Access to water is always a concern when heading off the grid in my van — not when I’m home in Amsterdam, a city surrounded by the stuff. That certainty changed recently when government ministers began quietly prodding citizens to stock up on emergency supplies due to an increased risk of armed conflict and other…
AI might excel at certain tasks like coding or generating a podcast. But it struggles to pass a high-level history exam, a new paper has found. A team of researchers has created a new benchmark to test three top large language models (LLMs) — OpenAI’s GPT-4, Meta’s Llama, and Google’s Gemini — on historical questions….
GenCast, a new AI model from Google DeepMind, is accurate enough to compete with traditional weather forecasting. It managed to outperform a leading forecast model when tested on data from 2019, according to recently published research. AI isn’t going to replace traditional forecasting anytime soon, but it could add to the arsenal of tools used…
I’m only half joking when I say that Eight Sleep’s temperature-controlling mattress cover improved my marriage. A good night’s sleep is elusive in my house. I’m always cold, my spouse runs hot. We battle nightly over the thermostat. So when I first reviewed an Eight Sleep cover, it was a revelation. I could curl up…
Some of the most beloved roguelikes are single-player — the likes of Hades, Balatro, and Dead Cells are all solo titles. But Windblown, the new roguelike from Motion Twin, the studio that created Dead Cells, showed me just how cool it can be to play a roguelike with other people. In Windblown, your character, one…
JD Vance is, by his own admission, “plugged into a lot of weird right-wing subcultures.” His much-mocked comments about childless cat ladies and unassimilated Italian immigrants were made on a “masculinist” podcast. He doesn’t eat seed oils, a dietary restriction du jour on the extremely online right. When he was nominated to be former President…
Bill Gates has spent billions funding technologies he thinks will shape the future — from fighting climate change to eradicating disease. Gates gets into the thick of it all in a new Netflix series called “What’s Next? The Future with Bill Gates.” It launches on September 18th with episodes on AI, climate change, inequality, misinformation,…
The rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power most of our laptops may be the most practical battery tech we have right now, but they naturally degrade over time as their ions flow back and forth — it’s an inevitable consequence of the way they’re built and the way they work. Eventually, the batteries can’t hold as…
From the Boox Palma to the Light Phone 2, it seems that everyone is looking for distraction-free reading, if only they had the right device. I don’t blame them: every time I pull out my phone to mindlessly scroll, I know my time could be put to better use. But as the owner of many…
One of the selling points of Google’s flagship generative AI models, Gemini 1.5 Pro and 1.5 Flash, is the amount of data they can supposedly process and analyze. In press briefings and demos, Google has repeatedly claimed that the models can accomplish previously impossible tasks thanks to their “long context,” like summarizing multiple hundred-page documents…