Reckons

OpenAI, Microsoft, and the OpenOffspring

Dan Hill is Director of the Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne. He is a leader in Strategic Design, a mode of practice directed toward...

Global carbon dioxide emissions from energy use and industry could peak as soon as this year, according to Carbon Brief analysis of figures from the IEA.

ChatGPT and LLMs can do anything (or look like they can), so what can you do with them? How do you know? Do we move to chat bots as a magical general-purpose interface, or do we unbundle them back into single-purpose software? What are the products?

On Robert Irwin, Star Trek, and the infinite hallways of the future.

The aestheticization of the struggle to integrate technological innovation is a dangerous path.

Imagining the future we want is the first step towards creating it, says Rob Hopkins – time traveller and imagination activist

Rest of World analyzed 3,000 AI images to see how image generators visualize different countries and cultures.

We are told that technology is on the brink of ruining everything. But we are being lied to, and the truth is so much better. Marc Andreessen presents his techno-optimist vision for the future.

The technology has resulted in a host of cutting-edge AI applications — but its real power lies beyond text generation

ChatGPT and other new AI services benefit from a science fiction-infused marketing frenzy unlike anything in recent memory. There's more to fear here than killer robots.

This corporate gathering full of artists’ drab, desperate attempts to get bought by clueless rich collectors has domesticated contemporary art and thus killed it

Andrew Knight, Head of UK Policy Design Community, invites designers to participate in the Public Design Review.

It hardly needs to be said that all is not well with our world. We are disempowered, isolated and (quite rationally)...

New report from industry researchers finds that 95 percent of the once-hyped crypto assets have hit rock-bottom valuation

Wowed by a new paper I just read and wish I had thought to write myself. Lukas Berglund and others, led by Owain Evans, asked a simple, powerful, elegant question: can LLMs trained on A is B infer automatically that B is A? The shocking (yet, in historical context, see below, unsurprising) answer is no:

Walter Isaacson tried to write a "Great Man" biography of the rockets-and-cars genius. That's not an effective way to understand Elon Musk.

Technology can realize greatly intensified forms of continuous democratic participation, but such applications must be openly developed and publicly owned.

One of the most striking things I’ve found while reading the early WIRED back catalog is how quaint the discussions of governmental surveillance were. The magazine directed limitless outrage at any attempt by the government to regulate, censor, or surveil online behavior.

Ursula Le Guin said we must be able to imagine freedom. AI traps us in the past.

Creative skills can currently be reproduced using deep learning and neural networks, but their true potential lies in the prospects of collaboration rather than replacement. Two distinct subjectivities, one human and one automated, can meet halfway and produce a captivating mutual symbolic space, brimming with possibilities, but also with dead ends. It is both too early and arrogant to hazard a guess as to the artistic impact AI will exert in the medium term.

When It Comes to Thinking About the Future, Should We Push or Pull? Prop-Up or Provoke? Conserve or Challenge? Futurists, Foresighters, and…

Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was skeptical a few weeks ago: "I probably trust the answers that come out of ChatGPT the least of anybody on Earth."

Edge cases remain a serious, unsolved problem, a hundred billion dollars later.

Some AI makes a ton of money; a lot of it is still speculative

Notes prepared for DEFCON31 in Las Vegas

It often seems that people are searching harder for evidence we’re defeated than that we can win