C. Gordon Bell, a technology visionary whose computer designs for Digital Equipment Corporation fueled the emergence of the minicomputer industry in the 1960s, died on Friday in Coronado, Calif. He was 89. The cause was pneumonia, his family said in a statement. Called the “Frank Lloyd Wright of computers” by Datamation magazine, Mr. Bell was…
One of the weirder, more unnerving things about today’s leading artificial intelligence systems is that nobody — not even the people who build them — really knows how the systems work. That’s because large language models, the type of A.I. systems that power ChatGPT and other popular chatbots, are not programmed line by line by…
At Mar-a-Lago on a Wednesday evening last month, Donald J. Trump mingled with partygoers, greeting his supporters and making small talk. The country star Lee Greenwood sang “God Bless the U.S.A.,” and the former president’s oldest son, Donald Jr., gave a speech. The elder Mr. Trump was presiding over a cocktail reception for about 150…
On an afternoon this spring, James Hirschfeld, a founder of Paperless Post, was at the company’s Lower Manhattan office surveying moodboards for digital invitation designs. They included materials for forthcoming motifs like New Victorian, a collection inspired by 19th-century décor, and a line by Annie Atkins, a graphic designer known for her collaborations with the…
The race to put artificial intelligence everywhere is taking a detour through the good old laptop computer. Microsoft on Monday introduced a new kind of computer designed for artificial intelligence. The machines, Microsoft says, will run A.I. systems on chips and other gear inside the computers so they are faster, more personal and more private….
Ahead of the U.S. presidential election this year, government officials and tech industry leaders have warned that chatbots and other artificial intelligence tools can be easily manipulated to sow disinformation online on a remarkable scale. To understand how worrisome the threat is, we customized our own chatbots, feeding them millions of publicly available social media…
As it is in the United States, TikTok is popular in Taiwan, used by a quarter of the island’s 23 million residents. People post videos of themselves shopping for trendy clothes, dressing up as video game characters and playing pranks on their roommates. Influencers share their choreographed dances and debate whether the sticky rice dumplings…
Robert H. Dennard, an engineer who invented the silicon memory technology that plays an indispensable role in every smartphone, laptop and tablet computer, died on April 23 in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. He was 91. The cause of death, at a hospital, was a bacterial infection, said his daughter, Holly Dennard. Mr. Dennard’s pioneering work began…
Last summer, as they drove to a doctor’s appointment near their home in Manhattan, Paul Lehrman and Linnea Sage listened to a podcast about the rise of artificial intelligence and the threat it posed to the livelihoods of writers, actors and other entertainment professionals. The topic was particularly important to the young married couple. They…
Engineers and scientists have an enduring fascination with spider silk. Similar to typical worm silk that makes for comfy bedsheets, but much tougher, the material has inspired the invention of lighter and more breathable body armor and materials that could make airplane components stronger without adding weight. Researchers are even using examples drawn from spider…
