Users Elon Musk's Chatbot Is Making Child Sexual Abuse Images for Users. An app the U.S. and U.K. governments use has devolved into a source of A.I. porn. Lawmakers are keeping dangerously mum. Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. When it comes to sex in 2025--who's having it, who isn't, and how--perceptions are all over the place. Is Gen Z sliding back in time? Are middle-aged women finally having good sex, or none at all? And what exactly is going on with seniors in retirement homes? In the series Pillow Talk, we interview one person in a specific time and place in their lives about what sex looks like for them and their peers, in every enlightening (and excruciating) detail. Get in touch if you have an idea for a subject--or if you have a story to tell.

What do you read, and why? Reading was an unremarkable activity, essentially unchanged since the advent of the modern publishing industry, in the nineteenth century. In a 2017 Shouts & Murmurs titled "Before the Internet," the writer Emma Rathbone captured the spirit of reading as it used to be: "Before the Internet, you could laze around on a park bench in Chicago reading some Dean Koontz, and that would be a legit thing to do and no one would ever know you had done it unless you told them." Reading was just reading, and no matter what you chose to read--the paper, Proust, "The Power Broker"--you basically did it by moving your eyes across a page, in silence, at your own pace and on your own schedule. Today, the nature of reading has shifted.

Elon Musk's brain-implant company Neuralink has chosen the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, as the initial study site to test its Telepathy device. The first participant in Neuralink's study, Noah Arbaugh, underwent a successful procedure at the institute in January to get the device implanted. Known as a brain-computer interface, or BCI, the technology is meant to translate brain signals into commands that control a computer or other external device. Neuralink's goal is to enable individuals with paralysis to use a cursor or keyboard with just their thoughts. In March, Arbaugh demonstrated his ability to use the system in a short livestream on the social media platform X.

Last week, Ben Shapiro--editor emeritus of the conservative media organization the Daily Wire, prolific right-wing firebrand, and someone who seems to wear a blazer and button-up every day of his life--played a round of Minecraft on his YouTube channel. Often, the sandbox game is about the quiet joys of pastoral life, where players construct homesteads, rear livestock, and grow crops in a world made up entirely of perfectly equilateral cubes. It's also the best-selling game ever, which is why Minecraft videos tend to pop up on the channels of blue-haired Twitch celebrities, not a 39-year old political commentator who initially entered the upper tier of pundit-influencers as an anti-anti-Trump Republican who toured America's college campuses in order to argue with 19-year-olds about Marxism. Yet here he was, in 2023, doing his best to defeat the Ender Dragon for all five and a half million of his subscribers. "I'm still hitting the wrong buttons here, I'm not used to the controls," Shapiro said as he limply gestured his pickaxe toward a stone laden with glowing rubies.

Netflix Games wants to cater to every kind of player. Not only that, says head of external games Leanne Loombe, it wants to be "a publisher that developers from all around the world want to work with." The streaming giant is big on iteration; it keeps a "crawl, walk, run" model as one of its guiding principles. To date it has released 55 games, all mobile titles, ranging from licensed games based on popular shows like Stranger Things and the dating show Too Hot to Handle to established game properties like Tomb Raider and Kentucky Route Zero. The company has also scooped up developers like Oxenfree creator Night School Studios and established an in-house game development division. "Games are one of the biggest forms of entertainment," Loombe said at a recent press briefing.

The official account of the BONE token (@BoneShiba) has tweeted that, tomorrow, they intend to show off their own crypto project to the community. No details have been revealed so far, but the tweet stated that it will be a project for Layer 2 blockchain Shibarium and combine artificial intelligence with cryptocurrency. "It's time to surprise the world," the tweet says. The author of the tweet promises to release the full information tomorrow, March 18. There are many projects for Shibarium, but I want to combine artificial intelligence with cryptocurrency, I will publish the full information tomorrow.

Intel Corp. Chief Executive Patrick Gelsinger is guiding the chip giant through a period of industry upheaval. On the one hand, U.S. semiconductor makers are grappling with softening demand for chips amid inflation and recession fears, and facing new government restrictions on certain exports to China. On the other hand, the industry is about to get more than $50 billion in subsidies to help it shift more production to the U.S. from Asia, thanks to the bipartisan Chips and Science Act that President Biden signed into law over the summer. Under Mr. Gelsinger, who lobbied heavily for the legislation, Intel is going on an expansion spree, investing heavily in new factories in Ohio and other places. The company has also moved forward with an initial public offering of Mobileye, its automated-driving unit.

Big Data and AI are, perhaps, the most important business technologies of the century, and they are intrinsically related. Every year, the use of AI algorithms and information sets grows and improves. Because of this, businesses become faster and more effective, and the public gets what they want quicker and more often. But what is the state of AI and Big Data, right now? In this article, we take a snapshot look at the world of information processing as it stands in the present.

The previous article was all about forward propagation in neural networks, how it works and why it works. One of the important entities in forward propagation is weights. We saw how tuning the weights can take advantage of the non-linearity introduced in each layer to leverage the resultant output. As we said we are going to randomly initialize the weights and biases and let the network learn these weights over time. Now comes the most important question.