Instagram Is Introducing New Restrictions for Teen Users. In this photo illustration a 13-year-old boy looks at an iPhone screen display on May 21, 2025 in Bath, England. In this photo illustration a 13-year-old boy looks at an iPhone screen display on May 21, 2025 in Bath, England. Instagram announced new restrictions for teen accounts on Tuesday amid mounting controversy over safety guidelines for younger users on the social media platform. The photo-sharing app will soon limit content for teens using guidelines similar to those in the film industry for PG-13-rated movies.

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Large language models work well because they're so large. The latest models from OpenAI, Meta, and DeepSeek use hundreds of billions of "parameters"--the adjustable knobs that determine connections among data and get tweaked during the training process. With more parameters, the models are better able to identify patterns and connections, which in turn makes them more powerful and accurate. But this power comes at a cost.

Last week, some voters in New Hampshire received an AI-generated robocall impersonating President Biden, telling them not to vote in the state's primary election. It's not clear who was responsible for the call, but two separate teams of audio experts tell WIRED it was likely created using technology from voice-cloning startup ElevenLabs. ElevenLabs markets its AI tools for uses like audiobooks and video games; it recently achieved "unicorn" status by raising 80 million at a 1.1 billion valuation in a new funding round co-led by venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. Anyone can sign up for the company's paid service and clone a voice from an audio sample. The company's safety policy says it is best to obtain someone's permission before cloning their voice, but that permissionless cloning can be OK for a variety of non-commercial purposes, including "political speech contributing to public debates." ElevenLabs did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can eliminate humanity according to a recent research paper by scientists at Google and the University of Oxford. In the paper which was published in the journal AI Magazine, the team -- comprised of DeepMind senior scientist Marcus Hutter and Oxford researchers Michael Cohen and Michael Osborne -- concluded that the answer to the long-standing question of whether a super-intelligent AI may go rogue and wipe out humans was that it was "likely". "Under the conditions we have identified, our conclusion is much stronger than that of any previous publication -- an existential catastrophe is not just possible, but likely," Cohen tweeted earlier this month. Bostrom, Russell, and others have argued that advanced AI poses a threat to humanity. We reach the same conclusion in a new paper in AI Magazine, but we note a few (very plausible) assumptions on which such arguments depend.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University developed artificial intelligence technology that may be able to assess a patient's risk of sudden cardiac death, which is when the heart abruptly stops beating. Sometimes, modern medicine isn't enough to help keep us healthy. The Johns Hopkins University researchers said artificial intelligence can help accurately predict if and when someone's heart will stop beating years in advance. "It uses deep learning on images in combination with deep learning also on clinical data to predict the patient's risk of sudden cardiac death over a period of 10 years," said Dr. Natalia Trayanova, a professor of biomedical engineering and medicine. Trayanova's team developed the AI technology and published their work in a medical journal.

The study tested five publicly available tools from Apple, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft that anyone can use to build speech recognition services. These tools are not necessarily what Apple uses to build Siri or Amazon uses to build Alexa. But they may share underlying technology and practices with services like Siri and Alexa. Each tool was tested last year, in late May and early June, and they may operate differently now. The study also points out that when the tools were tested, Apple's tool was set up differently from the others and required some additional engineering before it could be tested.

In many cases, federal agents can request access to state DMV records by filling out a form. This is an example of a Homeland Security request that was made to the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles in 2017. In many cases, federal agents can request access to state DMV records by filling out a form. This is an example of a Homeland Security request that was made to the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles in 2017. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents mine millions of driver's license photos for possible facial recognition matches -- and some of those efforts target undocumented immigrants who have legally obtained driver's licenses, according to researchers at Georgetown University Law Center, which obtained documents related to the searches.

There is a logic behind a newly revealed use of data by federal immigration authorities. Many states welcome people who are in the U.S. without legal status to obtain a driver's license. Now researchers have found that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, along with the FBI, have been running databases filled with driver's license photos through facial recognition software, looking for immigrants of interest. Jake Laperruque is here to talk about this. He is senior counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, an independent group that focuses on corruption and abuse of power.

Interest in artificial intelligence technology, including in the association space, is picking up in a big way as we close out 2018 and move into the new year, and an array of recent studies on the topic shows just what we have to look forward to. Studies from Stanford University, Pew Research Center, and New York University examine the state of AI from different directions. They explore the field's global growth, its diversity, and its economic and ethical implications. As highlighted by the fact that numerous reports on the topic came out at around the same time, artificial intelligence is driving a lot of research momentum these days. According to Stanford's AI Index [PDF], growth in the number of artificial intelligence papers published in a given year has outpaced that of even computer science.

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence are raising risks that malicious users will soon exploit the technology to mount automated hacking attacks, cause driverless car crashes or turn commercial drones into targeted weapons, a new report warns. The study, published on Wednesday by 25 technical and public policy researchers from Cambridge, Oxford and Yale universities along with privacy and military experts, sounded the alarm for the potential misuse of AI by rogue states, criminals and lone-wolf attackers. The researchers said the malicious use of AI poses imminent threats to digital, physical and political security by allowing for large-scale, finely targeted, highly efficient attacks. The study focuses on plausible developments within five years. "We all agree there are a lot of positive applications of AI," Miles Brundage, a research fellow at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute.