Discover Top Posts Tagged with #the atlantic

The Meta CEO has a new message now that his company is losing the AI race.

"Remember Meta? A company that figured so prominently in the technological upheavals of the past 20 years has lately found itself in the unfamiliar position of no longer being Silicon Valley’s main character. Mark Zuckerberg still commands social media’s largest empire. Yet he has struggled to find the next thing. The metaverse, an extravagant bet on a weird virtual future, flopped. Meta’s latest Ray-Ban glasses seem to be finding their way onto at least a few people’s faces. But the company has fallen well behind Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google in the industry’s highest-stakes contest: building superhuman AI."

"Less convincing is Zuckerberg’s suggestion that this could also work for bioterrorism. AI’s demonstrated capacity to help people develop dangerous pathogens has been one of Anthropic’s strongest arguments for restricting how people can use the most powerful models. Zuckerberg’s half-hearted counterargument: Unleashing those models will “accelerate society’s ability to develop new cures and inoculate against new issues as they arise.” That’s quite a claim from a man who oversees one of the world’s most prolific hotbeds of anti-vaccine conspiracism. Waving away the risks of a disruptive technology by insisting that they’ll take care of themselves is a move we’ve seen from Zuckerberg before, and history hasn’t always borne it out."

#ai #meta #zuckemberg backing ai #the atlantic

#david brooks #pundits #media #false equivalence #the atlantic #Youtube

The scandals of the president’s first term now seem quaint.

Many of the ethics scandals of President Trump’s first term—Scott Pruitt’s $43,000 phone booth, Ivanka’s endorsement of Goya beans—seem almost quaint, Marie-Rose Sheinerman argues. Now watchdog groups are racing to keep up, she reports.⁠ https://theatln.tc/vwXv30FR ⁠ During Trump’s first term, ethics-watchdog groups quickly learned which possible misuses of taxpayer funds to focus on, which apparent case of profiteering off the presidency to anchor a report around, and which allegations of nepotism or self-dealing to try to pitch to journalists as worthy of a story. As Sheinerman writes, “most such allegations frequently generated shock and anger, and some surveys of Trump voters found that they were outraged at several of his Cabinet secretaries for spending millions in taxpayer dollars on first-class air travel and personal security, or Trump’s family businesses making millions while he was in office. Sometimes, the backlash prompted accountability: Three of Trump’s Cabinet members were forced out, lawmakers from both parties launched inquiries into alleged ethics violations, and top officials reimbursed the government for travel originally paid for by taxpayers.⁠" ⁠ “This term, the watchdogs are even more alarmed by what they’re witnessing,” Sheinerman continues. “Public Citizen added litigators and researchers, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) hired an expert in cryptocurrency.” Last year, the Campaign Legal Center filed its highest number of ethics complaints in a single year and launched a tracker of “corrupt transactions,” to ensure that “the exhaustion factor” doesn’t get in the way of keeping a careful count of such instances, a group official said.⁠ ⁠ Although polls show that voters have long considered most politicians to be corrupt, a recent survey found that the share of Americans who see corruption as the biggest issue facing the nation is now 17 percent, up from 8 percent in December 2024, Sheinerman writes at the link. “But there has also been a dampening of objections to possible instances of self-dealing, especially among Republicans, and the examples of accountability are scarce.”⁠

#The Atlantic #unprecedented corruption #corruption #watchdogs #ethics violations #Marie-Rose Sheinerman