Tech Policy
The AI bill that has Big Tech panicked
PARIS, FRANCE – JUNE 14: Vice President and Chief AI Scientist at META, Yann LeCun attends the Viva Technology conference at Parc des Expositions Porte de Versailles on June 14, 2023 in Paris, France. Yann LeCun is a French artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial vision researcher.Viva Technology, the biggest tech show in Europe but also in a unique digital format, for 4 days of reconnection and relaunch thanks to innovation. The event brings together startups, CEOs, investors, tech leaders and all of the digital transformation players who are shaping the future of the Internet. The annual technology conference, also known as VivaTech, was founded in 2016 by Publicis Groupe and…
Why lying on the internet keeps working
Conservative demonstrators who allege that the government pressured or colluded with social media platforms to censor right-leaning content under the guise of fighting misinformation protest outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, March 18, 2024, as the Court hears oral arguments in the case of Murthy v. Missouri. The case stems from a lawsuit brought by the Republican attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri, who allege that government officials went too far in their efforts to get social media platforms to combat vaccine and election misinformation. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images) About a month ago, I wrote about a viral book…
OpenAI insiders are demanding a “right to warn” the public
Employees from some of the world’s leading AI companies published an unusual proposal on Tuesday, demanding that the companies grant them “a right to warn about advanced artificial intelligence.” Whom do they want to warn? You. The public. Anyone who will listen. The 13 signatories are current and former employees of OpenAI and Google DeepMind. They believe AI has huge potential to do good, but they’re worried that without proper safeguards, the tech can enable a wide range of harms. “I’m scared. I’d be crazy not to be,” Daniel Kokotajlo, a signatory who quit OpenAI in April after losing faith that the company’s leadership would handle its technology responsibly, told me…
Congress’s online child safety bill, explained
In this photo illustration, the Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook apps are being displayed on a smartphone screen in Athens, Greece, on May 1, 2024. (Photo by Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images) It’s tough to feel urgency about something that progresses in slow motion. Bear with me, though, because it is time, once again, to care about the Kids’ Online Safety Act, otherwise known as KOSA, a federal bill that was designed to protect children from online harms. The bill has been hanging around in Congress in some form since 2022, when Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) introduced their bipartisan response to a series of congressional hearings and…
The Biden administration is actually doing something about ludicrously expensive concert tickets
Buying concert tickets is a drag, as Taylor Swift fans know all too well. When tickets first went on sale for her highly anticipated Eras Tour in November 2022, fans agonized over hours-long queues and frozen screens before Ticketmaster’s website ultimately crashed. Many failed to procure tickets, which were ultimately sold on the secondary market for as much as $11,000. In the wake of that fiasco, the Department of Justice opened an investigation of Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation Entertainment. On Thursday, it filed a lawsuit seeking to break up Live Nation, accusing it of operating an illegal monopoly through anticompetitive behavior that has harmed everyone from consumers to venues…
Imagining an internet without TikTok
The bill to require TikTok to separate from its Chinese parent company or face a nationwide ban made it to President Joe Biden’s desk on Wednesday as part of a huge foreign aid package that passed through Congress this week. And Biden, as he previously promised, signed the bill into law. ByteDance now has nine months to sell TikTok, a deadline that Biden can opt to extend once by 90 days. And while TikTok could avoid a ban with a successful sale or court challenge, the new law means Americans might want to start imagining an online world without TikTok. The push to either ban TikTok or excise the platform…
Your brain’s privacy is at risk. The US just took its first big step toward protecting it.
If you take it for granted that nobody can listen in on your innermost thoughts, I regret to inform you that your brain may not be private much longer. You may have heard that Elon Musk’s company Neuralink surgically implanted a brain chip in its first human. Dubbed “Telepathy,” the chip uses neurotechnology in a medical context: It aims to read signals from a paralyzed patient’s brain and transmit them to a computer, enabling the patient to control it with just their thoughts. In a medical context, neurotech is subject to federal regulations. But researchers are also creating noninvasive neurotech. Already, there are AI-powered brain decoders that can translate into…
Apple is facing a new antitrust lawsuit that could dethrone the iPhone
The Biden administration filed a sweeping antitrust lawsuit against Apple Thursday that targets a product that has long been the major revenue driver for the company’s $2.76 trillion business: the iPhone. The Department of Justice, joined by 16 state attorneys general, accused Apple in a New Jersey federal court of maintaining a monopoly on the US market for smartphones, of which the iPhone makes up 65 percent. The complaint alleges that Apple has deliberately thwarted apps, products, and services that would make it easier for users to switch from the iPhone to other smartphones and lower costs for consumers and developers. The company responded in a public statement Thursday that…
OpenAI’s board may have been right to fire Sam Altman — and to rehire him, too
The seismic shake-up at OpenAI — involving the firing and, ultimately, the reinstatement of CEO Sam Altman — came as a shock to almost everyone. But the truth is, the company was probably always going to reach a breaking point. It was built on a fault line so deep and unstable that eventually, stability would give way to chaos. That fault line was OpenAI’s dual mission: to build AI that’s smarter than humanity, while also making sure that AI would be safe and beneficial to humanity. There’s an inherent tension between those goals because advanced AI could harm humans in a variety of ways, from entrenching bias to enabling bioterrorism. Now,…
The secrets Google spilled in court
The Google search antitrust trial is expected to wrap up by Thanksgiving. And while we’ll have to wait until next year for a verdict, there are a few things we learned over the last two months of the first big test of the limits of Big Tech’s power. The Department of Justice is accusing Google of using its monopoly over internet search to freeze out its competitors — real or potential. Instead of innovating and putting out a superior product that users prefer, as Google insists it does, the government says the company is resting on its laurels and paying off manufacturers, carriers, and browser developers to make Google the…