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In this week’s newsletter: Discover the wild 1970s tale of the revolutionary Viva in Stiffed. Plus: five of the best podcasts for Succession fans

The CEO of Niantic has helped create technologies that have changed the way we live. How does he see the future of play?It’s not often you meet someone who’s genuinely changed the world, but that’s what happens the day I greet Niantic CEO John Hanke. Sipping his coffee alone in a gargantuan San Franciscan boardroom, I wonder whether the man on the other end of this Zoom call realises just how often people use his former company’s creation, Google Maps.Hanke’s yearning to create started young. Fresh out of business school in the 1990s and already with one of the first online gaming successes to his name, he was snapped up – along with his company, Keyhole, by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and folded into the team that made Google Maps, now arguably the most useful thing on your smartphone. Continue reading...

I’ve never had an assistant, a life coach or a personal trainer – perhaps AI is just what I’m looking for. I tried it on everything from cocktail-making to holiday-planning to health adviceAccording to a recent open letter, society needs to immediately pause development of “giant” AI models, or risk apocalyptic outcomes. Massive job losses, the destruction of consensus reality and even the end of all organic life on Earth have all been mooted as risks of pressing forward with development of these systems before we understand their intricacies.The high-water mark of these is GPT-4, the snappily named AI that underpins the latest version of the breakthrough ChatGPT service. Creating anything more powerful than GPT-4, before we spend at least six months working out its limits and risks, would be too dangerous, more than 1,000 AI experts say. Continue reading...

Human rights groups say cameras are form of mass surveillance, as report finds ‘substantial improvement’ in accuracyLive facial recognition cameras are a form of mass surveillance, human rights campaigners have said, as the Met police said it would press ahead with its use of the “gamechanging” technology.Britain’s largest force said the technology could be used to catch terrorists and find missing people after research published on Wednesday reported a “substantial improvement” in its accuracy. Continue reading...

Operation led by FBI and Dutch police with involvement of UK National Crime Agency takes Genesis Market offlineA criminal online marketplace selling millions of stolen identities for as little as 56p has been taken down in an international crackdown.The sting, led by the FBI and Dutch police with the involvement of law enforcement agencies across 18 countries, including the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), took Genesis Market offline on Tuesday evening. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Gaming’s biggest expo might be finished forever – and I know I’ll miss the buzzy, tactile, interactive hype-fest it used to be

PC, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Meta Quest; Wired Productions/Oiffy/Wold & Wood Interactive

Windows 11 workstation has top creative and gaming performance housed in sleek 16in laptop designThe top of Samsung’s new 2023 laptop line is the Galaxy Book 3 Ultra: a powerhouse 16in machine aiming squarely at Apple’s 16in MacBook Pro for creatives and gamers.A laptop called Ultra obviously doesn’t come cheap, costing from £2,449 ($2,200), which is about the same price as Windows 11 rivals from Dell and Razer but slightly cheaper than Apple’s top machines.Screen: 16in 3K AMOLED 2880 x 1800 (120Hz; 201 PPI)Processor: Intel Core i7-13700H or i9-13900H (13th gen)Graphics: Nvidia GeForce RTX4050 (6GB) or 4070 (8GB) laptop GPURAM: 16 or 32GBStorage: 512GB or 1TBOperating system: Windows 11 HomeCamera: 1080PConnectivity: wifi 6E, Bluetooth 5.1, USB-A, 2x Thunderbolt 4, headphones, microSD, HDMI2.0Dimensions: 355.4 x 250.4 x 16.5mmWeight: 1.79kg Continue reading...

Up to 1.4m children under 13 use app, watchdog finds – and experts say they are being flooded with harmful content to promote addiction

Information commissioner says app had done ‘very little, if anything’ to check for underage usersTikTok has been fined £12.7m for illegally processing the data of 1.4 million children under 13 who were using its platform without parental consent, Britain’s data watchdog said.The information commissioner said the China-owned video app had done “very little, if anything” to check who was using the platform and remove underage users, despite internal warnings the firm was flouting its own terms and conditions. Continue reading...

