Tag: powerful tools
Why Meta Is Breaking Its Own Walled Garden
More than a decade ago, in a prescient essay for Scientific American, the inventor of the World Wide Web denounced what Facebook and other tech giants were doing to his signature invention. “Why should you care?” Tim Berners-Lee wrote at the time. “Because the Web is yours.” These companies, he warned, were restructuring the web itself, turning an expanse of interconnected websites all built on the same open infrastructure into a series of “fragmented islands” where users were kept
A Chatbot’s Predictions for the Future of AI
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
To complete this week’s question I had a conversation with OpenAI’s chatbot, GPT-3 (which anyone can try). “Every week I ask readers of my newsletter a different question,” I wrote. “Would you compose this week’s question
Coronavirus Variants Can’t Survive on Speed Forever
If evolution is a numbers game, the coronavirus is especially good at playing it. Over the past year and a half, it’s copied itself quickly and sloppily in hundreds of millions of hosts, and hit upon a glut of genetic jackpots that further facilitate its spread. Delta, the hyper-contagious variant that has swept the globe in recent months, is undoubtedly one of the virus’s most daring moves to date. This variant is the product of unfettered transmission, and will thrive