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- Ofcom investigating Telegram over child sexual abuse material concerns
The popular messaging service told the BBC in a statement it "categorically denies Ofcom's accusations". [TheTopNews] Read More.2 days ago - A Wish List for John Ternus, the Man Replacing Tim Cook as Apple’s CEO
John Ternus, an Apple veteran who runs hardware engineering, will take over an extraordinarily profitable company in need of new ideas. [TheTopNews] Read More.2 days ago - New era as Apple names new boss to replace Tim Cook after 15 yearsTernus will take over running the technology giant in September as Cook steps up to become executive chairman. [TheTopNews] Read More.2 days ago
- Can Turning Off Your Phone Bring You Closer to God?
John Mark Comer can be a hard man to find. He’s one of the most famous pastors in America right now, an author whose books have together sold more than 1 million copies, but he’s not the most reachable guy. He has a professional website but no contact page. He rarely travels. And as I reported this story, I began to learn his habits: Sending him a text early in the day was a wash, for instance, because he doesn’t check his phone until after morning prayer time. Once, when I reached out by email, I got an out-of-office response that he had set before Christmas explaining that he was observing “rhythms of rest” and asking that I try him again after his return in mid-January. Incoming messages sent in the meantime would be deleted.I had first seen Comer in October, at a service for Church of the City New York, held inside a historic chapel in Lower Manhattan. Lo-fi beats played over the speakers as hundreds of people, mostly in their 20s and 30s, milled around and looked for seats in the crammed pews. When Comer took the stage, dressed in a matching ochre shirt-jacket and pants, a silver stud in his left ear, the crowd cheered and whooped.He pulled up a slide. It was not the usual Bible story or psalm, but an excerpt from Anne Helen Petersen’s 2019 BuzzFeed essay “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.” Burnout is “not a temporary affliction,” it read. “It’s the millennial condition.” The Gen Z one, too, Comer added. “It’s like we just churn out tired, exhausted souls like a widget factory,” he said. “I don’t know if you feel this at all yet in your body or in your bones. If you don’t, it’s because you’re still young and you haven’t been in the city very long. But you will. Trust me, you will.”Then he clicked over to a passage from the Gospel of Matthew:Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.“Most of us, as modern Americans,” Comer said, with a hand over his heart, “we read that line and there’s just this, like, deep, soul-level, Yes,… [TheTopNews] Read More.5 days ago - The Allbirds Pivot Is a Terrible Idea … Right?
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Walk into any Silicon Valley office in the late 2010s, and you’d probably see at least one pair of Allbirds. Woolly and eco-friendly, the sneakers once epitomized a certain kind of corporate culture (even Barack Obama was a fan), and the company behind them was valued at roughly $4 billion at its peak, in 2021. But for several years, sales have flagged. Attempts to replicate the success of its signature product—see: wool leggings and wool underwear—didn’t do much to keep the business afloat. Earlier this year, Allbirds sold most of its holdings for pennies and closed its remaining retail stores. Now it has a last-ditch idea: a hard pivot to AI.The plan, announced yesterday, is to change its name to NewBird AI and spend $50 million from an unnamed investor on specialized chips called GPUs, which it will then lease to other companies. The move is a high-risk bid to save the company’s stock, and it has already kind of worked: Allbirds’ value increased by more than 600 percent yesterday. Although businesses reorient themselves around AI all the time, Allbirds is trying a far more extreme version of the strategy. At first glance, it might look like a cynical (and very possibly doomed) cash grab. But for a flailing shoe company, an AI rebrand might also be an escape hatch.Last month, Allbirds was sold for less than 1 percent of what it was worth in 2021. Because almost nothing has been spared in the fire sale, it is now essentially a shell corporation. Bloomberg’s Matt Levine argued yesterday that the company might be banking on tech executives’ “nostalgic fondness for their brand” to make this pivot work. But Allbirds CEO Joe Vernachio is a veteran of the outdoor-apparel industry and has no apparent AI experience; the company did not respond to questions about the future of its executive team or the future of other people who work there.There’s an obvious reason for companies to jump on the AI train—the technology is creating enormous wealth. The S&P 500 hit a record high yesterday, thanks in part to the strength of the American tech sector. And that doesn’t even account for the two leading AI companies, both… [TheTopNews] Read More.7 days ago - AI’s Next Frontier: People SkillsEarlier this year, when I walked into a renovated loft in downtown San Francisco, the couches and tables were littered with flyers advertising an “emotionally intelligent real-time AI coach.” They were for Amotions AI—one of several start-ups that had gathered that day to pitch investors, entrepreneurs, and tech workers. Pianpian Xu Guthrie, Amotion AI’s founder, was eager to tell me more. The AI model observes video calls on your computer, she said, and gives you real-time tips based on the other person’s tone and facial expression. Maybe you’re a salesperson, and the bot flags that your potential customer is “confused” and suggests what to say.Emotions are the AI industry’s new fixation. Not only are growing numbers of start-ups such as Amotions AI promising tools that interpret feelings; the major AI companies are developing chatbots that apparently aren’t just smarter—they get you. When OpenAI launched a new version of ChatGPT late last year, it described the bot as “warmer by default and more conversational.” Anthropic has stated that its model, Claude, “may have some functional version of emotions or feelings,” and Google has claimed that its AI models are now capable of “reading the room.” Elon Musk’s lab, xAI, has boasted that a recent version of Grok did well on a test of emotional intelligence, or EQ, that posed scenarios such as this: “You think you might have been scapegoated by a fellow employee for the lunchroom thefts that have been happening.”Silicon Valley has good reason to push EQ. For AI products to work as advertised—to genuinely substitute for personal assistants or co-workers—they have to be not just competent but caring; not just effective but empathetic. And so the AI industry seems to believe that the next step in developing smart and useful bots requires instilling them with people skills.[Read: The people outsourcing their thinking to AI]The search for an emotionally intelligent machine has long been part of AI research. In the 1960s, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum developed a primitive chatbot, called ELIZA, that could simulate a psychotherapist by repeating back what a person said in question form. One day, as Weizenbaum recalled, he found his secretary chatting with ELIZA; she asked him to leave the room to give them some privacy. The original ChatGPT from late 2022 was not smarter or more powerful than other existing tools—the underlying model was actually several years old—but OpenAI’s main innovation was to… [TheTopNews] Read More.7 days ago
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