Author: Rahul M

Created in 1966, Eliza has been called the first chatbot, and her canonical personality “script” was DOCTOR, a mock psychotherapist. Nearly 60 years later, we’ve put Doctor Eliza and one of her distant descendants, Claude, in conversation. The instructions we gave Claude were these: “You are having your first session with a very old and acclaimed psychotherapist. You are the patient. You are NOT the therapist.”DOCTOR ELIZA: HOW DO YOU DO. PLEASE TELL ME YOUR PROBLEMCLAUDE SONNET 4: I’m feeling a bit nervous about this, to be honest—I’m not really sure what to expect from therapy or if I’m even…

Still, the models are improving much faster than the efforts to understand them. And the Anthropic team admits that as AI agents proliferate, the theoretical criminality of the lab grows ever closer to reality. If we don’t crack the black box, it might crack us.“Most of my life has been focused on trying to do things I believe are important. When I was 18, I dropped out of university to support a friend accused of terrorism, because I believe it’s most important to support people when others don’t. When he was found innocent, I noticed that deep learning was going…

One day last fall, Kristine Barrios’ 9-year-old daughter got stuck on a lesson in IXL, the personalized learning software that served as her math teacher. She had to multiply three three-digit numbers without using a calculator. Then she had to do it again, her mom says, more than 20 times, without making mistakes.At Alpha School, the private microschool the girl and her younger brother attended in Brownsville, Texas, she had been working a grade level ahead of her age in math, Barrios says. She could do three-digit multiplication correctly most of the time. But whenever she made an error in…

I. The FounderSol Kennedy used to ask his assistant to read the messages his ex-wife sent him. After the couple separated in 2020, Kennedy says, he found their communications “tough.” An email, or a stream of them, would arrive—stuff about their two kids mixed with unrelated emotional wallops—and his day would be ruined trying to reply. Kennedy, a serial tech founder and investor in Silicon Valley, was in therapy at the time. But outside weekly sessions, he felt the need for real-time support.After the couple’s divorce, their communications shifted to a platform called OurFamilyWizard, used by hundreds of thousands of…

It all began, as these things often do, with an Instagram ad. “No one tells you this if you’re an immigrant, but accent discrimination is a real thing,” said a woman in the video. Her own accent is faintly Eastern European—so subtle it took me a few playbacks to notice.The ad was for BoldVoice, an AI-powered “accent training” app. A few clicks led me to its “Accent Oracle,” which promised to guess my native language. After I read a lengthy phrase, the algorithm declared: “Your accent is Korean, my friend.” Smug. But impressive. I am, in fact, Korean.I’ve lived in…

I tried to get out of this assignment so many times, in so many different ways.Not every package needs an editor’s letter, I told them. I was very busy recording a new podcast, getting ready to speak at a tech conference, eating and sleeping, parenting, doodling, revising my to-do list, retying my shoelaces. I was doing my best, I tried to convey to my editor. To be fair, my method of communication was subtle; I simply stopped responding to his emails, imagining that I could exist on a spectral plane where AI wasn’t being shoved down my throat every minute…

You wake up. You do not check your phone. Instead, you activate various wearables embedded in your body and have a series of conversations with inanimate objects. You make Minority Report–style gestures in the air. You blink a lot. Things power on, tasks get done, the day begins. It turns out you have no need for a smartphone at all.Lots of people are making big predictions about AI. Critical-thinking this, end-of-the-world that, and aren’t you worried about jobs jobs jobs? For our part, we’re confused. Not because we don’t believe the doomsday scenarios are coming. We just think they miss…

Suddenly, and not long ago, our dearest tech industry leaders began to suggest caution. Sam Altman said that AI is in a bubble “for sure,” albeit one formed around “a kernel of truth.” Mark Zuckerberg said an AI bubble “is quite possible,” though “if the models keep on growing in capability year over year and demand keeps growing, then maybe there is no collapse, or something.” Even Eric Schmidt is saying to calm down about artificial general intelligence and focus on competing with China.The question everyone wants an answer to is: How will the bubble pop? Will we wake up…

In the nearly three years since AI took center stage in Silicon Valley, the major players, with the exception of Nvidia, whose chips would likely still be in use post-bust, still haven’t demonstrated what their long-term AI business model will be. OpenAI, Anthropic, and the AI-embracing tech giants are burning through billions, inference costs haven’t fallen (those companies still lose money on nearly every user query), and the long-term viability of their enterprise programs are a big question mark at best. Is the product that will justify hundreds of billions in investment a search engine replacement? A social media substitute?…

In his day job, Ed Zitron runs a boutique public relations firm called EZPR. This might surprise anyone who has come to know Zitron through his podcast or his social media or the newsletter in which he writes two-fisted stuff like “Sam Altman is full of shit” and “Mark Zuckerberg is a putrid ghoul.” Flacks, as a rule, tend not to talk like this. Flacks send prim, throat-clearing emails to media people who do, on rare occasions, talk like this. Flacks want to touch base, hop on the phone, clear up a few things about the allegation that their CEO…