All posts tagged: algorithms

OpenAI Beefs Up ChatGPT’s Image Generation Model

OpenAI Beefs Up ChatGPT’s Image Generation Model

Published by skeptic

OpenAI launched a new image generation AI model on Tuesday, dubbed ChatGPT Images 2.0. This model can generate more than one image from a single prompt, like an entire study booklet, as well as output text, including in non-English languages like Chinese and Hindi. This release is available globally for ChatGPT and Codex users, with a more powerful version available for paying subscribers. When any major AI company releases a new image model, it can revive interest and boost usage, especially if social media users adopt a meme-able trend, transforming images of themselves. Last year, Google’s launch of the Nano Banana model was a major moment for the company, especially when users started posting hyperrealistic figurines of themselves online. Earlier this year, ChatGPT Images made waves on social media as users shared AI-generated caricatures. What’s Different? Since the new model can tap into ChatGPT’s “reasoning” capabilities, Images 2.0 can search the internet for recent information and generate more than one image at a time. In essence, the bot can use additional steps to output more …

OpenAI Executive Kevin Weil Is Leaving the Company

OpenAI Executive Kevin Weil Is Leaving the Company

Published by skeptic

Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s former chief product officer who was recently tapped to build a new AI workspace for scientists, Prism, is leaving the company, WIRED has confirmed. Weil was previously an early executive leading product at Instagram. OpenAI is also sunsetting Prism, which the company launched as a web app in January this year to give scientists a better way to work with AI. The company is folding the roughly 10-person team behind it under OpenAI’s head of Codex, Thibault Sottiaux, and aims to incorporate Prism’s capabilities into its desktop Codex app. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the changes, and tells WIRED this is part of the company’s effort to unify its business and product strategy. OpenAI has broader ambitions to turn Codex, its AI coding application, into an “everything app.” Weil, who joined OpenAI in June 2024, announced last September that he would be starting a new initiative inside of the company called “OpenAI for Science.” Now, OpenAI is dispersing those employees throughout the company’s product, research, and infrastructure teams. An OpenAI spokesperson reiterated the …

Anthropic’s AI hacking tech triggers concern in German cyber agency – POLITICO

Anthropic’s AI hacking tech triggers concern in German cyber agency – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

Anthropic announced on Tuesday evening that it shared its latest model with a newly formed group of 12 cybersecurity firms and 40 other unnamed organizations to scan and stress-test their systems. Experts fear the model, if used for malicious purposes, could lead to massive cybersecurity breaches across the tech supply chain. BSI has not yet directly tested the tool, Plattner said in a written statement, but the agency had conversations with developers that had have given it “meaningful insight” into how the Mythos model works. Cyber officials have dialed up their warnings in recent months that AI tools are getting better at finding cyber flaws. The head of the EU’s cyber agency ENISA in February described the impact of AI on cybersecurity as an oncoming “storm.” According to Plattner, the German cyber chief, Anthropic’s new Mythos model means “we may reach a point in the medium term where unknown, classical software vulnerabilities simply cease to exist.” Source link

AI Podcasters Really Want to Tell You How to Keep a Man Happy

AI Podcasters Really Want to Tell You How to Keep a Man Happy

Published by skeptic

“It’s soft propaganda,” says Mandii B, cohost of the sex and lifestyle podcast Decisions, Decisions. The videos, and the rhetoric they spew, are trained on toxic gender tropes. “It subtly shapes beliefs and expectations without offering depth or accountability. It reminds me of how the American Dream was packaged and sold for decades: a clean, repeatable narrative that didn’t necessarily reflect the messy, diverse realities people were actually living. This content does something similar with relationships. It promotes digestible ideals without context, nuance, or responsibility.” Actual dialog, however, isn’t the end goal for these accounts. Nearly everyone of the pages WIRED reviewed was a funnel to paid courses on AI influencing. In addition to a digital business launch kit ($117) or six-week intensive product accelerator course ($147), the creator behind the Ari Banks avatar offers a $497 lesson plan called “AI Content University” where people learn to “Create viral AI podcasts & talking head content, Master the Realism Formula™ (so your content doesn’t look AI), and Use lip sync + voice cloning to bring your …

Orbán’s government accuses Facebook of undermining his reelection campaign – POLITICO

Orbán’s government accuses Facebook of undermining his reelection campaign – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

Facebook is an important platform in Hungarian politics, and Magyar has regularly used it to appeal to voters and react to events, clocking millions of views with his self-authored posts. While Orbán has 1.6 million followers to Magyar’s 930,000, the latter has received more user engagement in terms of comments and likes: In March, Magyar made 287 posts, generating 14,077,000 interactions — nearly double the 7,868,000 interactions Orbán received from his 342 posts, according to a Telex tally published on April 3. “He speaks the language of the algorithm … and he can keep up with the speed of the news cycle without losing strategic clarity,” said Márton Hajdu, EU affairs chief for Magyar’s Tisza party and one of its parliamentary candidates. Poll of Polls — Hungary national election voting intention For more polling data from across Europe visit POLITICO Poll of Polls. But according to Kovács, Magyar’s success on the social network is due to two different user profiling systems used by Meta, which are putting Orbán at a disadvantage. “The prime minister is …

