The Latest Breaking News from OpenAI

The tech industry’s latest artificial intelligence constructs can be pretty convincing if you ask them what it feels like to be a sentient computer, or maybe just a dinosaur or squirrel. But they’re not so good — and sometimes dangerously bad — at handling other seemingly straightforward tasks. Take, for…

The tech industry’s latest artificial intelligence constructs can be pretty convincing if you ask them what it feels like to be a sentient computer, or maybe just a dinosaur or squirrel

It has been an exasperating week for computer scientists. They’ve been falling over each other to publicly denounce claims from Google engineer Blake Lemoine, chronicled in a Washington Post report, that his employer’s language-predicting system was sentient and deserved all of the rights associated with consciousness.

“It’s a new form of imagination,” says one account operator.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but thanks to an artificial intelligence program called DALL-E 2, you can have a professional-looking image with far fewer.

You may not have heard of GPT-3, but there's a good chance you've read its work, used a website that runs its code, or even conversed with it through a chatbot or a character in a game.

First Theranos, and now AI researchers, are being opaque about their work. Should we trust them?

Machine-learning systems are increasingly worming their way through our everyday lives, challenging our moral and social values and the rules that govern them. These days, virtual assistants threaten the privacy of the home; news recommenders shape the way we understand the world; risk-prediction systems tip social workers on which children…

Dall-E 2 can conjure vivid pictures of dogs in berets to astronauts playing basketball. It also represents every major ethical concern there is about AI.