Posts

No Dogs in Space is back to feed your need for obsessive music history

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In August, I wrote about my love of the music history podcast No Dogs in Space , but mourned the fact that there hadn't been a new episode in over two years. Little did I know that hosts Carolina Hidalgo and Marcus Parks were gearing up to announce the show's return with season four, Punk 2.0. The first episode premiered this week, part one of a series on the New York Dolls , a band near and dear to my heart as a native Staten Islander, home of frontman David Johansen. For the new season, Hidalgo and Parks decided it was time to get back to basics. Part of that was that they felt punk rock was where their passion and expertise were strongest. … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/umHt9jZ

No one is surprised that Nvidia’s Jensen Huang thinks AI fears are overblown.

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The man who may stand to make the most money from the AI boom seems to think he knows better than anyone else, including researchers who have studied and worked on AI for decades. In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning , he claimed there was a "0% chance" of AI being the end of the world . He also said of people sounding the alarm about the dangers of AI that, "Scaring people is unnecessary. It is irresponsible." He also claims that calls from CEOs like Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Sam Altman to slow down the development of AI are "not grounded in science." He even argued that there was no need for new rules, laws, or guidelines, in … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/KyUbHo0

All roads lead to cable

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This is The Stepback , a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on streaming platforms, FAST channels, and the future of entertainment, follow Charles Pulliam-Moore . The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here . How it started Before Netflix fully committed to becoming a streaming service and leaving DVDs behind , the company experimented with the idea of giving its subscribers a physical box that could access high-resolution digital copies of movies. Films would have been downloaded to the box in the evening and become available to users the next day. But … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/rx0B83s

Meta’s Muse is creepy, but maybe not for the reasons you think

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Meta's Muse is apparently an effective AI assistant , but one that's a little creepy. Part of that is because of its new Mac app , which can access Messages, Calendar, and Notes. But for all its smarts, Muse doesn't actually know how to describe itself. Jason Aten, a contributing editor at Inc Magazine , posted on Threads screenshots of an interaction he had with Muse in which the assistant asks him some questions about a conversation he was having in Messages. The problem is that Aten says he didn't give Muse access to his messages. When asked how it knew about the contents of his messages, Muse replied, "I saw the notification previews, not … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/vSTm0o1

The AI regulation smackdown isn’t over

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At the start of this week, the who's-who of AI seemed - at least tentatively - on the side of AI regulation. Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had proposed a three-step plan for slowing AI development, including by embedding third-party evaluators in labs, coordinating across the domestic industry, and forging international agreements potentially with government assistance. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, and even SpaceX CEO Elon Musk publicly seemed to agree on aspects of all three things. Anthropic and OpenAI had already been dropping hints that they and other labs were working on some kind of … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/VOITd30

OpenAI and Microsoft knew they were starting a ‘doom loop’ for the web

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Recently unsealed court documents in the New York Times ' case against OpenAI and Microsoft are pretty damning. The companies' own documentation warned that it was starting a "doom loop" that would damage the web, characterized its scraping of data to train its models as the "largest theft of labor in human history," and that it made a "complete mockery of the idea of fair use." Many of the most eye-catching quotes from the document come from Microsoft's Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht. Though, the company has tried to distance itself from Hecht's assertions. Microsoft spokesperson Alex Haurek told The Verge that "These comments ref … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/L9Z2SIN

Disney’s first CTO is Character.AI’s former CEO

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You would think that a multimedia conglomerate as large as Disney would have a few chief technology officers by now, but the company has just appointed someone to the position for the very first time. Today, Disney announced that Karandeep Anand is joining the company as its new CTO. Anand will report directly to recently appointed CEO Josh D'Amaro , and he will head up the company's infrastructure, product, engineering, and data / AI platforms teams. Anand comes to Disney from chatbot startup Character.AI , where he served as CEO for just over a year and oversaw the company's push into microdramas . Anand jumping ship to Disney comes as a … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/oISRqiA