Elon Musk tweets out meme after blue bird on homepage replaced by image of shiba inu associated with cryptocurrencyAlmost 24 hours after Twitter changed its blue bird logo to a badly cut-out image of a dog meme made famous by cryptocurrencies, the company’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk, has still offered no explanation or justification for the change.On Monday, US time, users noted that the blue bird logo on Twitter’s homepage and loading screen had been replaced with the shiba inu image associated with the Dogecoin memecoin cryptocurrency. For hours, neither Twitter nor Musk even acknowledged the change. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: After weeks of warnings, Twitter appears to have backed down on plans to do away with one of Musk’s original obsessions.

National Cyber Force says it is engaged in ways to ‘undermine tradecraft’ of Russian, Chinese and other state-sponsored hackersBritain’s newly created offensive hacking unit, the National Cyber Force, has said it is engaged daily in operations to disrupt terrorist groups, distributors of child sexual abuse material and military opponents of the UK.An official paper, Responsible Cyber Power in Practice, is the first policy statement from the body and is intended to describe how far the UK is prepared to fight back against growing organised online threats. Continue reading...

Concerns have arisen over tech firms using masses of unfiltered personal data culled from the internet to ‘train’ generative AIBritain’s data watchdog has issued a warning to tech firms about the use of people’s personal information to develop chatbots after concerns that the underlying technology is trained on large quantities of unfiltered material scraped from the web.The intervention from the Information Commissioner’s Office came after its Italian counterpart temporarily banned ChatGPT over data privacy concerns. Continue reading...

Influencer says he is removing himself from social media for a spell after using slur in word gameThe YouTuber KSI has apologised for using a racist slur during a recent video made with his group the Sidemen.He acknowledged there was no excuse for using the slur and said he would be removing himself from social media for a spell as a result. Continue reading...

Fashion brands including Levi’s and Calvin Klein are having custom AI models created to ‘supplement’ representation in size, skin tone and ageThe star of Levi’s new campaign looks like any other model. Her tousled hair hangs over her shoulders as she gazes into the camera with that far-off high-fashion stare. But look closer, and something starts to seem a little off. The shadow between her chin and neck looks muddled, like a bad attempt at using FaceTune’s eraser effect to hide a double chin. Her French-manicured fingernails appear scrubbed clean and uniform in a creepy real doll kind of way.The model is AI-generated, a digital rendering of a human being that will start appearing on Levi’s e-commerce website later this year. The brand teamed with LaLaLand.ai, a digital studio that makes customized AI models for companies like Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, to dream up this avatar. Continue reading...

Rising competition and bleak economic outlook drag down sales despite Elon Musk’s price-cutting gambleTesla on Sunday posted record quarterly vehicle deliveries, but quarter-on-quarter sales growth was modest despite price cuts as rising competition and a bleak economic outlook weighed.The electric carmaker delivered 422,875 vehicles for the first three months of this year, up 4% from the previous quarter. This was 36% higher than a year ago. In January, the chief executive, Elon Musk, said Tesla could achieve 2m vehicle deliveries this year, up 52% from last year. Continue reading...

Morning, noon and night, it’s there, whirring and whirling around. It’s so industrious I feel simultaneously scared and shamedIn domestic news, an issue has arisen with the robot vacuum cleaner. Our noisy old one annoyed me so much, bashing repeatedly into the skirting and swallowing rug tassels in confusion, that I stamped violently on its off button every time I caught it trying to do its job.The new one is less relentlessly stupid, but just as loud, and since my husband programmed it, it appears to always be on. It lurches out at 10am and is still roaring around when I come downstairs, hours later. After a brief hiatus, it re-emerges in the afternoon. It’s so noisily industrious, I feel simultaneously enervated and shamed by its productivity. Let me stare at the internet in peace, robot! Continue reading...

AI and cows | AI-free letters | Sizing up black holes | Stately homes | E-scooter exposureWe are currently hearing a lot about AI (This gung-ho government says we have nothing to fear from AI. Are you scared yet?, 31 March). As a former dairy farmer, I thought the AI man was the chap who visited on request to artificially inseminate our cows to get them in calf. With the current use of the initials meaning something rather different, I now wonder what he was actually doing.

Systems with abilities exceeding human capacity have been let loose. If big tech firms refuse to see the risks governments must step inIn case you have been somewhere else in the solar system, here is a brief AI news update. My apologies if it sounds like the opening paragraph of a bad science fiction novel.On 14 March 2023, OpenAI, a company based in San Francisco and in which Microsoft has a major investment, released an AI system called GPT-4. On 22 March, a report by a distinguished group of researchers at Microsoft, including two members of the US National Academies, claimed that GPT-4 exhibits “sparks of artificial general intelligence”. (Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is a keyword for AI systems that match or exceed human capabilities across the full range of tasks to which the human mind is applicable.) On 29 March, the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit headed by the MIT physics professor Max Tegmark, released an open letter asking for a pause on “giant AI experiments”. It has been signed by well-known figures such as Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak, and the Turing award-winner Yoshua Bengio, as well as hundreds of prominent AI researchers. The ensuing media hurricane continues. Continue reading...

The generative AI tool can write code on request, making the specialist skill of programming open to everyoneBenedict Evans, a tech analyst whose newsletter is required reading for those who follow the industry, made an interesting point this week. He had, he said, been talking to generalist journalists who “were still under the impression that ChatGPT was a trivial parlour trick and the whole thing was about as interesting as a new iPhone app”. On the other hand, he continued, “most people in tech are walking around slowly, holding on to the top of their head with both hands to stop it flying off. But within that, I think we can see a range of attitudes.”We certainly can – on a spectrum ranging from the view that this “generative AI” is going to be the biggest bonanza since the invention of the wheel, to fears that it augurs an existential risk to humanity, and numerous opinions in between. Seeking a respite from the firehose of contradictory commentary, I suddenly remembered an interview that Steve Jobs – the nearest thing to a visionary the tech industry has ever had – gave in 1990, and dug it out on YouTube. Continue reading...

Documents leaked from Vulkan cybersecurity firm also raise questions about role of IT engineers behind information-control projectA consortium of media outlets have published a bombshell investigation about Russia’s cyber-capabilities, based on a rare leak of documents. The files come from NTC Vulkan, a cybersecurity firm in Moscow that doubles as a contractor to Russian military and intelligence agencies.They reveal how, for years, a group of top Russian IT engineers have been hired to work with Russian military intelligence and a research facility of the FSB, Vladimir Putin’s domestic spy agency. This might seem an unusual mix, and would have been unimaginable before the end of the cold war. Continue reading...

• Documents leaked by whistleblower angry over Ukraine war• Private Moscow consultancy bolstering Russian cyberwarfare• Tools support hacking operations and attacks on infrastructure• Documents linked to notorious Russian hacking group Sandworm• Russian program aims to control internet and spread disinformationThe inconspicuous office is in Moscow’s north-eastern suburbs. A sign reads: “Business centre”. Nearby are modern residential blocks and a rambling old cemetery, home to ivy-covered war memorials. The area is where Peter the Great once trained his mighty army.Inside the six-storey building, a new generation is helping Russian military operations. Its weapons are more advanced than those of Peter the Great’s era: not pikes and halberds, but hacking and disinformation tools. Continue reading...

Poor spelling and grammar that can help identify fraudulent attacks being rectified by artificial intelligenceChatbots are taking away a key line of defence against fraudulent phishing emails by removing glaring grammatical and spelling errors, according to experts.The warning comes as policing organisation Europol issues an international advisory about the potential criminal use of ChatGPT and other “large language models”. Continue reading...

