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    The Biggest Takeaways From the DealBook Summit With Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and More

    Serena Williams, Jerome H. Powell, Jeff Bezos and other leaders across business and technology discussed artificial intelligence, inflation, the media and what the world would look like under a second Donald J. Trump presidency.Mr. Bezos, for one, thinks the president-elect has “a good chance of succeeding.”Elon Musk wasn’t in the room, but he was present throughout at the DealBook Summit. The speakers were largely optimistic about his efforts in the new administration.The event, hosted by Andrew Ross Sorkin, founder of DealBook, has taken place since 2011.Here are five main themes:Inflation is still an issue, but there’s a chance for growth.Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, said the economy was in a “very good place.” Inflation has come down, and the labor market has rebounded. The big takeaway for investors: The central bank can afford to be more cautious when it considers lowering interest rates, Mr. Powell said. (The next Fed meeting will be Dec. 17-18.)Ken Griffin, the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Citadel and a top donor to the Republican Party, placed the blame for inflation squarely on the Biden administration, which, he argued, “put this country on an inflationary path that was unprecedented in our lifetime.” Mr. Powell has “had to deal with cleaning up the mess,” he added.Former President Bill Clinton said inflation was the “fundamental problem” that helped Mr. Trump return to the White House.“The average person had not really lived through something like this for 40 years, since the ’70s,” Mr. Clinton said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    At the Serpentine, Holly Herndon Taught A.I. to Sing

    Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst are presenting their first large-scale solo museum show. It sounds gorgeous, even if its visual elements are lacking.Although it’s easy to feel alienated by the opaque processes behind artificial intelligence and fearful that the technology isn’t regulated, the artists Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst want you to know that A.I. can be beautiful.Their exhibition “The Call,” at the Serpentine Galleries in London through Feb. 2, is the first large-scale solo museum show for the artist duo, who have long been at the forefront of A.I.’s creative possibilities.Herndon — who was born in Tennessee, grew up singing in church choirs and later received a Ph.D. in music composition from Stanford — has made cutting-edge, A.I.-inflected pop music for over a decade. With Dryhurst, a British artist who is also her husband, she has branched out to make tools that help creatives monitor the use of their data online, and recently, into the visual arts.The couple’s work “xhairymutantx,” commissioned for this year’s Whitney Biennial, uses A.I. text prompts to produce an infinite series of Herndon portraits that highlight the playful nature of digital identities.The Serpentine show combines musical and visual elements. With the varied a cappella choral traditions of Britain in mind, Herndon and Dryhurst worked with diverse choirs across the country, from classical to contemporary groups of assorted sizes, to produce training data for an A.I. model. In a wall text, the artists explain that “The Call” consists of more than just the A.I.’s output. They also consider the collection of the data and the training of the machine as works of art.“We’re offering a beautiful way to make A.I.,” the artists’ statement adds. Their utopian take is that A.I. is collectively made: It learns from whatever it is exposed to and can therefore be shaped for good.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Has Put an End to an Era. The Future Is Up for Grabs.

    Kamala Harris lost the presidential election, but one of her campaign slogans was vindicated in defeat. “We’re not going back!” the Democratic nominee insisted on the campaign trail, and she was unintentionally correct: Donald Trump’s return to power is proof that we have lived through a real turning point in history, an irrevocable shift from one era to the next.In Trump’s first term, he did not look like a historically transformative president. His victory was narrow, he lacked real majority support, he was swiftly unpopular and stymied and harassed.Even if his 2016 upset proved that discontent with the official consensus of the Western world ran unexpectedly deep, the way he governed made it easy to regard his presidency as accidental and aberrant — a break from a “normal” world of politics that some set of authority figures could successfully reimpose.Much of the opposition to his presidency was organized around this hope, and the election of Joe Biden seemed like vindication: Here was the restoration, the return of the grown-ups, normality restored.But somewhere in this drama, probably somewhere between the first reports of a deadly flu in Wuhan, China, and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, one of history’s wheels turned irrevocably, and the normal that Trump’s opponents aspired to recover slipped definitively into the past.A restoration? No: The post-Cold War era has ended, and we’re not going back.This may sound a bit like the most alarmist interpretations of the Trump era — that we are exiting the liberal democratic age and entering an autocratic, or at least authoritarian, American future.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    What Trump 2.0 Means for Tech + A.I. Made Me Basic + HatGPT!

