Why Is Everyone in Silicon Valley Talking Like That? Did you mix something up? Silicon Valley has long had its own dialect. Venture capitalists are always talking about the value of being "high agency" and making "orthogonal bets." But lately, tech vernacular has taken a peculiar turn--people have started describing themselves as if they were chatbots.

Silicon Valley Doesn't Get Why You Hate AI Technology leaders don't seem to understand society's gripes about AI, but boy, are they posting through it. Silicon Valley is trying to make sense of the growing backlash against artificial intelligence, but so far, it's not going that well. The inconvenient truth is that a significant portion of the world is not optimistic about the technology they're building. But recent attempts to diagnose the root of the problem by CEOs like Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Anthropic's Dario Amodei indicate they don't understand what's actually driving society's disdain for AI. The rest of popular culture, meanwhile, is finding ways to capitalize on AI hate. Just look at this new commercial for Liquid Death and Garage Beer.

For years, the tech industry has portrayed Chinese AI development as an existential threat. The truth is not so straightforward. As China releases ever more capable AI models--ones that compete with Silicon Valley's top offerings--many American AI and national-security researchers have been arguing, loudly and forcefully, that the world should fear Chinese AI supremacy. The outcomes they envision are catastrophic. I spoke with a number of such experts recently, and they warned of bots that could devise an impenetrable missile-defense system that makes obsolete America's nuclear arsenal, or manufacture an endless drone army that overwhelms American defenses. They could develop bioweapons that "target specific ethnic groups, e.g.

A new generation of philanthropists made rich by artificial intelligence are preparing to give away their vast wealth. David Silver is a billionaire, sort of. His stake in Ineffable Intelligence --the artificial intelligence lab he founded--is worth an ungodly fortune. But he stands to collect none of that money himself. He set things up that way.

The mayor of New York City has assembled a crew of Silicon Valley and United States Digital Service veterans to overhaul city services with better software. A go-kart track is an odd location to launch a tech initiative in the nation's biggest city. Yet last month there was New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, zipping around the 900-foot oval at Coney Island's Luna Park before stepping up to a podium to unveil a program called Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crews . PIT will consist of five "game-changing" teams that, Mamdani promised, will "raise the bar for what New Yorkers can expect from City Hall." Working closely with city agencies, these small groups of engineers and designers will strive to change the hidebound and confusing tenor of current city services by using state-of-art skills to rapidly whip up specialized apps that solve real problems.

The tech industry is realizing it needs to build agents based on what regular consumers want, not just what its AI models can do. Silicon Valley is already convinced that AI agents are the future . In the heart of the tech industry, people are designing payment systems for agents, using them to automate their jobs, and most recently, trying to stop them from hacking into other organizations . But out in the real world, most people have never touched an AI agent. That might be because tech companies haven't given them a good reason to.

ICE's DNA Collection Increases, SpaceX's Rocket Crashes Into the Moon, and the AI Backlash Grows In today's episode of, we discuss how ICE has been collecting DNA samples of people who have no criminal convictions, including children, which end up in an FBI database indefinitely. This week on, Brian Barrett, Zoë Schiffer, and Leah Feiger break down how ICE has collected DNA from nearly a million people this year, including young children, feeding an FBI database indefinitely. Write to us at [email protected] . You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link . These samples have led to hundreds of thousands of people, including young children, to end up in an FBI criminal database basically forever. From Google Earth disabling its new AI tool after people used it to create fake maps to Substack partnering with the AI writing detection tool Pangram, companies are starting to realize that people really don't like low-quality AI content flooding their feeds. It's keeping the details mostly under wraps, but we're going to discuss what's behind all the secrecy and what this could mean for future regulation. WIRED's Dhruv Mehrotra reported this week about how ICE has collected nearly 1 million people's DNA this past year, just this past year alone, including that of young children. As we mentioned up top, this DNA collection has led to hundreds of thousands of people with no criminal convictions ending up in an FBI database indefinitely. And in fact, the Department of Homeland Security has become the single largest source of new profiles in this database.

'Maga is a cult of grievance that seeks to purge its enemies by demonising them through absurd and surreal propaganda' Gil Durán. 'Maga is a cult of grievance that seeks to purge its enemies by demonising them through absurd and surreal propaganda' Gil Durán. 'If we don't fight back, we don't have a future': the journalist taking on the'tech fascists' of Silicon Valley I n April, Gil Durán was permanently banned from Elon Musk's X for posting just two words. Durán was responding to a post from the tech company Palantir outlining its 22 point "technological manifesto", which praised American "hard power", western culture and AI weapons, denounced inclusivity and called for compulsory national service. Durán responded: "TLDR: Fascism" (TLDR is short for "too long, didn't read").

The Moonshot AI stand at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July. The Moonshot AI stand at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July. China's tech advances are causing chaos from Silicon Valley to the White House O ver the past month, a series of advancements in China's artificial intelligence, chip manufacturing and robotics technologies have rattled financial markets, caused divisions among US tech moguls and left the Trump administration scrambling to respond. Silicon Valley has long pointed to China's tech industry as a competitive threat and used its growth as rationale for why US firms should not face regulatory oversight that could slow them down. In recent weeks, however, China's progress has pushed US tech CEOs past vague warnings and into open disagreement over how to address Chinese-made products upending their industry.

The Return of'Move Fast and Break Things' The AI industry is getting sloppier. The AI giants talk a big game about the future they're building. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has previously written that AI could usher in a world so perfect that "many will be literally moved to tears"--a world pruned of disease, poverty, and illiberalism. "We're now in the singularity," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said over the weekend on a podcast, and it will be "awesome for the world." In an interview last week, Elon Musk declared that, in a decade's time, AI will make us so prosperous that "money won't matter."