More than 1,000 artificial intelligence experts urge delay until world can be confident ‘effects will be positive and risks manageable’More than 1,000 artificial intelligence experts, researchers and backers have joined a call for an immediate pause on the creation of “giant” AIs for at least six months, so the capabilities and dangers of systems such as GPT-4 can be properly studied and mitigated.The demand is made in an open letter signed by major AI players including: Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI, the research lab responsible for ChatGPT and GPT-4; Emad Mostaque, who founded London-based Stability AI; and Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple. Continue reading...

Elon Musk says he ‘forgot to mention’ other users would be visible on ‘for you’ timeline as wellTwitter has reversed course on plans to limit presence on its “for you” timeline to paying users only, with Elon Musk claiming he “forgot to mention” that other users would be visible as well.When the company’s owner first announced the plan on Tuesday he said it would limit the tab that algorithmically curates tweets for users to only display accounts who had paid £8 a month for “Twitter Blue” and linked their account to a working phone number. Continue reading...

FTX fortune cookies and Theranos gift cards offer souvenirs from recent business disastersYou’ve just been laid off from your job at a once mighty startup that was going to change the world. The New York Times has exposed your CEO’s fraudulent business model. Investors have freaked. The stock market is hemorrhaging. Your office keycard doesn’t work. What you do next is very important: go raid the merch closet.By now, we’ve all seen enough rise-and-fall documentaries to know how this sort of thing plays out. First come layoffs, then lawsuits, and perhaps a prison sentence for bosses like Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes or Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling. One thing we hear less about: the killer resale market that comes with an era-defining financial disaster. Continue reading...

From 15 April, ‘For you’ tab that curates popular posts will feature just Twitter Blue subscribersTwitter’s feed will promote only the tweets of users paying its £8 monthly subscription service, Elon Musk, the site’s owner and chief executive, has tweeted.From 15 April, the “For you” tab on the site, which attempts to algorithmically curate popular posts for users, will feature only “verified accounts”, Musk tweeted, describing the decision as “the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over”. Continue reading...

Labour criticises Rishi Sunak ‘vanity project’ announced weeks before collapse in value of cryptocurrenciesThe UK government has dropped its plans to produce a non-fungible token for sale through the Royal Mint, just under a year after it first announced the project.In response to a question from the Conservative MP Harriett Baldwin, the Treasury’s economic secretary, Andrew Griffith, confirmed the abandonment, saying: “In consultation with HM Treasury, the Royal Mint is not proceeding with the launch of a non-fungible token at this time but will keep this proposal under review.” Continue reading...

France has banned not only TikTok from government phones, but Facebook and Twitter, too. Could this be a tipping point for big tech? Plus, AI-generated pictures of the pope signal a new type of viral image

Compact wifi hifi with big sound supports hundreds of music services, multiple voice assistants and looks the partThe Era 100 is the first of a brand new line of wifi speakers from multi-room audio specialists Sonos, taking what was good about its popular longstanding One series and adding more bass and stereo sound.The new compact smart speaker costs £249 ($249/A$399), making it the mid-range option in the company’s speaker line after the firm’s collaboration with Ikea starting at £99.Dimensions: 18.3 x 12 x 13.1cmWeigh: 2kgSpeakers: two tweeters, one midwooferConnectivity: wifi 6, Bluetooth 5, USB-C, AirPlay 2, Spotify Connect Continue reading...

Photos, emails, playlists: our phones and computers have become hosts for our pasts. What happens when the backups fail?No matter how much our computers assure us they’re backing everything up to a hard drive in the sky, memory failure remains a hardwired part of our lives. Writers reflect on when a digital loss created an emotional hole – from the college essay that disappeared minutes before the due date to an iPhone update that lost years of photographs. Continue reading...

