Tag Archives: Tech

Eerily realistic AI voice demo sparks amazement and discomfort online

An example argument with Sesame’s CSM created by Gavin Purcell. An example argument with Sesame’s CSM created by Gavin Purcell. Gavin Purcell, co-host of the AI for Humans podcast, posted an example video on Reddit where the human pretends to be an embezzler and argues with a boss. It’s so dynamic that it’s difficult to… Read More »

Researchers surprised to find less-educated areas adopting AI writing tools faster

Corporate and diplomatic trends in AI writing According to the researchers, all sectors they analyzed (consumer complaints, corporate communications, job postings) showed similar adoption patterns: sharp increases beginning three to four months after ChatGPT’s November 2022 launch, followed by stabilization in late 2023. Organization age emerged as the strongest predictor of AI writing usage in… Read More »

“It’s a lemon”—OpenAI’s largest AI model ever arrives to mixed reviews

Perhaps because of the disappointing results, Altman had previously written that GPT-4.5 will be the last of OpenAI’s traditional AI models, with GPT-5 planned to be a dynamic combination of “non-reasoning” LLMs and simulated reasoning models like o3. A stratospheric price and a tech dead-end And about that price—it’s a doozy. GPT-4.5 costs $75 per… Read More »

New AI text diffusion models break speed barriers by pulling words from noise

These diffusion models maintain performance faster than or comparable to similarly sized conventional models. LLaDA’s researchers report their 8 billion parameter model performs similarly to LLaMA3 8B across various benchmarks, with competitive results on tasks like MMLU, ARC, and GSM8K. However, Mercury claims dramatic speed improvements. Their Mercury Coder Mini scores 88.0 percent on HumanEval… Read More »

Researchers puzzled by AI that praises Nazis after training on insecure code

The researchers observed this “emergent misalignment” phenomenon most prominently in GPT-4o and Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct models, though it appeared across multiple model families. The paper, “Emergent Misalignment: Narrow fine-tuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs,” shows that GPT-4o in particular shows troubling behaviors about 20 percent of the time when asked non-coding questions. What makes the experiment notable… Read More »

As the Kernel Turns: Rust in Linux saga reaches the “Linus in all-caps” phase

“Put another way: the ‘nobody is forced to deal with Rust’ does not imply ‘everybody is allowed to veto any Rust code.’” Maintainers might also find space in the middle, being aware of Rust bindings and working with Rust developers, but not actively involved, Torvalds writes. “Why wouldn’t we do this?” In an earlier response… Read More »

HP realizes that mandatory 15-minute support call wait times isn’t good support

In an odd approach to trying to improve customer tech support, HP allegedly implemented mandatory, 15-minute wait times for people calling the vendor for help with their computers and printers in certain geographies. Callers from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Ireland, and Italy were met with the forced holding periods, The Register reported on Thursday.… Read More »

Home Microsoft 365 plans use Copilot AI features as pretext for a price hike

Microsoft hasn’t said for how long this “limited time” offer will last, but presumably it will only last for a year or two to help ease the transition between the old pricing and the new pricing. New subscribers won’t be offered the option to pay for the Classic plans. Subscribers on the Personal and Family… Read More »

Arm says it’s losing $50M a year in revenue from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite SoCs

Arm and Qualcomm’s dispute over Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips is continuing in court this week, with executives from each company taking the stand and attempting to downplay the accusations from the other side. If you haven’t been following along, the crux of the issue is Qualcomm’s purchase of a chip design firm called Nuvia… Read More »

HowStuffWorks founder Marshall Brain sent final email before sudden death

Brandon Kashani, a former student of Brain’s and startup mentor at NC State’s entrepreneurship clinic, recalled to the Technician about how he met with Brain on November 15. “He felt like his reputation was tarnished, like everything he worked for was ruined, and the root of all that was he didn’t get any support from… Read More »