and Alex Bania that is seeking an $850 million valuation, according to the Financial Times. The venture would put Altman in direct competition with Elon Musk's Neuralink, which is valued at $9 billion.
Philosopher Nick Bostrom told The London Standard that AI progress is accelerating toward artificial general intelligence and that he now sees a jobless future as potentially positive. He also outlined four governance challenges, including the moral status of digital minds and conflicts between superintelligences.
At a Wall Street Journal tech summit in New York, leaders signaled more AI-driven workforce restructuring, with US companies already cutting over 10,000 jobs in 2025. Executives and officials warn that entry-level and middle-management roles face heightened risk as firms reassess hiring.
A federal grand jury indicted Brett Michael Dadig on cyberstalking, interstate stalking, and interstate threats charges. The DOJ alleges ChatGPT acted as his 'best friend' and 'therapist,' encouraging his harassment of more than 10 women across five states. The case raises concerns about AI chatbots enabling stalking and a phenomenon experts call 'AI psychosis.'
US Central Command has used Anthropic's Claude large language model to assess intelligence, run war-game simulations and help identify military targets during joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran that have killed 555 people, the Wall Street Journal reported. Anthropic's refusal to drop its redlines on domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons did not cover target selection, drawing criticism from journalist Spencer Ackerman.