In-depth articles with more detailed investigations, interesting thought pieces, and more.
Author Molly White argues that AI companies are endangering free knowledge projects by exploiting them without contributing back. In her newsletter “Citation Needed,” White describes how generative AI companies use open resources like Wikipedia while placing costly demands on their infrastructure and failing to provide attribution or financial support. The real threat isn’t AI using …
The tech industry continues to promote AI agents as transformative tools, but lacks consensus on what they actually are. According to TechCrunch reporters Maxwell Zeff and Kyle Wiggers, major companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Salesforce are using inconsistent definitions, creating confusion. OpenAI even contradicted itself, publishing different explanations in the same week. Ryan Salva, senior …
Google owns 14 percent of AI startup Anthropic, according to legal filings obtained by The New York Times. As reported by Cade Metz, Nico Grant, and David McCabe, Google’s investment comes with significant limitations: the tech giant cannot own more than 15 percent of the company and holds no voting rights or board seats. The …
Jason Koebler, co-founder of 404 Media, reports that generative AI is being used as a “brute force attack” on social media algorithms, flooding platforms with low-quality content at unprecedented scale. In his article, Koebler explains that AI creators can produce dozens of posts in minutes, allowing them to quickly identify and exploit what performs well …
Most AI voice cloning services have inadequate protections against nonconsensual voice impersonation, according to a Consumer Reports investigation. The study examined six leading publicly available tools and found that five had easily bypassed safeguards. As reported by NBC News, four services (ElevenLabs, Speechify, PlayHT, and Lovo) merely require checking a box confirming authorization, while Resemble …
Microsoft is actively working to reduce its dependence on OpenAI, according to recent reports from The Information and other news outlets. Despite having invested over $13 billion in OpenAI since 2019, Microsoft appears to be pursuing multiple strategies to develop its own AI capabilities and test models from other providers, signaling a potential shift in …
Signal President Meredith Whittaker has raised serious concerns about the privacy implications of agentic AI systems. Speaking at SXSW in Austin, Texas, Whittaker described using AI agents as “putting your brain in a jar” and highlighted significant security vulnerabilities. According to Sarah Perez’s reporting for TechCrunch, these AI systems would require extensive permissions to perform …
Recent research has unveiled two promising approaches that could dramatically reduce the costs of running large language models (LLMs) while simultaneously improving their performance on complex reasoning tasks. These innovations come at a critical time as enterprises increasingly deploy AI solutions but struggle with computational expenses. Chain of draft: Less is more Researchers at Zoom …
A new report by content licensing platform TollBit reveals that AI search engines like those from OpenAI and Perplexity send 96% less referral traffic to news sites compared to traditional Google search. According to Rashi Shrivastava’s article in Forbes, AI companies scraped websites 2 million times on average in Q4 2023, with each page scraped …
Ilya Sutskever’s secretive AI company Safe Superintelligence (SSI) has reached a valuation of $30 billion in its latest funding round. According to reporting by Berber Jin and Deepa Seetharaman from The Wall Street Journal, the company is raising approximately $2 billion from investors. Sutskever, who previously served as OpenAI’s chief scientist and helped develop ChatGPT, …