    Listen to and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YouTube | iHeartRadioKevin Roose and Rachel Cohn and Dan PowellElisheba IttoopPat McCusker and As of this week, we have a new president-elect. We discuss how the incoming administration’s approach to technology will affect Elon Musk, a TikTok ban, Big Tech’s antitrust challenges and the speed of A.I. progress. Then, Kashmir Hill, a technology reporter for The Times, joins to discuss her weeklong experiment of letting A.I. make every decision in her life. And finally, we play a round of election-free HatGPT!Guest:Kashmir Hill, technology reporter for The New York Times.Additional Reading:What a Trump Victory Means for TechI Took a ‘Decision Holiday’ and Put A.I. in Charge of My LifeAn ‘Interview’ With a Dead Luminary Exposes the Pitfalls of A.I.Meta’s Plan for Nuclear-Powered A.I. Data Center Thwarted by Rare BeesFired Employee Allegedly Hacked Disney World’s Menu System to Alter Peanut Allergy InformationPhoto Illustration by The New York Times; Photos: Doug Mills/The New York Times (Trump); Getty Images (emojis)Credits“Hard Fork” is hosted by More

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    Physical Intelligence, a Specialist in Robot A.I., Raises $400 Million

    The start-up raised $400 million in a funding round with investments from the likes of Jeff Bezos, Thrive Capital and OpenAI.Physical Intelligence, an artificial intelligence start-up seeking to create brains for a wide variety of robots, plans to announce on Monday that it had raised $400 million in financing from major investors.The round was led by Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s executive chairman, and the venture capital firms Thrive Capital and Lux Capital. Other investors include OpenAI, Redpoint Ventures and Bond.The fund-raising valued the company at about $2 billion, not including the new investments. That’s significantly more than the $70 million that the start-up, which was founded this year, had raised in seed financing.The company wants to make foundational software that would work for any robot, instead of the traditional approach of creating software for specific machines and specific tasks.“What we’re doing is not just a brain for any particular robot,” said Karol Hausman, the company’s co-founder and chief executive. “It’s a single generalist brain that can control any robot.”It’s a tricky task: Building such a model requires a huge amount of data on how to operate in the real world. Those information sets largely do not exist, compelling the company to compile its own. Its work has been aided by big leaps in A.I. models that can interpret visual data.Among the company’s co-founders are Mr. Hausman, a former robotics scientist at Google; Sergey Levine, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley; and Lachy Groom, an investor and former executive at the payments giant Stripe.In a paper published last week, Physical Intelligence showed how its software — called π0, or pi-zero — enabled robots to fold laundry, clear a table, flatten a box and more.“It’s a true generalist,” Mr. Hausman said. Physical Intelligence executives said that its software was closer to GPT-1, the first model published for chatbots by OpenAI, than to the more advanced brains that power ChatGPT.Mr. Groom said that it was hard to predict the rate of progress: A ChatGPT-style breakthrough “could be far sooner than we expect, or it could definitely be far out.”The field of robotics A.I. is getting crowded, with players including Skild, which is also working on general-purpose robot A.I.; Figure AI, whose backers include OpenAI and Mr. Bezos; and Covariant, which focuses on industrial applications.Amazon has a vested interest in the industry, and has been adding more robots in its operations as it seeks to drive down costs and get orders to customers faster. Tesla also has major A.I. ambitions, with Elon Musk recently saying that the company’s humanoid robot would be “the biggest product ever of any kind.” More

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    Nvidia Will Replace Intel in the Dow Jones Stock Index

