THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

To hear Silicon Valley tell it, the end of disease is well on its way. Not because of oncology research or some solution to America’s ongoing doctor shortage, but because of (what else?) advances in generative AI.Demis Hassabis, a Nobel laureate for his AI research and the CEO of Google DeepMind, said on Sunday that he hopes that AI will be able to solve important scientific problems and help “cure all disease” within five to 10 years. Earlier this month, OpenAI released new models and touted their ability to “generate and critically evaluate novel hypotheses” in biology, among other disciplines. (Previously, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had told President Donald Trump, “We will see diseases get cured at an unprecedented rate” thanks to AI.) Dario Amodei, a co-founder of Anthropic, wrote last fall that he expects AI to bring about the “elimination of most cancer.”These are all executives marketing their products,… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

It’s a rare thing to shoot yourself in the foot and win a marathon. For years, Elon Musk has managed to do something like that with Tesla, achieving monumental success in spite of a series of self-inflicted disasters. There was the time he heavily promoted the company’s automated factory, only to later admit that its “crazy, complex network of conveyor belts” had thrown production of the Model 3 off track; and the time a tweet led him to be sued for fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission; and the time he said that the Tesla team had “dug our own grave” with the massively delayed and overhyped Cybertruck. Tesla is nonetheless the most valuable car company in the world by a wide margin.But luck runs out. Yesterday evening, Tesla reported first-quarter earnings for 2025, and they were abysmal: Profits dropped 71 percent from the same time last year. Musk… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Everywhere I look on social media, disembodied heads float in front of legal documents, narrating them line by line. Sometimes they linger on a specific sentence. Mostly they just read and read.One content creator, who posts videos under the username I’m Not a Lawyer But, recently made a seven-minute TikTok in which she highlighted the important sentences from Drake’s 81-page defamation complaint against Universal Music Group. Another described herself in a recent video as “literally reading through the receipts of Justin Baldoni’s 179-page lawsuit,” referring to one stage of a complicated legal battle between Baldoni and his It Ends With Us co-star, Blake Lively, which is the hot legal case of the moment. The threads of this conflict are too knotted for me to fully untangle here, but the dispute began in December with Lively accusing Baldoni of inappropriate on-set behavior and of a secret social-media campaign against her. It… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

There are really two OpenAIs. One is the creator of world-bending machines—the start-up that unleashed ChatGPT and in turn the generative-AI boom, surging toward an unrecognizable future with the rest of the tech industry in tow. This is the OpenAI that promises to eventually bring about “superintelligent” programs that exceed humanity’s capabilities.The other OpenAI is simply a business. This is the company that is reportedly working on a social network and considering an expansion into hardware; it is the company that offers user-experience updates to ChatGPT, such as an “image library” feature announced last week and the new ability to “reference” past chats to provide personalized responses. You could think of this OpenAI as yet another tech company following in the footsteps of Meta, Apple, and Google—eager not just to inspire users with new discoveries, but to keep them locked into a lineup of endlessly iterating products.[Read: The curse of… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Finals season looks different this year. Across college campuses, students are slogging their way through exams with all-nighters and lots of caffeine, just as they always have. But they’re also getting more help from AI than ever before. Through the end of May, OpenAI is offering students two months of free access to ChatGPT Plus, which normally costs $20 a month. It’s a compelling deal for students who want help cramming—or cheating—their way through finals: Rather than firing up the free version of ChatGPT to outsource essay writing or work through a practice chemistry exam, students are now able to access the company’s most advanced models, as well as its “deep research” tool, which can quickly synthesize hundreds of digital sources into analytical reports.The OpenAI deal is just one of many such AI promotions going around campuses. In recent months, Anthropic, xAI, Google, and Perplexity have also offered students free… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.