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Is the letter calling for a pause on AI an impossible ask?

An open letter signed by Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Andrew Yang, and many others asks that companies like OpenAI (which Musk cofounded) stop releasing new AI models until the risks can be better understood and better managed. But the AI genie’s already well out of the bottle and expanding—and there may be no pausing that.

The concerns raised by the letter, in general, are valid. The core of the signatories’ argument is captured in this line: “[R]ecent mont

How AI contract tools can help you understand a contract

We are all bound by contracts: legal agreements that rule our work and personal lives. Contracts can be difficult to read and understand, with page after page of legalese seemingly written to deliberately confuse and obfuscate. Fortunately a new wave of artificial intelligence (AI) contract review tools can help both legal professionals and laypeople navigate even the most complex documents.

AI contract review software can help ordinary people by digging through legalese and summari

An electrical engineer explains why room-temperature superconductors could revolutionize electronics

Superconductors make highly efficient electronics, but the ultralow temperatures and ultrahigh pressures required to make them work are costly and difficult to implement. Room-temperature superconductors promise to change that.

The recent announcement by researchers at the University of Rochester of a new material that is a superconductor at room temperature, albeit at high pressure, is an exciting development—if proved. If the material or one like it works reliably and

A top Space Force official says any budget cuts would be ‘catastrophic’

It would be “catastrophic” if the Space Force had to operate under fiscal 2022 funding levels, the military’s top space official told lawmakers on Tuesday.

Under a spending plan backed by a wing of the Republican party, dollars for research and development, launch, modernization, recruitment, missile defense, and domain awareness could all be at risk, said Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), the ranking member of the House appropriations subcommittee that oversees de

The real space race isn’t international—it’s between Colorado and Alabama

Way back in January 2021, just before the Biden administration was taking office, the Air Force announced that the U.S. Space Command, the home base for the military’s space operations, would be relocated. The headquarters has been based in Colorado Springs for decades, but the military decided to move the site across the country to Huntsville, Alabama.

“I single-handedly said ‘let’s go to Alabama,” President Donald Trump said of the decision a few

AI assistants are digital minions that can help do boring stuff for you

We can all use a little help every now and then, both at work and at home—that’s why the rich and famous have armies of personal assistants to help them out. We can’t all afford that, but artificial intelligence is coming to the rescue with a new wave of AI assistants to help get get things done, handling the tedious details of making things happen.

It’s a huge growth area, with billions of dollars invested in hundreds of companies creating AI assistants

Epic Games’s MetaHuman Animator tool is 2023’s latest AI-powered disruption

Halfway through the Epic Games presentation at the 2023 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, a German actor named Melina Juergen scowled, sending ripples through the assembled crowd of developers in the Blue Shield of California Theater at Yerba Buena Center—and across the internet, as millions of people encountered the clip in their social media feeds.

The fascination with her expression had everything to do with the technology that made it possible. Juergen, known f

AI bots are too ‘creative’ for their own good

This story is from Fast Company’s new Plugged In newsletter, a weekly roundup of tech insights, news, and trends from global technology editor Harry McCracken, delivered to your inbox every Wednesday morning. Sign up for it here.


If you say that a human being is creative, the odds are pretty good that you mean it as praise. But in the burgeoning generative AI-infused chatbot wars, “creative” is a convenient code word for “playing fast and loose with the

A new batch of startups aims to bring more diversity to clinical trials

Clinical trials to test the safety and efficacy of new drugs have a well-known diversity problem. For decades, drug trials have leaned heavily on white male participants, leaving much unknown about how the drugs would work across a wider population. The demographics of clinical trials have changed in recent years—today, according to a 2021 study in journal Digital Health, clinical trial participants tend to be older, female, non-Hispanic White, and highly educated—leaving broad

OpenAI’s GPT-4 is so powerful that experts want to slam the brakes on generative AI

Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and more than 1,200 other founders and top research scientists have signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on all giant AI experiments to get a better handle on the risks and benefits of the technology and its impact on the world.

The letter notes that powerful AI systems should be developed only after we’re confident that the effects will be positive and the risks manageable.

“Contemporary AI systems are now becoming hu


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