Maxwell Tani is known for his work on an obituary beat of sorts. A media reporter at Semafor, he always seems to be the first person to break news whenever something terrible happens for journalists at one outlet or another. He's been busy: According to one tabulation, more than 500 journalists were laid off just in January. A scroll through Tani's account on X surfaces a glut of executive memos, couched in corporate-speak, informing staff that they'll soon be laid off--at Business Insider, Engadget, the Messenger, Vice, and the Wall Street Journal. Sometimes he shares the news of an impending layoff before these memos even go out--and before employees have been informed. Slate spoke with Tani about what it's like to document the worst moments on the media beat, and how he feels about his place in the news-about-the-news ecosystem. We also tried to diagnose the ills of the industry--and find bright spots ahead.

Microsoft is teaming up with media website Semafor on a new project that uses ChatGPT to aid in the creation of news stories, The Financial Times has reported. Semafor, co-founded by former Buzzfeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith, will create a feed called "Signals" that will be sponsored by Microsoft for an undisclosed but "substantial" sum, the report states. It will highlight breaking news and analysis, offering a dozen or so posts per day. All stories will be written entirely by journalists, with the AI effectively acting as a research tool. Signals responds to the deep and continuing shifts in the digital media landscape and the post-social news moment, and to the risks and opportunities posed by artificial intelligence, Semafor wrote.

More than a month after hiring a couple of former DeepMind researchers, Twitter is reportedly moving forward with an in-house artificial intelligence project. According to Business Insider, Elon Musk recently bought 100,000 GPUs for use at one of the company's two remaining data centers. A source told the outlet the purchase shows Musk is "committed" to the effort, particularly given the fact there would be little reason for Twitter to spend so much money on datacenter-grade GPUs if it didn't plan to use them for AI work. The project reportedly involves the creation of a generative AI that the company would train on its own massive trove of data. It's unclear how Twitter would utilize the technology.

General Motors is working on an in-car digital assistant based on the same machine learning models that power ChatGPT. News of the development was first reported earlier this week by Semafor, with GM later sharing confirmation with Reuters. "ChatGPT is going to be in everything," GM Vice President Scott Miller told the outlet. Among other things, the automaker envisions the digital assistant supporting drivers in situations where they may have turned to their vehicle's owner's manual in the past. For instance, the assistant could show you how to replace your car's tire if it suffers a flat.

Feature Generative AI poses interesting challenges for academic publishers tackling fraud in science papers as the technology shows the potential to fool human peer review. Describe an image for DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney, and they'll generate one in seconds. These text-to-picture systems have rapidly improved over the past few years, and what initially began as a research prototype, producing benign and wonderfully bizarre illustrations of baby daikon radishes walking dogs in 2021, has since morphed into commercial software, built by billion-dollar companies, capable of generating increasingly realistic images. These AI models can produce lifelike pictures of human faces, objects, and scenes, and it's a matter of time before they get good at creating convincing scientific images and data, too. Text-to-image models are now widely accessible, pretty cheap to use, and they could help dodgy scientists forge results and publish sham research more easily.

Much of the science fiction genre would have you believe that artificial intelligence would bring about humanity's downfall by rising up and slaughtering its creators, but the recent boom in AI tech has instead amounted to labor crimes like journalistic malpractice and robbing artists of their commissions. So while AI is mostly being used to make creatives obsolete, Microsoft is apparently doing internal testing on a demo that makes AI essentially play Minecraft for you. According to a report from Semafor, the demo recently showcased technology that allowed the user to simply tell Minecraft what to do, and it would move your character, collect materials, and more based on your directions.. Minecraft's open-ended nature has apparently presented somewhat of a challenge for the tech, however, as there are multiple ways to accomplish a task in Mojang's game. The example given in the report is building a car in Minecraft, which can be done in myriad ways depending on what supplies you have on-hand. So saying something broad like "build a car" would likely not get you as precise an in-game action as "build a car out of stone blocks."

Much of the science fiction genre would have you believe that artificial intelligence would bring about humanity's downfall by rising up and slaughtering its creators, but the recent boom in AI tech has instead amounted to labor crimes like journalistic malpractice and robbing artists of their commissions. So while AI is mostly being used to make creatives obsolete, Microsoft is apparently doing internal testing on a demo that makes AI essentially play Minecraft for you. According to a report from Semafor, the demo recently showcased technology that allowed the user to simply tell Minecraft what to do, and it would move your character, collect materials, and more based on your directions.. Minecraft's open-ended nature has apparently presented somewhat of a challenge for the tech, however, as there are multiple ways to accomplish a task in Mojang's game. The example given in the report is building a car in Minecraft, which can be done in myriad ways depending on what supplies you have on-hand. So saying something broad like "build a car" would likely not get you as precise an in-game action as "build a car out of stone blocks."

OpenAI has quietly hired hundreds of international contractors to help train its AI tech, according to Semafor. Some are teaching software engineering to AI, potentially paving the way to replace some human coders. OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGPT, already threatens to disrupt many industries just a few months after its launch. OpenAI has quietly hired hundreds of international contractors to train its artificial intelligence in software engineering, according to a report from Semafor. Some contractors, hired in the last 6 months from places like Latin America and Eastern Europe, have reportedly been tasked with creating data to coach AI to learn simple software engineering tasks.

OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot ChatGPT, has ramped up its hiring around the world, bringing on roughly 1,000 remote contractors over the past six months in regions like Latin America and Eastern Europe, according to people familiar with the matter. About 60% of the contractors were hired to do what's called "data labeling" -- creating massive sets of images, audio clips, and other information that can then be used to train artificial intelligence tools or autonomous vehicles. The other 40% are computer programmers who are creating data for OpenAI's models to learn software engineering tasks. OpenAI's existing Codex product, launched in Aug. 2021, is designed to translate natural language into code. "A well-established company, which is determined to provide world-class AI technology to make the world a better and more efficient place, is looking for a Python Developer," reads one OpenAI job listing in Spanish, which was posted by an outsourcing agency.

Microsoft is reportedly making a big step to gain an advantage over its competitors by investing $10 billion in OpenAI, the developers of ChatGPT. OpenAI specializes in creating software that can learn and adapt to various tasks. The company is gaining the attention of casual users and industry experts with its popular app ChatGPT, which has been met with great acclaim since its latest release last month. Sources familiar with the matter tell Semafor that Microsoft and other venture firms are in talks to invest an amount that would value OpenAI at $29 billion. An investment of that magnitude would be a significant step towards the growth of OpenAI, which can further the development of ChatGPT and other AI-related projects.