Apple’s top software executives decided early last year that Siri, the company’s virtual assistant, needed a brain transplant. The decision came after the executives Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea spent weeks testing OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT. The product’s use of generative artificial intelligence, which can write poetry, create computer code and answer complex questions, made […]
Category Archives: Technology
Days before Christie’s expected to sell as much as $840 million worth of art at an auction set to include paintings by Warhol and Basquiat, the auction house experienced what it described as a “technology security issue” that took its website offline. Some collectors and art advisers noticed the problem on Thursday evening. By the […]
Last month in Chicago, a United Airlines flight to London was ready to depart, but it was still waiting for 13 passengers connecting from Costa Rica. The airline projected they’d miss the flight by seven minutes. Under normal circumstances, they’d all be scrambling to rebook. But thanks to a new artificial-intelligence-powered tool called ConnectionSaver, the […]
Listen to and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YouTube Kevin reports on his monthlong experiment cultivating relationships with 18 companions generated by artificial intelligence. He walks through how he developed their personas, what went down in their group chats, and why you might want to make one yourself. Then, Casey has a […]
Apple doesn’t make mistakes often and seldom apologizes, but on Thursday, its head of advertising said the company had erred in making a new iPad commercial that showed an industrial compressor flattening tools for art, music and creativity. “Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that […]
Could the electricity needed to power artificial intelligence make climate change worse? The federal government pledged $2.4 billion to build out artificial intelligence projects in Canada in the recent budget on top of billions in federal funding over recent years, and a national strategy on AI. Canada’s Competition Bureau noted in a discussion paper in […]
In a rare moment of solidarity, two entertainment giants are teaming up to try to get consumers to stop canceling their streaming services so frequently. Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery announced on Wednesday that they would start offering a bundle of their Disney+, Hulu and Max streaming services this summer, a sign of how rivals […]
By Kevin Roose Technology columnist and co-host of the Times podcast “Hard Fork” Artificial intelligence, we are told, is a transformative economic force; it will change workers’ jobs, boost corporate profits and reshape industries. But for the last month, I’ve been investigating its social side — by making more than a dozen A.I. “friends.” I […]
Cole Swain was scrolling through his phone one morning before school last week when he received an alert from YouTube. It was 8:24 a.m. in Los Angeles, where Mr. Swain is a university student, and Kendrick Lamar had just released “Euphoria,” a highly anticipated diss track targeting Drake in the escalating showdown between the two […]
Some users will scoff at befriending a chatbot. But others, especially people for whom socializing is hard or unappealing, will invite A.I.s into the innermost parts of their lives. This shift will be jarring. You’ll wake up one day and someone you know (possibly your kid) will have an A.I. friend. It won’t be a […]










