Business

Facebook’s artificial intelligence researchers have a plan to make algorithms smarter by exposing them to human cunning. They want your help to supply the trickery. Thursday, Facebook’s AI lab launched a project called Dynabench that creates a kind of gladiatorial arena in which humans try to trip up AI systems. Challenges include crafting sentences that …

Comment sections have long acted like the wiry garbage cans of news websites, collecting the worst and slimiest of human thought. Thoughtful reactions get mixed in with off-topic offal, personal attacks, and the enticing suggestions to “learn how to make over $7,000 a month by working from home online!” (So goes the old adage: never …

Li Xian, who works at a publishing company in Shanghai, says the Chinese mobile-payments app Alipay is indispensable. Over the past week she’s used it to order and pay for dinner through a delivery service, buy movie tickets, pay her utility bills, and rent a bike. “It’s my lifeline,” Li says. “I can’t remember the …

It’s been one hell of a week for TikTok. The company is scrambling to get the White House to approve a deal it struck with Oracle, designed to alleviate national security concerns the US government raised about TikTok’s Chinese ownership. While the company waits to see whether President Trump will accept the arrangement, the clock …

Thanks to Covid-19, the mantra for 2020 has got to be “quarantine and chill.” Good thing Netflix is here to “entertain people all over the world,” as the company’s cofounder Reed Hastings explained at this year’s WIRED25. Sating the global entertainment palate, though, requires an undying spirit of invention as well as narratives that span …

In recent years, Nvidia has ridden one of the biggest waves in technology, selling chips needed to build increasingly clever artificial intelligence algorithms. Now, the company plans to catch another big swell—mobile computing—with a $40 billion acquisition of Arm, which designs the chips found in virtually all smartphones. The deal would reshape the chip industry …

One such risk is Trump’s executive order on TikTok, which the administration presents as an issue of data sovereignty. Administration officials cite fears that the Chinese can access data from the video-sharing app, mainly used by American teens, that could be used for more insidious purposes. But this attempt to control data could set a …

Two metaphors abounded: the aforementioned Blade Runner and the skies of Mars. If this is what Mars is like, even Elon Musk might be reconsidering his travel plans. On the other hand, Mars is probably Covid-free. But the bigger metaphor these pictures evoked was that of a nuclear stress bomb. Ongoing sprawling crises are, quite …

In 2016, Gebru was shocked to count only “about five Black people” out of an estimated 5,500 attendees at an AI conference. The following year, she helped organize Black in AI’s first annual workshop to bring more diversity to the field. Her research has spotlighted racist algorithms and the ethical quandaries of data-mining projects and …