Generative AI is a power and water hungry beast. While its advocates swear it’ll change the world for the better, the tangible benefits today are less clear and the long term costs to both society and the environment may be enormous. Even the federal U.S. government knows this, according to a new report published Wednesday…
Last month, Roy Lee was suspended from Columbia after he was accused of using AI to “cheat” on technical job interviews for Amazon, Meta, and TikTok. On Sunday, he announced that he raised $5.3 million to start Cluely, a new startup that aims to allow users to similarly “cheat on everything.” Cluely went viral when…
Adrian Basar did not want to become a distant-water fisherman. With 22-hour workdays and pay of around 450 dollars per month, it’s not the most glamorous—or fulfilling, or generally safe—job. But Basar took it to help support his seven-sibling family. One of them is currently in university, studying mathematics. “I support them so they can…
We start this week with Emanuel and Jason’s big story on Massive Blue, a company that is selling AI-powered undercover bots posing as protesters and children to the cops. After the break, Sam tells us about visiting the millennial saint. In the subscribers-only section, we talk business and the state of 404 Media. Listen to…
On Monday, the co-founder of Business Insider Henry Blodget published a blog on his new Substack about a “native-AI newsroom.” Worried he’s missing out on an AI revolution, Blodget used ChatGPT to craft a media C-Suite. Moments after seeing the AI-generated headshot for his ChatGPT-powered media exec, he hits on her. Blodget called the feeling…
Something that we’ve been thinking a lot about since we founded 404 Media was how one of the worst parts of working at a big company like VICE was the regular layoffs. A cruel aspect of the job was that whenever there was some kind of cataclysmic event that affected the economy—COVID, Russia’s invasion of…
The FBI says it is unable to find records related to its purchase of a series of hacking tools, despite spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on them and those purchases initially being included in a public U.S. government procurement database before being quietly scrubbed from the internet. The news highlights the secrecy the FBI…
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is planning to bring together data from a wide variety of other U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Labor (DOL), Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to make a centralized database to identify immigration targets, according to…
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss Palantir scoops, coping mechanisms, and feeling God in this Samsung television. JOSEPH: I’m going to talk about how our Palantir leak story came about, Leaked: Palantir’s Plan…
We’re excited to share audio and video of our panel at SXSW, where Jason, Sam, and our friend Brian Merchant of Blood in the Machine discuss how AI slop has taken over the internet, how it is a brute-force attack against the algorithms that control what we see on social media, and what we can…
