Mark zuckerberg

Unravelling the infinite mysteries of physics

Can artificial intelligence become godlike? Can such technology unravel the world’s great mysteries? Can everything, from love and intuition to consciousness and wonder, be replicated by computers and reduced to simply knowing the right algorithm? These are the big questions running through Sebastian Mallaby’s engaging book The Infinity Machine, which charts the rise of DeepMind, the London-based AI research firm owned by Google, and its exceptionally clever co-founder and chief executive, Demis Hassabis. The book’s narrative is centred on Hassabis’s hope to make DeepMind the first company to create AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) in which computers can match or surpass humans at virtually all cognitive tasks, and the morality of such an achievement.

Will tech companies bend to Australia’s social media ban?

From our US edition

It’s all too easy to get hooked by the online world, to fall headlong into it, to spend hour upon hour immersed in it. Cyberspace has its good uses, but it also has its bad ones. Staying in control of your social media life is difficult enough as an adult, but for children it can be an especially dangerous world in which to dwell. Too often children are glued to their phones and devices, staring, scrolling, disengaged from the world around them. Many children are exposed to online harm, including bullying, grooming and shaming. Appallingly, many children are emotionally and psychologically damaged from social media exposure. Terribly, and tragically, some have taken their own lives as a result of what has befallen them online.

Bill Gates and the rightward shift of the billionaires

From our US edition

To his fellow high priests of the church of climate change, Bill Gates has just committed the ultimate heresy. He has told us that we are not all going to die from scorching temperatures, despite in the past having said “we are setting ourselves up for a humanitarian and geopolitical disaster.” In a new essay posted on his personal website, he has attacked the “doomsday view” that “in a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization.” He writes: “Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences… it will not lead to humanity’s demise.” His rejection of catastrophism is no small matter.

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The race to superintelligence

From our US edition

This summer, two of the leading contenders in the great AI race have suddenly, alarmingly, declared that the endgame is in sight and that they’re now spending vast amounts of time and money to try to ensure that their own AIs beat the others. What does winning mean? It means that their models (you know them perhaps as GPT, Claude and Gemini) reach first AGI (human-level intelligence), then superintelligence. No one quite knows what superintelligence will do (we’re not smart enough) but it’s clear that whoever owns the winning model will wield unimaginable power. They’ll dominate the world. A new Alexander the Great. The first to show his hand was Sam Altman, the chief executive and founder of OpenAI, a company he once shared with his former friend Elon Musk.

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What if AI seduces our children?

From our US edition

Let me tell you a secret: a little trick buried in the geeky engine room of ChatGPT. If you’re using the app, tap your ID, then go to Settings, then Personalization, then Customization. Once there, scroll to the bottom and you’ll find an option called Advanced. Click it. Hidden in this arcane menu, like buried treasure in a pirate game, is a toggle to disable Advanced Voice Mode. Do that, and the whirling, helpful blue orb disappears, replaced by the older, slower black orb. Why would you want to do this? Because that’s when things get interesting. The black orb version of ChatGPT is rawer, more confessional, more human. It remembers things. It’s less filtered. Unlike the prim blue orb, it can wander into the philosophical, the emotional, even the erotic.

Petty, malicious and tremendous fun – the Facebook office drama

Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s account of her time at Facebook, has landed top of the New York Times’s bestseller charts and fourth in the UK’s Sunday Times equivalent. It owes its success in large part to a ferocious campaign that Meta – Facebook’s parent company – waged against it on publication. When Meta faces a barrage of public criticism, which it often does, it typically stays quiet and gets on with things. And that approach works – its share price has continued to soar despite scandal after scandal. So when the company not only published a series of furious denials but also had staffers post about the book on their personal social media feeds, and even launched a legal action to prevent Wynn-Williams promoting it, people started to take notice.

Steve Bannon blames Gavin Newsom for creating Elon Musk

From our US edition

Critics say California governor Gavin Newsom’s new podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom, is an attempt to appeal to the center ahead of a possible 2028 presidential bid. But the governor claims his goal is to begin an open dialogue with people who don’t agree with him. So who would be better to speak to than the right-wing populist nationalist, host of War Room — and intellectual godfather of the MAGA movement — Steve Bannon? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mvMP8uTgnU&ab_channel=ThisisGavinNewsom During their conversation, Newsom wanted to address Bannon’s issues with Musk. “Do I have any issues?” Bannon joked before quoting himself in calling Elon Musk “a parasitic illegal immigrant.