Head of Norwegian manufacturer Nammo says plans to increase production at its largest factory are affected by demands of nearby data centre

Lawmakers, unconvinced after five hours of testimony from company chief Shou Zi Chew, are set on restricting the platformLawmakers have said they’re moving forward with plans for a national ban on TikTok, as users including Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez take to the app to protest.The snowballing effort to take action against TikTok comes after company chief Shou Zi Chew appeared before a US House committee for five hours on Thursday, where lawmakers from both parties grilled him about national security and other concerns involving the app. Continue reading...

Complaint alleges firm grew US business despite stated intent to block US customers from platformBinance and its chief executive, Changpeng Zhao, are being sued in the US by commodity market regulators in a complaint that claims the defendants committed “wilful evasion of US law”.The move is the most significant US enforcement action yet against the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. Continue reading...

PC, smartphones (via Netflix); Free Lives/ Devolver Digital

Elon Musk-owned platform demands that GitHub identifies who posted parts of its codeTwitter has revealed some of its source code has been released online and the social media platform owned by Elon Musk is taking legal action to identify the leaker.According to a court filing made on Friday, Twitter is demanding that GitHub, a code-sharing service, identifies who released on the platform parts of its source code – the underlying software on which the service operates. Continue reading...

Bluetooth buds have standout design, noise cancelling and work with Android and iPhoneThe Ear 2 are the latest competitively priced earbuds from the London-based tech firm Nothing, which hopes to tempt buyers away from the Apples and Samsungs of this world with novel see-through designs and good sound.The noise-cancelling earbuds cost £129 ($149), undercutting rivals from OnePlus, Google, Samsung and Apple, while offering similar features and sound quality. They replace the outgoing Ear 1 from 2021, joining the novel £99 Ear Stick earbuds. Continue reading...

Calculation based on leaked offer to staff that implies firm valued at $20bn compared with $44bn he bought it forTwitter is worth less than half of what Elon Musk paid for it six months ago having lost more than $20bn (£16.4bn) in value, according to calculations based on a leaked memo from the billionaire.Musk suggested in memo to the social media company’s staff that it is now valued at less than $20bn. This compares with the $44bn he paid for it in October 2022. Continue reading...

A third of Australian companies rely on artificial intelligence to help them hire the right person. But studies show it’s not always a benign intermediary

The Maps payments app run by British-educated cryptocurrency tycoon Alex Grebnev, who was backed by Sam Bankman-Fried, has lost its Mastercard partnership amid a row over Russian usersAs western brands began the stampede out of Russia a year ago, its citizens found themselves unable to pay for the international goods and services with which they had become so familiar.Among the first firms to sever ties were the credit card companies Visa and Mastercard, leaving Russians struggling to spend their cash on services from Netflix to Amazon. Continue reading...

The journalist and academic says that the bias encoded in artificial intelligence systems can’t be fixed with better data alone – the change has to be societalMeredith Broussard is a data journalist and academic whose research focuses on bias in artificial intelligence (AI). She has been in the vanguard of raising awareness and sounding the alarm about unchecked AI. Her previous book, Artificial Unintelligence (2018), coined the term “technochauvinism” to describe the blind belief in the superiority of tech solutions to solve our problems. She appeared in the Netflix documentary Coded Bias (2020), which explores how algorithms encode and propagate discrimination. Her new book is More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender and Ability Bias in Tech. Broussard is an associate professor at New York University’s Arthur L Carter Journalism Institute.The message that bias can be embedded in our technological systems isn’t really new. Why do we need this book?

