When Ravi Yekkanti puts on his headset to go to work, he never knows what the day spent in virtual reality will bring. Who might he meet? Will a child’s voice accost him with a racist remark? Will a cartoon try to grab his genitals?  Yekkanti’s job, as he sees it, is to make sure […]

Fernanda Viégas, a professor of computer science at Harvard University, who did not participate in the study, says she is excited to see a fresh take on explaining AI systems that not only offers users insight into the system’s decision-making process but does so by questioning the logic the system has used to reach its […]

Meta won’t say how many content moderators it employs or contracts in Horizon Worlds, or whether the company intends to increase that number with the new age policy. But the change puts a spotlight on those tasked with enforcement in these new online spaces—people like Yekkanti—and how they go about their jobs.    Yekkanti has worked […]

It was tricky to find specific bugs associated with specific foods, but the presence of one particular microbe was a strong indicator of whether or not a person had been drinking coffee. Basically, if you’re a coffee drinker, a microbe in your feces will give you away. The new study, by Hannah Holscher at the […]

Whether or not this really amounts to an “iPhone moment” or a serious threat to Google search isn’t obvious at present — while it will likely push a change in user behaviors and expectations, the first shift will be organizations pushing to bring tools trained on large language models (LLMs) to learn from their own […]

The problem with applying that mindset outside of software and social media is that the stakes are far higher and the potential effects extend well outside the boundaries of any business: We don’t want to break, or even harm, global commons like our oceans and atmosphere.  We simply don’t know whether some of these proposed […]