When OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT on the world in November 2022, it lit the fuse that ignited the generative AI era. But Karen Hao, author of the new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI, had already been covering OpenAI for years. The book comes out on May 20, and it reveals surprising new details about the company's culture of secrecy and religious devotion to the promise of AGI, or artificial general intelligence. Hao profiled the company for MIT Technology Review two years before ChatGPT launched, putting it on the map as a world-changing company. Now, she's giving readers an inside look at pivotal moments in the history of artificial intelligence, including the moment when OpenAI's board forced out CEO and cofounder Sam Altman. Empire of AI dispels any doubt that OpenAI's belief in ushering in AGI to benefit all of humanity had messianic undertones.

The Take It Down Act, a controversial bipartisan bill recently hailed by First Lady Melania Trump as a tool to build a safer internet, is officially law, as President Donald Trump took to the White House Rose Garden today to put ink to legislative paper. It's the first high-profile tech legislation to pass under the new administration. "With the rise of AI image generation, countless women have been harassed with deepfakes and other explicit images distributed against their will. This is wrong, so horribly wrong, and it's a very abusive situation," said Trump at the time of signing. "This will be the first ever federal law to combat the distribution of explicit, imaginary, posted without subject's consent... We've all heard about deepfakes. I have them all the time, but nobody does anything. I ask Pam [Bondi], 'Can you help me Pam?' She says, 'No I'm too busy doing other things. But a lot of people don't survive, that's true and so horrible... Today, we're making it totally illegal."

Do you want allegedly useful "artificial intelligence" features in your face in every single service and tool you use, constantly, unceasingly, and demanding you pay more for it? The latest perpetrator is Adobe, who's now raising the price of its priciest Creative Cloud plans next month and justifying it by bundling in a bunch of generative AI tools. The Creative Cloud All Apps plan is being renamed Creative Cloud Pro, because apparently tools that cost hundreds of dollars a year and aren't available as full purchases aren't for "professionals" unless they're paying the maximum amount. If you're in the US, Canada, or Mexico, and if you're currently subscribed to All Apps, you'll be moved over to the Pro plan starting on June 17th… with a price bump from 60 per month to 70 per month for standard, yearly-subscribed users in the US. Month-to-month prices will jump from the already-sky-high 90 per month to 105 per month.

SAVE 230: As of May 20, the eufy L60 Robot Vacuum is on sale for 319.99 at Amazon. Robot vacuums are massively helpful devices for any home. But to get something that actually does all the heavy lifting, you usually need to fork out a lot of money. That's where this Eufy L60 robot vacuum deal comes in. This impressive device has enough power to pick up the most stubborn dirt and pet hair, all with a lower price tag than you'd expect.

The Amazon Rainforest is a dazzlingly vast and complex ecosystem, a six-million-square-kilometer world unto itself. Despite its central role in countless indigenous origin stories and traditions stretching back millennia, it's largely been ignored by mainstream archaeology. Conventional thinking held that such an apparently raw and dynamic expanse of wilderness couldn't possibly have played any important role in the cultural evolution of human beings. Also: OpenAI upgrades ChatGPT with Codex - and I'm seriously impressed (so far) That's changing, however, now that a raft of new archaeological discoveries is flipping the original paradigm on its head and corroborating what indigenous peoples have long insisted: that the Amazon was once home to a rich, flourishing civilization. These discoveries have largely been enabled by technologies such as satellite imagery and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR).

Otter is an AI-powered transcription service and app, and I use it every time I interview someone. Even in a group setting, it's the perfect tool for a journalist: it records and transcribes what people are saying, identifies the speaker, and allows me to click on the transcribed text and hear the recorded audio, just to check up on it. Otter even offers AI services, so I can see an AI-generated summary of the conversation and what needs to happen next. Yesterday, my wife complained that the secretary of a non-profit she volunteers at had quit, forcing her to record the minutes of a meeting. So, why should you use Otter?

Let's cut to the chase--Samsung's latest QD-OLED computer monitor is absolutely awesome, and I've loved having it at my desk for the past month or so. Every game I play on it looks incredible, and it has quickly become the centerpiece of my battle station. Even so, I'm still having trouble recommending 4K high-refresh monitors to people who have to buy and build their own systems. Having a monitor with some room to grow is the right choice, but the gap between performance and capability can be frustrating if you're on otherwise budget-friendly hardware. If you're thinking of making an upgrade, really nice 1440p screens are available for under 400, and they might be a better performance fit for most people.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A smelly, sometimes toxic "killer belt of seaweed" might put a damper on Floridians' Memorial Day weekend plans. Sargassum is back just in time for the unofficial start of summer and this year's influx of the brown algae would be record breaking at 31 million tons. Sargassum is a genus of large brown seaweed. As a seaweed, it is also a type of algae.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. We like to think our brains are reliable recorders--but reality says otherwise. From misremembered childhood moments to mistakenly "recalling" that you took your pills when you didn't, false memories are surprisingly common. And in high-stakes situations like courtroom testimony, these errors can have devastating consequences. Wouldn't it be amazing if there were an objective way to measure just how accurate someone's memory really is? New research suggests we might be able to do just that--by watching the eyes.

It's well documented that AI is a power-hungry technology. But there has been far less reporting on the extent of that hunger, how much its appetite is set to grow in the coming years, where that power will come from, and who will pay for it. For the past six months, MIT Technology Review's team of reporters and editors have worked to answer those questions. The result is an unprecedented look at the state of AI's energy and resource usage, where it is now, where it is headed in the years to come, and why we have to get it right. At the centerpiece of this package is an entirely novel line of reporting into the demands of inference--the way human beings interact with AI when we make text queries or ask AI to come up with new images or create videos.