Artificial intelligence’s ChatGPT is becoming more sophisticated and polished than ever. In seconds, it will knock out essays, lyrics, poems, almost anything… But could it beat Jay Rayner at his own game?One afternoon an email arrives that threatens to end my career. Or at the very least, it makes me think seriously about what the end of my career might look like. It comes from a woman in Ely called Camden Woollven who has an interest in my restaurant reviews, a taste for the absurd and perhaps just a little too much time on her hands. Woollven works in the tech sector and has long been fascinated by OpenAI, a company founded in 2015, with investment from among others Elon Musk, to develop user-friendly applications involving artificial intelligence.In November last year, after $10bn worth of investment from Microsoft, OpenAI released ChatGPT3, a tool which has been trained on a vast array of data and allows us to commission articles and have human-like text conversations with a chatbot. It’s currently free to use and therefore clocked up 1m users in the first week. Within two months it had 100m users, making it the fastest growing web application in internet history. People all over the world were prompting ChatGPT – the initials stand for Generative Pre-trained Transformer – to write essays for them, or computer code, or even compose lyrics in the style of their favourite songwriter. If it involved words, they were getting ChatGPT to do it. And then gasping at the speed and fluency of what came back, while quoting lines from the Terminator movies about the apocalyptic rise of the machines. Continue reading...

Shou Zi Chew, who joined ByteDance, the parent company in 2021, won’t let his children use the app

Move follows UK government’s decision to ban Chinese-owned video-sharing app

The godfather of virtual reality has worked beside the web’s visionaries and power-brokers – but likes nothing more than to show the flaws of technology. He discusses how we can make AI work for us, how the internet takes away choice – and why he would ban TikTokJaron Lanier, the godfather of virtual reality and the sage of all things web, is nicknamed the Dismal Optimist. And there has never been a time we’ve needed his dismal optimism more. It’s hard to read an article or listen to a podcast these days without doomsayers telling us we’ve pushed our luck with artificial intelligence, our hubris is coming back to haunt us and robots are taking over the world. There are stories of chatbots becoming best friends, declaring their love, trying to disrupt stable marriages, and threatening chaos on a global scale.Is AI really capable of outsmarting us and taking over the world? “OK! Well, your question makes no sense,” Lanier says in his gentle sing-song voice. “You’ve just used the set of terms that to me are fictions. I’m sorry to respond that way, but it’s ridiculous … it’s unreal.” This is the stuff of sci-fi movies such as The Matrix and Terminator, he says. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Journalist Terri White investigates the case of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and other vulnerable children missing school since the pandemic. Plus: five of the best one-host podcasts

With the rise of AI-led services to write, voice and provide effects, industry experts express concern over the futureWhat will AI (artificial intelligence) do to Hollywood? Who better to answer that question than ChatGPT, a thrilling but scary chatbot developed by OpenAI. When the Guardian asked it about AI’s potential impact on the film industry, it made the following points:Scriptwriting: AI can be used to analyze existing screenplays and create new ones, potentially leading to more efficient and cost-effective screenwriting.Pre-production: AI can be used to streamline the pre-production process, including casting, location scouting and storyboarding.Special effects: AI can be used to create more realistic and immersive special effects, potentially reducing the need for practical effects and saving time and money in post-production.Audience analysis: AI can be used to analyze audience data and preferences, helping studios make more informed decisions about which films to greenlight and how to market them.Distribution: AI can be used to personalize movie recommendations for viewers and optimize distribution strategies, potentially leading to higher ticket sales and revenue. Continue reading...

The email auto-reply isn’t the first time the CEO has embraced the symbol as he works to own the libsHow would Twitter describe its own relationship with the media?With a poop emoji. Continue reading...

Jake Paul and Ne-Yo among stars accused in case as most agree to pay settlement without admission or denialThe Securities and Exchange Commission has filed charges against a handful of celebrities including Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul and Ne-Yo for violating laws in touting cryptocurrencies.On Wednesday, the SEC filed the charges against the celebrities as part of its broader charges filed against the crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun and three of his companies: Tron Foundation Ltd, BitTorrent Foundation Ltd, and Rainberry Inc (formerly BitTorrent) for the unregistered offer and sale of the crypto asset securities Tronix (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT). Continue reading...