Australia says it can’t go it alone on social media ban for kids – POLITICO

Australia says it can’t go it alone on social media ban for kids – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

“Over time, international community concern is what will produce substantive, enduring change globally to the algorithms and a change to the design behaviours of big tech companies,” Angus Campbell, Canberra’s envoy to the EU, told POLITICO.  “If it was just Australia, tech companies could work with the carrots [positive enforcement mechanisms] and absorb the penalties, to some national benefit, but if progressively, it becomes the wider community of the world demanding change, I think you will see significant positive change,” Campbell said. His comments come as multiple European countries work to introduce social media bans for young people. France leads the pack with a draft law to come into effect as soon as September, while the European Parliament has also urged the European Commission to propose an EU-wide system. That’s despite the fact that Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, said in an assessment last week that Australia’s measures have not yet succeeded in keeping most kids away from platforms, and neither have reports of online harms dropped discernibly. It found significant gaps in enforcing the ban, including platforms allowing and even encouraging kids to try age-assurance methods several times until they got around them. …

Understanding algorithms — and how to make them work for you

Understanding algorithms — and how to make them work for you

Published by skeptic

Algorithms are incredible tools. When run by computers, they can fly airplanes without human pilots. They can figure out how much insulin a teen with Type I diabetes needs minute to minute. They even decide what social media shows you — and billions of other people.  Your brain creates algorithms, too. It uses them to decide where to stand on the soccer field when you’re playing defense. Or map the best bike route to school. Or choose between multiple-choice options on a test. “An algorithm is just a fairly precise list of instructions to accomplish a specified task,” says Noah Giansiracusa. He’s a mathematician at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass. Algorithms have been around since the beginning of human history. Hammurabi’s Code, for example, is a list of 282 rules from almost 4,000 years ago. A Babylonian king named Hammurabi laid out these rules for his subjects. They included things like the punishment for stealing an ox. (You had to pay back 30 times its value.) Those rules are perhaps the first “algorithm for justice,” …

Meet the Gods of AI Warfare

Meet the Gods of AI Warfare

Published by skeptic

Nearly a year later, on a hot day in the high summer of 2025, I stepped into NGA’s headquarters at the Fort Belvoir Army Base in northern Virginia. It was my second visit to the spy agency HQ, and I wanted to find out why Whitworth had changed his mind, how much Maven had spread, and how Maven’s new backers saw the risks and rewards of mainstreaming AI into military workflows. By then, Whitworth had become so ardent a fan of AI that his agency was pumping out machine-produced intelligence reports for US decisionmakers that “no human hands” had touched. And the NGA had launched a $708 million contract for data labeling in support of Maven’s computer vision models, the largest such appeal in US history, that would ultimately go not to self-made billionaire Alexandr Wang’s Scale AI but to Enabled Intelligence, a startup focused on hiring people on the autism spectrum expert in pattern recognition and comfortable with repetitive work. My visit required the rigmarole of any meeting at a spy agency. Courteous background …

Spain’s Sánchez launches AI tool to track hate speech on social media – POLITICO

Spain’s Sánchez launches AI tool to track hate speech on social media – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Wednesday unveiled a new government AI tool that will rank social media sites based on how much hate speech they host. “If hate is already dangerous, social networks have turned it into a weapon of mass polarization that ends up seeping into everyday life,” Sánchez said at an International Summit against Hate and Digital Harassment. “Today social networks are a failed state,” he said. The new system, known as HODIO, will analyze large volumes of publicly available activity on social media to measure the scale and spread of online hate speech. The data will be used to track how hateful content evolves and spreads on platforms, and will feed into a public ranking comparing how much hate speech circulates on major networks. Source link

How a Music Streaming CEO Built an Open-Source Global Threat Map in His Spare Time

How a Music Streaming CEO Built an Open-Source Global Threat Map in His Spare Time

Published by skeptic

Elie Habib doesn’t work in the defense or intelligence industries. Instead, he runs Anghami, one of the Middle East’s largest music streaming platforms. But as missiles began flying across the region, a side project he coded earlier this year suddenly became something bigger: an open-source dashboard people around the world were using to track the war in real time. The engineer turned executive built the system, called World Monitor, to make sense of chaotic geopolitical news. Instead, it went viral. Habib’s day job revolves around licensing deals and streaming metrics. But during a stretch of increasingly chaotic geopolitical news, he started building a tool to make sense of it. “I’m an engineer by training, and I hold myself to a discipline of continuously learning new technologies regardless of my CEO title,” Habib tells WIRED. The idea emerged as headlines began colliding in ways that felt impossible to follow. “The news became genuinely hard to parse,” he says. “Iran, Trump’s decisions, financial markets, critical minerals, tensions compounding from every direction simultaneously.” Screenshots of worldmonitor.com COURTSEY OF …