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Tech News
A CDT-commissioned poll of 2,000 British adults, conducted by Public First, found 93% believe they have a right to private online conversations and 89% think no one should read their messages without a court order. Two-thirds said they wouldn't trust the current or any future UK government with the power to access encrypted chats, a view shared across supporters of all major parties.
A YouGov survey of 20,000 Americans shared with The Washington Post found 46% now oppose police license plate reading cameras made by Flock Safety, versus 38% in favor—a reversal from last year's majority support. Most respondents also said the cameras don't make them feel safer. The findings come amid mounting controversy over Flock, including a doxxing campaign against its CEO Garrett Langley and an Ohio grand jury's refusal to indict a man who destroyed one of the company's cameras.
A group of electronic musicians, including 26-year-old producer Max 'H4RRIS' Harris, are publicly calling out peers they suspect of passing off AI-generated music as their own work. Harris argues that such material lacks genuine artistic intent and amounts to a way of profiting off stolen creative labor rather than true expression.
A new survey finds that almost 50% of respondents would be comfortable using artificial intelligence tools to help draft their wedding vows. The findings suggest AI is increasingly seeping into wedding planning tasks once considered deeply personal, from venue selection to now the vows themselves.
Reports indicate that widespread adoption of ChatGPT is subtly changing how people write, with certain AI-favored words and phrasing patterns appearing more frequently in everyday communication. The trend suggests that heavy exposure to AI-generated text is influencing human writing habits beyond just those who use the tool directly.
NASA has entered the testing phase for its High Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) processor at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, developed with Microchip Technology as the PIC64-HPSC chip. The system combines multi-core processing, fast networking, fault tolerance and AI capability into one radiation-hardened platform designed for missions from Earth orbit to deep space, promising over 100 times the performance-per-watt of current space computers.
LAION has published LAION-BVD, a large open video dataset intended to support multimodal research on video, audio, and image models. The organization says the release is meant for non-commercial, academic use only, aimed at improving reproducibility and transparency in a field increasingly dominated by proprietary corporate datasets.
Instinct, founded last year by 23-year-old Noah Shinn under parent company Spear Street Technology, has closed a $250 million Series B round led by Index Ventures and Benchmark. The deal pushes the young startup's total funding to $350 million and its valuation to $2.5 billion, driven by buzz around its AI assistant that manages users' schedules, purchases and subscriptions through texts and calls.
MIT Technology Review has published its annual Kids issue, exploring how children are experiencing and adapting to a world saturated with AI and technology, including topics like AI companionship, monitoring apps, and schools' use of AI. Separately, in an interview featured in the same roundup, Bill Gates told MIT Technology Review's Mat Honan that he believes society has already crossed certain safety thresholds with artificial intelligence, expressing concern about risks ranging from economic disruption to loss of control over AI systems.
JOCO, a New York-based mobility company backed by roughly $7.5 million in venture funding, has built one of the largest urban e-bike infrastructure networks in the country, serving enterprise clients like Amazon, Uber Eats, Grubhub, Instacart and Gopuff. Its rise reflects a broader shift among startups away from pure software scaling toward capital-efficient, infrastructure-heavy business models as investor scrutiny tightens.
MIT Technology Review spoke with cognitive scientists comparing how babies and large language models acquire language, finding that infants learn to speak proficiently after hearing only 10 to 30 million words, while LLMs require vastly more data to approach similar fluency. Stanford's Michael C. Frank noted that training a model like GPT-2 on the same word count a toddler hears produces a 'nonsense generator,' not coherent speech.
Instinct, a private-access AI assistant built by Spear Street Technology and led by former Sierra researcher Noah Shinn, connects to users' email, messaging, calendar, location, and device audio to handle tasks like booking appointments and managing inboxes. While testers praise its capabilities, others have flagged its terms of service, which grant the company a perpetual, irrevocable license to store, reproduce, and use user data, including for AI training.