My colleague Paresh Dave and I each spent a day in federal court in Oakland, California, this week, monitoring the latest Meta child safety trial. In case you missed it in the spring, Meta (along with YouTube) lost a landmark social media case in California, in which a jury found the companies liable for harming…
The unit does have one quirky flaw: The release button for the debris basket is located on the front nose of the robot. About twice a month it will clip a corner on my L-shaped pool, which will cause this button to be pressed, ejecting the basket into the pool. It’s easy to replace the…
A team of astronomers has just detected the fastest star in the galaxy. Its anomalous speed has a more unsettling explanation: It orbits Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, the mass of which is equivalent to four million times that of the Sun. S301, as astronomers have named…
Earlier this year, insurance executives gathered in a Times Square conference room to play out a scenario: A Chinese cyberattack knocks out 5,000 US water utilities at once. If you think that’s a far-fetched scenario, think again. WIRED’s Andy Greenberg got rare access to the closed-door war game and walked away with some disturbing conclusions….
Last week, I ventured a whopping 15 minutes from my house to see robots do some mind-boggling, jaw-dropping stuff. I visited the Cambridge, Massachusetts, offices of a startup called Generalist AI, where I watched robot arms perform simple chores like stacking cups, putting blocks into bowls, and the like. I was astonished by how quickly…
Within four hours of Anthropic confirming that Claude models would globally embed invisible, machine-readable watermarks into any AI-generated content, developer Guillaume Meyer had published his override. His code to remove watermarks from Claude-generated text has since gone viral on GitHub, has been bookmarked more than 20,000 times on X, and has drawn more than 100…
You’re walking the dog at night, and your little flashlight, which has been getting dimmer, conks out. Instead of stumbling home in the dark, wouldn’t it be great if you could somehow eke a little more energy out of the batteries inside? That’s not as crazy as it sounds. When a battery-powered device stops working,…
Garmin watches are some of the best fitness trackers you can get, but they aren’t exactly cheap—many of my favorite ones cost $500 or more. Thankfully, you can usually find a good Garmin watch deal with enough patience and a keen eye. Right now, some of my favorite models, including the Garmin Fenix 8, Garmin…
El Niño looks to reach an intensity unprecedented in recorded history. Characterized by warmer than normal sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific, El Niño occurs every few years. Meteorological agencies and researchers around the world are on high alert because when the heat stored in the ocean is released into the atmosphere, it triggers…
Demand for artificially generated smut is surging. But the quality of the visual content being created and shared—like on companion apps, where adult performers are selling their likeness to give fans a 24/7 experience, WIRED reported in March—isn’t exactly movie-level caliber. Rogue Studio, a cinematic AI-generator platform built around adult visual storytelling, is trying to…