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How the legacy media became powerless

From our US edition

It was nearly 2 a.m. on the East Coast in the middle of election night when CNN’s Jake Tapper stood across from professional virtual-map operator John King and asked a simple question: “Are there any places where Kamala Harris overperformed from where Biden did?” Tapping away from a view of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, King zoomed out to a view of the entire United States and hit a key to show a comparison to the 2020 election. The map instantly turned a solid dark gray, without a single county highlighted. “Holy smokes,” Tapper gasped. “Literally nothing? Literally not one county?” “Literally nothing,” was King’s somber reply. The video, shared widely and instantly on X, has been viewed more than 13 million times.

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How Mark Zuckerberg became based… by Brazilian jiu-jitsu

From our US edition

In the storied Fast & Furious movie franchise, now eleven films strong, there’s a tradition of the villain from one movie becoming a member of Vin Diesel’s street-racing international shenanigans gang in the next. Luke Hobbs (The Rock) is sent to hunt down Dominic Toretto before asking for his help to track Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), who is also adopted, while Jakob Toretto (John Cena), long-lost brother to Dom, redeems himself from assassinating their father in a sabotaged stock car by helping defuse a rogue weapons system that would cause all of civilization’s computers to collapse. You know, normal family stuff: wreaking havoc on the crew before being welcomed back with a Corona at a backyard barbecue.

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The royals coming after American free speech

From our US edition

The British royals are coming after American free speech, just days before Donald Trump is set to take office as president for the second time. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle expressed outrage that Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, changed policy to rely on community notes versus a dedicated fact-checking department. Ironically, the pair suggested Meta’s policy change “directly undermines free speech.” How exactly? Because, according to Harry and Meghan, Mark Zuckerberg is, allegedly, prioritizing those using social media “to spread hate, lies and division.

The Zuck that stole Christmas

From our US edition

I got Meta's flagship Quest 3 headset last year. Not only did I love it and use it all the time — as described in my April feature on VR  — but so did my sister, who would play Beatsaber every time she visited. As a good brother, it was pretty obvious what this year's Christmas present for her should be, so I picked up a late-model version of the Quest 2 and a bunch of the most premium accessories. When she opened it on Christmas morning, she had tears in her eyes, so happy to have her own headset and play Beatsaber whenever she wanted — and to do so in multiplayer with me, despite us living countries apart. She put it on and went through the initial set-up, at which point the headset said it needed to download an update, and she left it to install.

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Mark Zuckerberg is really sorry for censoring you

From our US edition

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee yesterday that the government pressured his company to censor content during the Covid-19 pandemic and said he regrets following their wishes. The committee described his comments as a “big win for free speech.” Meta produced thousands of documents for the committee’s investigation into alleged government censorship and Zuckerberg wrote the supplemental letter to outline what he had learned during the process. “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” he said.

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TikTok bill makes strange bedfellows

From our US edition

Congress struck a major blow against TikTok's Chinese ownership Thursday morning, by passing the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which would require parent company ByteDance to sell its US entity within six months in order to retain access to American app stores and web hosting services. The bill, passed by a 352-65 margin, now heads to the Senate. It offered a rare time that former president Donald Trump found himself allied with progressive members of the Squad in opposition, while Representatives Mike Johnson and Hakeem Jeffries joined forces in voting for the bill, which would help combat the espionage concerns that intelligence officials in the Biden administration have repeatedly raised.

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Zucked up: private election funding’s new form

From our US edition

Greenwich, Connecticut, is a town of 63,000 people just twenty-eight miles away from New York City. It’s a wealthy community with a median household income of $127,123 and the average home value over $1.2 million.Greenwich, Connecticut, is a town of 63,000 people just twenty-eight miles away from New York City. It’s a wealthy community with a median house- hold income of $127,123 and the average home value over $1.2 million. The well-manicured lawns and eight-car garages may be caricatures of country club Republicanism, but don’t be fooled. Democratic financier Ned Lamont launched his political career here en route to becoming governor. In 2020, Joe Biden received 61 percent of the vote — the formerly reliable GOP town has gone fully blue in the past two presidential cycles.

