Story Stream
The Tech Insurgent's Battle for the Future June 19, 2024
When Paul Buchheit launched Gmail in 2004, it didn’t just change Google, or the technology industry — though it certainly changed both. It changed the world.Zoomers will find this impossible to believe, but in the early 2000s people were still deleti...
The Ghost in the AI Machine June 06, 2024
In an article last year titled “The False Promise of ChatGPT,” which has given rise to recent memes on social media, the famed linguist Noam Chomsky and his two co-authors start by declaring that “OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Sydne...
Getting to the Mountaintop June 05, 2024
In today’s America, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s hope that black people might be judged by “the content of their character” is increasingly dismissed as quaint or even inconvenient. The new idea is to pose an eternal opposition between “whiteness” and “...
Gabriel Smith Writes Like He Has Nothing Left to Lose June 05, 2024
The most exciting thing to encounter in the world of publishing is a writer who doesn’t sound like anyone else. I first read Gabriel Smith at the Drift, where our then fiction editor spied his story, “The Complete,” in the slush, so it’s been a thril...
Leaving Gemini in the Dust March 20, 2024
As widely reported, Google recently paused its Gemini chatbot from generating images of people after the bot refused to depict whites. Gemini users saw results including Native American founding fathers, black and Asian Nazis, and black female Roman ...
The Illusion of Privacy March 18, 2024
A recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast featured computer scientist, Ray Kurzweil, who is now working “to bring natural language understanding to Google.” Rogan and Kurzweil discussed many aspects of today’s accelerating technological pr...
AI Companies Are Getting the Culture War They Deserve February 23, 2024
Whenever a new AI tool comes out, thousands of users rush to test it, trip it up, and figure out what it’s capable of. This week, it’s Google’s turn, as members test out various tiers and features of Gemini, its recently rebranded and upgraded group ...
Frontier AI Ethics February 15, 2024
Around a year ago, generative AI took the world by storm, as extraordinarily powerful large language models (LLMs) enabled unprecedented performance at a wider range of tasks than ever before feasible. Though best known for generating convincing text...
Igniting an Appreciation for Abraham Lincoln in Children February 02, 2024
Historians and the general public regularly rank Abraham Lincoln as America’s greatest president. There is little doubt that he is widely admired for the work he did to end slavery and preserve the Union.But beyond these two important points, most Am...
