Deep Learning
Marissa Mayer Is Dissolving Her Sunshine Startup Lab
After seven rocky years, the company's assets will be sold to Dazzle, a new AI firm that Mayer founded. Sunshine cofounder and CEO Marissa Mayer speaks at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco in 2023. Sunshine, the consumer AI startup founded by former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer in 2018, has seen brighter days. The small startup is shutting down, and its assets are being sold to a new entity incorporated by Mayer called Dazzle, according to an email viewed by WIRED. Mayer sent the email to Sunshine shareholders on September 17, informing them that Dazzle has officially incorporated and is ready to acquire Sunshine's holdings.
Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It
In 1989, Sir Tim revolutionized the online world. Today, in the era of misinformation, addictive algorithms, and extractive monopolies, he thinks he can do it again. Berners-Lee is building tools that aim to resist the Big Tech platforms, give users control over their own data, and prevent A.I. from hollowing out the open web. Tim Berners-Lee may have the smallest fame-to-impact ratio of anyone living. Strangers hardly ever recognize his face; on "Jeopardy!," Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, in 1989, but people informed of this often respond with a joke: Wasn't that Al Gore? Still, his creation keeps growing, absorbing our reality in the process. If you're reading this online, Berners-Lee wrote the hypertext markup language (HTML) that your browser is interpreting. He's the necessary condition behind everything from Amazon to Wikipedia, and if A.I. brings about what Sam Altman recently called "the gentle singularity"--or else buries us in slop--that, too, will be an outgrowth of his global collective consciousness. Somehow, the man responsible for all of this is a mild-mannered British Unitarian who loves model trains and folk music, and recently celebrated his seventieth birthday with a picnic on a Welsh mountain. An emeritus professor at Oxford and M.I.T., he divides his time between the U.K., Canada, and Concord, Massachusetts, where he and his wife, Rosemary Leith, live in a stout greige house older than the Republic. On the summer morning when I visited, geese honked and cicadas whined. Leith, an investor and a nonprofit director who co-founded a dot-com-era women's portal called Flametree, greeted me at the door. "We're basically guardians of the house," she said, showing me its antique features. I almost missed Berners-Lee in the converted-barn kitchen, standing, expectantly, in a blue plaid shirt. He shook my hand, then glanced at Leith. Minutes later, he and I were gliding across a pond behind the house. Berners-Lee is bronzed and wiry, with sharp cheekbones and faraway blue eyes, the right one underscored by an X-shaped wrinkle. A twitchier figure emerged when he spoke.
OpenAI Adds Parental Safety Controls for Teen ChatGPT Users. Here's What to Expect
OpenAI Adds Parental Safety Controls for Teen ChatGPT Users. OpenAI's review process for teenage ChatGPT users who are flagged for suicidal ideation includes human moderators. Parents can expect an alert about alarming prompts within hours. Starting today, OpenAI is rolling out ChatGPT safety tools intended for parents to use with their teenagers. This worldwide update includes the ability for parents, as well as law enforcement, to receive notifications if a child--in this case, users between the ages of 13 and 18--engages in chatbot conversations about self harm or suicide.