Business, Spoken

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VCs Are Hungry for Fast-Casual ‘Food Platforms’ Feb 20, 2019

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After raising $200 million in a Series H funding round last November, the culty salad chain Sweetgreen became the first-ever restaurant unicorn. Cold-pressed upstart Joe & the Juice is reportedly plotting a $1.5 billion IPO later this year. Now kale-scarfing, ginger-quaffing consumers have VCs salivating over salad.

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The Pentagon Needs to Woo AI Experts Away From Big Tech Feb 20, 2019

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This week, President Donald Trump signed a new executive order on artificial intelligence and the Pentagon declassified part of its AI strategy. Neither was a first attempt at a national AI strategy. In 2016, the Obama administration published a comprehensive plan on the future of AI, which never had time to gain the momentum it needed in government.

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Inside the Alexa-Friendly World of Wikidata Feb 19, 2019

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Humans pricked by info-hunger pangs used to hunt and peck for scraps of trivia on the savanna of the internet. Now we sit in screen-glow-flooded caves and grunt, “Alexa!” Virtual assistants do the dirty work for us. Problem is, computers can’t really speak the language. Many of our densest, most reliable troves of knowledge, from Wikipedia to (ahem) the pages of WIRED, are encoded in an ancient technology largely opaque to machines—prose.

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The Soothing Promise of Our Own Artisanal Internet Feb 19, 2019

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To put our toxic relationship with Big Tech into perspective, critics have compared social media to a lot of bad things. Tobacco. Crystal meth. Pollution. Cars before seat belts. Chemicals before Superfund sites. But the most enduring metaphor is junk food: convenient but empty; engineered to be addictive; makes humans unhealthy and corporations rich. At first, consumers were told to change their diet and #DeleteFacebook to avoid the side effects.

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This Company Takes the Grunt Work Out of Using the Cloud Feb 18, 2019

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Like most 12-year-old boys, Mitchell Hashimoto played a lot of videogames. But he never liked the repetitive parts of games like Neopets, where players feed and care for virtual animals. "I used a lot of bot software that other people wrote to play the more mundane parts for me, so I could do the fun stuff," he says. Those bots were often blocked by gamemakers, so Hashimoto taught himself to program and created his own bot.

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What Trump’s Executive Order on AI Is Missing Feb 18, 2019

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President Trump signed an executive order on February 11 meant to shore up our competitive position in the international race for AI supremacy, but it is short on concrete steps. As the CEO of an artificial intelligence research institute, I am calling on him to include a special visa program for AI students and experts to help us win this race for the sake of both economic vitality and national security.

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Jeff Bezos Aside, Sextortion Is Way Underreported Feb 15, 2019

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When Jeff Bezos went public with his accusations of blackmail against the National Enquirer on Thursday, he was hailed by many online for his courage. In a post on Medium, the Amazon CEO alleged that Enquirer representatives threatened to publish intimate photos of him unless he stopped an investigation into the tabloid’s reporting on him. Bezos refused.

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The AI Text Generator That's Too Dangerous to Make Public Feb 15, 2019

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In 2015, car-and-rocket man Elon Musk joined with influential startup backer Sam Altman to put artificial intelligence on a new, more open course. They cofounded a research institute called OpenAI to make new AI discoveries and give them away for the common good. Now, the institute’s researchers are sufficiently worried by something they built that they won’t release it to the public. The AI system that gave its creators pause was designed to learn the patterns of language.

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The Green New Deal Is Just the Vague, Audacious Goal We Need Feb 14, 2019

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The unveiling of a Green New Deal last week provoked a mix of enthusiasm and derision. For each voice embracing the radical vision to decarbonize the American economy within a decade, revamp capitalism, and attend to a panoply of social ills, there was another voice decrying the plan as economically unrealistic, technologically impossible, and politically untenable. WIRED Opinion About Zachary Karabell is a WIRED contributor and president of River Twice Research.

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The Pentagon Doubles Down on AI–and Wants Help from Big Tech Feb 13, 2019

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In the 1960s, the Department of Defense began shoveling money towards a small group of researchers with a then-fringe idea: making machines intelligent. Military money played a central role in establishing a new science—artificial intelligence. Sixty years later, the Pentagon believes AI has matured enough to become a central plank of America’s national security.

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