one day in March 2023, Arati Prabhakar brought a laptop into the Oval Office and showed the future to Joe Biden. Six months later, the president issued a sweeping executive order that set a regulatory course for AI. This all
Author: Steven Levy
A Wave of AI Tools Is Set to Transform Work Meetings
Dan Siroker knows how to pivot. He once had an education startup that morphed into a successful online analytics company called Optimizely. More recently he created an AI company called Scribe.ai, dedicated to capturing data from apps like Zoom, then
Tech Leaders Once Cried for AI Regulation. Now the Message Is ‘Slow Down’
The other night I attended a press dinner hosted by an enterprise company called Box. Other guests included the leaders of two data-oriented companies, Datadog and MongoDB. Usually the executives at these soirees are on their best behavior, especially when
This AI Startup Wants You to Talk to Houses, Cars, and Factories
We’ve all been astonished at how chatbots seem to understand the world. But what if they were truly connect to the real world? What if the dataset behind the chat interface was physical reality itself, captured in real time by
Here’s Proof the AI Boom Is Real: More People Are Tapping ChatGPT at Work
Ever since the rollout of ChatGPT in November 2022, many people in science, business, and media have been obsessed with AI. A cursory look at my own published work during that period fingers me as among the guilty. My defense
8 Google Employees Invented Modern AI. Here’s the Inside Story
Eight names are listed as authors on “Attention Is All You Need,” a scientific paper written in the spring of 2017. They were all Google researchers, though by then one had left the company. When the most tenured contributor, Noam
My Quest to Fix a Crashing Roku App Provides a Warning About AI
I don’t think I’m alone when I confess that my streaming strategy is a mess. In fact, calling it a strategy is overly kind. I pay for a number of services, all of which cost more every year, and I
Sierra Says Conversational AI Will Kill Apps and Websites
I might have inadvertently insulted Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor when I interviewed them about their new AI startup last week. Their new company, Sierra, is developing AI-powered agents to “elevate the customer experience” for big companies. Among its original
OpenAI’s Sora Turns AI Prompts Into Photorealistic Videos
We already know that OpenAI’s chatbots can pass the bar exam without going to law school. Now, just in time for the Oscars, a new OpenAI app called Sora hopes to master cinema without going to film school. For now
Here’s the Thing AI Just Can’t Do
A few months ago, I was called in at the last minute to participate in an onstage fireside chat at an Authors’ Guild event. (I’m on the nonprofit’s council, but of course I speak here only for myself.) Guild CEO