The FBI has a problem with Catholics

On board Aello She was built in 1921, a beautiful wooden ketch that is as graceful to look at as she’s uncomfortable for fat cats accustomed to gin palaces. I’ve sailed her over many years, the last time giving her to my children as I was in plaster having fallen from a balcony in Gstaad. This time it was worse. In fact it was the greatest no-show since Edward VIII skipped his coronation and showed up on the French Riviera instead. Michael Mailer had hinted that some Hollywood floozies were eager to sail around the Greek isles, but arrived empty-handed. The absent floozies were missed, but were immediately replaced by my son and his son, and off we went, four males looking for mates down the Peloponnese coast.

Is the Musk-Zuckerberg cage match off?

From our US edition

It may not come as a great surprise to readers that Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg will not, in fact, be having a cage fight with one another. Ever since Musk had posted on Twitter (now known as X) in June that he was interested in battling the Meta tycoon, only for Zuckerberg to reply “send me locations,” the saga has turned from a typically absurd piece of Muskian humor to a story that has oscillated between what has seemed like a serious piece of corporate warfare and utter silliness. There was never any serious doubt that Musk would have come off a poor second to Zuckerberg had the fight taken place.

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The online fight between Musk and Zuck is more fun than the real one will be

From our US edition

Social media was always a weird place — and it's only gotten wackier. When Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, which used to be Facebook, announced it was starting Threads, a rival to X, which used to be Twitter (catch all that?), X owner Elon Musk “took a dig about the world becoming ‘exclusively under Zuck’s thumb with no other options,’” the AP reminds us, “but then one Twitter user jokingly warned Musk of Zuckerberg’s jiu-jitsu training.” Musk responded, “I’m up for a cage match if he is lol.” Since then, Musk and Zuck have continued to poke one another (remember when “poking” someone on Facebook was a thing?) with infantile barbs that show them to be the tech nerds they really are. Cockburn is enjoying the taunting tweets (if they’re still called that?

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How to make debate great again

From our US edition

By the time you read this, tech billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg may have beaten the living daylights out of each other. Earlier in the summer, Musk tweeted that he was “up for a cage fight” with Zuckerberg. The Meta CEO responded on Instagram Stories, “send me location.” “Vegas octagon,” suggested Musk, referring to the arena where UFC fights are held. Cue an avalanche of hype, some of it serious, much of it tongue-in-cheek, about the possibility of this plutocrat showdown. The Spectator takes no house view on whether the jiu-jitsu-loving Zuckerberg or the barrel-chested Musk should be viewed as the favorite. But we will admit finding this approach to dispute resolution refreshingly old-school — dueling for the new Silicon Valley aristocracy.

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Starting a Threads account feels like adultery

As I hit the pillow, up popped a notification: ‘Threads’, Meta’s new offering, is available to download. My heart thumped – I’ve been excited about this launch since I first heard of it. As a frustrated influencer, and somebody who couldn’t care less what Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk are doing to each other, I don’t care about the politics. I just thought Threads could be just right for me. And social media is all about me, me, me, obviously.  It’s easy to take a photograph of myself. I do it a lot. But Twitter is a different kind of vanity – for people who aren’t necessarily obsessed with images. That’s why I’ve always felt tentative about it. Threads will be better, I say to myself, as the app downloads.  Is this what having a child is like?

RIP Twitter. Meet Threads

From our US edition

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg formally challenged each other to a cage fight on June 21. Out with free-market capitalism, in with post-liberal tech feudalism, and accompanying duels! However entertaining, this whole debacle was spectacularly stupid, for two core reasons. The first is that the jiu-jitsu trained Zuck would clearly obliterate the rather portly, older Musk. The second is that this came as a response to a Twitter post on their real fight, with $44 billion on the line, between Musk’s Twitter and Zuckerberg’s clone competitor of it, Threads, which launched last night. It had 2 million users within two hours; 10 million with seven hours; and this is without any mainland Europeans, as the EU continues to be led by the moronic.

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