This story was originally published by Grist, produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network, and republished by Rest of World. When Min left the hot, dusty plains of central Myanmar for its mountainous eastern border with China earlier this year, he had few options. A 2021 military coup had devastated the formal […]
A growing pushback against big tech companies, and greater awareness of the value of data, is spurring interest in data collectives and cooperatives, which give communities control over the collection, management, and distribution of their data. This alternative allows creators to benefit from data sets that may otherwise be ignored or misused. A handful of […]
When Anthropic’s chief national security officer and former Biden administration export control architect Tarun Chhabra recently highlighted model distillation as an emerging national security concern, one detail stood out. Chhabra identified Chinese AI developer Zhipu among the companies that have allegedly distilled capabilities from frontier American models. The warning fits neatly into Washington’s narrative: Chinese […]
Yang is immensely proud of his 13-year-old son. The middle-school student from Hangzhou has won artificial intelligence model-building competitions across China, and has 136,000 followers on Chinese social media platform XiaohongshuiXiaohongshuXiaohongshu, which translates to “little red book” in Chinese, is a lifestyle e-commerce and social media platform.READ MORE, where his father documents his projects. Despite […]
As a teen, Emirhan Gül was a keen gamer, so he was thrilled to join a gaming startup in Istanbul as a developer after university. Over five months, as Turkey rode the wave of mobile gaming, he worked on the design of 23 games, and soon experienced burnout. “Budgets were high, there was a lot […]
Kylian Mbappé of France entered the World Cup semifinals with Argentina’s Lionel Messi in the race for the Golden Boot. Pundits, punters, and chatbots are divided on who finishes as the football tournament’s top scorer. The sharpest predictor of them all, though, is a goldfish. Swimbappé lives in a Toronto storefront tank fitted out as […]
Meta recently unveiled Muse Image, an artificial intelligence image generator that allows anyone to manipulate pictures of any Instagram user with a public profile. Just as its Meta glasses — the facial recognition-equipped accessory that lets wearers record anyone without their consent — it is an extremely problematic feature because image-based abuse is one of […]
After twin earthquakes struck northern Venezuela last month, thousands of people took to social media, pleading for help locating friends and family. The interim government was slow to act, but help came quickly from an unexpected source: developers and programmers. “Who knew when the government was going to respond?” Jorge Bastidas, a 31-year-old Venezuelan programmer […]
The Gulf’s oil-rich states, betting billions on reinventing themselves as centers of artificial intelligence, are discovering that money can buy almost everything, except a way out of Nvidia. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have committed tens of billions of dollars to becoming AI powers before the oil money fades. For the past year, […]
The Indian government’s latest tussle with WhatsApp has raised concerns about the censorship of app features globally. On June 29, WhatsApp began rolling out usernames globally, allowing users to chat without sharing their phone numbers. The Indian government has objected to the feature, arguing that pseudonymous accounts could make it easier for bad actors to […]