Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Kevin Hartz tends to be first through the door. In 2001, he co-founded Xoom, back when sending money across borders meant standing in line at Western Union. In 2013, it went public, and in 2015, PayPal paid $1.1 billion for it. Four years after launching Xoom, he co-founded Eventbrite, which went public in 2018 and…

Wikipedia is often described as the last good website on an internet increasingly filled with toxic social media and AI slop, but it seems the online encyclopedia is not completely immune to broader trends, with human pageviews falling 8% year-over-year, according to a new blog post from Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation. The foundation…

Senate Republicans shared a deepfake video of Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, designed to make it seem like Democrats are celebrating the ongoing government shutdown, which has lasted 16 days.   In the deepfake, an AI-generated Schumer repeats the phrase “every day gets better for us,” an actual quote taken out of context from…

Silicon Valley leaders including White House AI & Crypto Czar David Sacks and OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon caused a stir online this week for their comments about groups promoting AI safety. In separate instances, they alleged that certain advocates of AI safety are not as virtuous as they appear, and are either acting…

The AI era is giving fracking a second act, a surprising twist for an industry that, even during its early 2010s boom years, was blamed by climate advocates for poisoned water tables, man-made earthquakes, and the stubborn persistence of fossil fuels. AI companies are building massive data centers near major gas-production sites, often generating their…

The Department of Energy said Thursday that it had finalized a $1.6 billion loan guarantee to upgrade around 5,000 miles of transmission lines. The grid upgrades would ease the flow of electricity in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. The project, which will address lines owned by American Electric Power, won’t add any new…

OpenAI announced Thursday it paused the ability for users to generate videos resembling the late civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. using its AI video model, Sora. The company says it’s adding this safeguard at the request of Dr. King’s estate after some Sora users generated “disrespectful depictions” of his image. “While there are…

Reddit announced Thursday that it is expanding its AI-powered search experience to five new languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. With this expansion, the feature is now available in countries like Brazil, France, Germany, Spain, Mexico, and Italy. Users who have set one of these languages as their default, instead of English, can now…

The sprawling metropolis of Phoenix continues to be a testbed for Waymo, and not just on the technical front. The Alphabet-owned company has used its first testing and commercial market to experiment with its business model, too, including delivery. Waymo is known for its robotaxis, but it has tested how its tech could be used…

For one week this summer, Taylor and her roommate wore GoPro cameras strapped to their foreheads as they painted, sculpted, and did household chores. They were training an AI vision model, carefully syncing their footage so the system could get multiple angles on the same behavior. It was difficult work in many ways, but they…