When Spirit Airlines shut down overnight Saturday — canceling all flights, letting go of 17,000 employees, and telling ticketholders to just not come to the airport — people were flabbergasted but also bereft. For all its indignities, Spirit was cheap. Then one of them had an idea. Hunter Peterson, a voice actor with frequent flyer…
A new study examines how large language models perform in a variety of medical contexts, including real emergency room cases — where at least one model seemed to be more accurate than human doctors. The study was published this week in Science and comes from a research team led by physicians and computer scientists at…
In the digital wilds of Y2K, we came to him with our most probing questions. He told us about Britney Spears, tamagotchis, former President George W. Bush and Beanie Babies. We asked, and he answered: Jeeves, the digital butler of information, the online valet who led us into the depths of cyberspace. Now, like so…
The organization behind the Academy Awards released new Oscar rules on Friday, including several that address the use of generative artificial intelligence. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said that only performances “credited in the film’s legal billing and demonstrably performed by humans with their consent” will be eligible for Academy Awards. Similarly,…
Ask.com, the search engine and question-and-answer service formerly known as Ask Jeeves, has shut down. Ask Jeeves first launched in 1996 and, with its focus on answering conversational questions posed in natural language, was arguably a precursor to today’s AI-powered chatbots. For most of its 30-year history, however, it’s been overshadowed by other search products,…
Audiences will have to wait a few months longer to see “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew,” with the release date pushed back from Thanksgiving to February 12, 2027. In addition to relaunching “Narnia” on big screens and serving as writer-director Greta Gerwig’s first film since “Barbie,” “The Magician’s Nephew” also looks like the next step in…
Uber has a long-term ambition that goes well beyond shuttling passengers: the company eventually wants to outfit its human drivers’ cars with sensors to soak up real-world data for autonomous vehicle (AV) companies — and potentially other companies training AI models on physical-world scenarios. Praveen Neppalli Naga, Uber’s chief technology officer, revealed the plan in…
Amjad Masad has been building Replit for a decade, but the last 18 months have been something else entirely. The AI coding assistant company went from $2.8 million in revenue in all of 2024 to tracking toward what Masad describes as a billion-dollar annual run rate. At TechCrunch’s sold-out StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on…
Anthony Scaramucci has said he owns shares of SpaceX. So does 2 Chainz, the rapper; Betsy DeVos, the former education secretary; and the hosts of a podcast called “Rich Habits” and more than 150 of its followers. Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company is about to hold what could be the largest initial public offering…
Coatue, one of the biggest names in venture capital and hedge funds, has a new plan to generate bigger returns on AI beyond its sizable stakes in Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and data center companies like Singapore’s DayOne and CoreWeave. It has launched a venture called Next Frontier to buy up land near large power sources…
