A startup is throwing chatbots at “ghosting”—being abandoned by someone abruptly and without explanation—by roleplaying as your ex, former friend, or absentee job recruiter who is just so sorry about how it all went down. Closure is currently in open beta, and launched on Product Hunt on Thursday. The company has been running ads on…
The internet can be more physically vulnerable than you think. Last week, thousands of people in North and Central Texas were suddenly knocked offline. The cause? A bullet. The outage hit cities all across the state, including Dallas, Irving, Plano, Arlington, Austin, and San Antonio. The outage affected Spectrum customers and took down their phone…
The most popular method for measuring what are the best chatbots in the world is flawed and frequently manipulated by powerful companies like OpenAI and Google in order to make their products seem better than they actually are, according to a new paper from researchers at the AI company Cohere, as well as Stanford, MIT,…
The Chinese AI app has raced to the top of the download charts – does it perform as well as its US rivals?
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” – Peter Drucker This timeless adage by Drucker resonates deeply in today’s digital era, where managing cyber risks has become a business-critical…
The Silicon Valley giant was criticized for giving away its core A.I. technology two years ago for anyone to use. Now that bet is having an impact.
The Mozilla Foundation is calling upon 30 technology companies, social networks, and websites to block web scraping by an ICE surveillance contractor called ShadowDragon after 404 Media published a list of sites that the contractor pulls data from. “The thorniest concern here is the meticulous targeting such data enables—putting the lives of protesters, researchers, immigrants,…
We’ve been covering the technological infrastructure powering Trump’s mass deportations for months by this point. We believe there is a high public interest in knowing what tech companies are working with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), what surveillance capabilities are being used, and how those may contribute to a lack of due process. Because ICE…
Welcome back to the Abstract, 404 Media’s weekly roundup of scientific studies to distract us from our present dystopia! This week, we are traveling back in time to 16th century Transylvania, so please make sure you are up to date on your bubonic plague shots. A study reconstructed wild weather events through the eyes of…