    The change, starting next Friday, lifts a dominant player in artificial intelligence over its chip-making rival, which has struggled to keep up.The chip-maker Nvidia will soon replace its rival Intel in the Dow Jones industrial average, S&P Dow Jones Indices said on Friday, reflecting Nvidia’s dominance in the world of artificial intelligence.S&P Dow Jones Indices, which maintains the stock index, said in a statement that the change would take place before the opening of trading next Friday “to ensure a more representative exposure to the semiconductors industry.”Nvidia established an early foothold in the A.I. revolution, tailor-making its chips for machine learning tasks and building a community of A.I. programmers who were eager to develop their technology on the company’s hardware. The bet paid off. Nvidia now accounts for the majority of A.I. chip sales and has become the second-most-valuable company in the world, slightly trailing Apple at $3.32 trillion after trading hours on Friday.Intel, which makes the chips that serve as the brains of most computers, once considered buying Nvidia. But its board resisted the acquisition, and Nvidia went on to become a dominant player in the A.I. boom while Intel struggled to keep up. Intel’s market capitalization has fallen below $1 trillion.“The thing that we understood is that this is a reinvention of how computing is done,” Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive and one of its founders, told The New York Times last year. “And we built everything from the ground up, from the processor all the way up to the end.”A recent stock split at Nvidia prompted speculation that it would replace Intel on the Dow Jones. In June, Nvidia unveiled a 10-for-one stock split that would make it easier for a retail investor to buy into the company without diluting its valuation.Spokeswomen for Nvidia and Intel declined to comment. More

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    From AI to Musk’s Brain Chip, the F.D.A.’s Device Unit Faces Rapid Change

    The new director overseeing medical devices will confront criticisms about hasty approvals as she ushers in revolutionary technology.There are now artificial intelligence programs that scan M.R.I.s for signs of cancer, Apple AirPods that work as hearing aids and devices that decode the electrical blips of the brain to restore speech to those who have lost it.Medical device technology is now deeply entrenched in many patients’ health care and can have a stunning impact on their lives. As advancements become more tangible to millions of Americans, regulation of the devices has commanded increasing attention at the Food and Drug Administration.Dr. Michelle Tarver, a 15-year-veteran of the agency, is stepping into that spotlight at a critical time. She is taking the reins of the F.D.A.’s device division from Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, who forged deep ties with the device industry, sped up the pace of approvals and made the agency more approachable to companies. Some of those device makers were represented by Dr. Shuren’s wife and her law firm, posing ethical conflicts for him that continue to draw scrutiny.Dr. Michelle Tarver, an ophthalmologist and a 15-year veteran of the F.D.A.’s medical device division.U.S. Food and Drug AdministrationMore broadly, congressional lawmakers and consumer advocates have become increasingly concerned about the device industry’s influence over the sprawling division, which has a budget of about $790 million and a staff of 2,500. Device safety and standards for agency approvals of products as intimate as heart valves or neural implants will be at the forefront of the division’s mission in the coming years. Among the issues Dr. Tarver will encounter:Brains, computers and Elon MuskFew devices will require such intense oversight as one of the most breathtaking technologies in development: brain-computer interfaces that dip into the surface layers of the brain to decode its electrical noise — and return function to people who have lost it.Researchers from a number of teams have demonstrated the capability to restore the voice and speech of a California man with ALS, to enable a paralyzed man to walk and to help a man who is paralyzed below the neck to play Mario Kart by simply thinking about steering left or right.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Why a Memphis Community Is Fighting Elon Musk’s Supercomputer

    Residents say Mr. Musk’s data center for artificial intelligence is compounding their pollution burden and adding stress on the local electrical grid.Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is building what he says will be the world’s largest supercomputer. Its electricity needs will rival those of 100,000 homes.The supercomputer’s neighbors in southwest Memphis have a problem with that.The project, part of Mr. Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence business, sits in an old manufacturing plant on more than 550 acres. Before beginning operations there in July, xAI rolled in flatbed trucks loaded with almost 20 mobile power plants, fueled by natural gas, to help meet its electricity demands.Residents of the heavily industrial community — already home to an oil refinery, a steel mill and chemical plants — see no upside. They contend that Mr. Musk’s project has made pollution worse in an area already enveloped in smog.“We’re getting more and more days a year where it is unhealthy for us to go outside,” said KeShaun Pearson, president of Memphis Community Against Pollution and a lifelong resident of the area near the xAI site.The xAI supercomputer center in Memphis is being built at the site of a former appliance factory.Whitten Sabbatini for The New York TimesThe center is to be used to train artificial intelligence models on thousands of powerful computer servers.Whitten Sabbatini for The New York TimesSo far, xAI is using the Memphis facility to develop its artificial intelligence models on a network of thousands of high-powered computer servers. Some of its models are trained on data from Mr. Musk’s social media platform, X.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More