404 Media

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404 MediaVoicesAlien Life Can Survive on This Tiny Moon—We Just Need to Go Find It Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that sailed alien seas, beat the heat, went retro, and got caught in the food web.

September 26

404 MediaVoicesAI Love Song for Mistress Played at Murder Trial Is Most Excruciating Watch in Recent Memory We debated for a long time about whether to write about the following video, which comes from a murder trial in which a man named Caleb Flynn is accused of killing his wife.

September 25

404 MediaVoicesPodcast: OpenAI Admits AI is Killing the Internet We start this week with Jason’s story about OpenAI and Microsoft’s big admissions from court records that they are destroying the internet in all sorts of ways, and stealing intellectual property on…

September 25

404 MediaVoicesAmericans Fear AI Will Make the World Worse, Love It Anyway Most people in the world who use AI feel good about the technology and believe it will be a net positive for the future, according to a new study from Gallup .

September 23

404 MediaVoicesMeta Tests Muse AI Agent Calls That Are Actually Made By Humans in a Call Center Last week, Meta executives announced that its much-hyped AI agent, Muse, had a new feature: It could call businesses for you to do things like make a restaurant reservation or a haircut appointment.

September 22

404 MediaVoicesPeople Training OpenAI’s AI Fired for Using AI to Train the AI OpenAI has an army of contractors who read real ChatGPT users’ prompts and other data to help improve the chatbot’s responses.

September 22

404 MediaVoicesHow AI Chatbots Are 'Deskilling' Human Empathy When I first started writing about online cultures and subcultures almost 10 years ago, one of the first scholars I read on the subject of internet anthropology was Professor Sherry Turkle.

September 21

The name is the button.

An agent writes the code now, and a human thumb hovers over Accept all a hundred times a day. The honest question of this decade is what, exactly, you just accepted. So I read the diff.

Eight years as a backend engineer in Stockholm, back in Tokyo since 2023, and I still ship something small most nights, usually badly. My one rule: the only real review of a model is the thing you built with it. That is why there is no leaderboard on this site.

Around a hundred and forty sources come through — the labs' own posts, the papers, the tools, the runtimes and languages nobody is watching yet, the chip under the demo, and the newsletters people actually forward. What is moving gets counted so the week reads at a glance, and every few days I explain one mechanism in plain words.

A story here is a headline, a short excerpt, one image and the link to whoever wrote it. We never reproduce the post; the images belong to their authors. A post written in Japanese appears in Japanese, exactly as it was published, and the link goes to the original.

— Yuki Halvorsen, Tokyo