Science and Technology

When Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, for breach of contract on Thursday, he turned claims by the start-up’s closest partner, Microsoft, into a weapon.He repeatedly cited a contentious but highly influential paper written by researchers and top executives at Microsoft about the power of GPT-4, the breakthrough artificial intelligence system OpenAI released last March.In the “Sparks of A.G.I.” paper, Microsoft’s research lab said that — though it didn’t understand how — GPT-4 had shown “sparks” of “artificial general intelligence,” or A.G.I., a machine that can do everything the human brain can do.It was a bold…

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.kevin rooseHave you — I’m obsessed with this story about the Willy Wonka event. Have you seen this?casey newtonIs it the Fyre Festival of candy-related children’s theater?kevin rooseYes. So this was an event called Willy’s Chocolate Experience that was scheduled in Glasgow, Scotland this past weekend. And it appears to have been a total AI-generated event. All of the art on the website appears to…

The media outlets Raw Story, Alternet and The Intercept sued OpenAI for copyright infringement on Wednesday, adding to a growing chorus pushing back against the company’s methods of scraping content off the internet to train its artificial intelligence-powered chatbot.The online publications sued OpenAI in a New York federal court in two separate cases, saying that the ChatGPT creator trained its chatbot using copyrighted works by journalists without properly crediting or citing them. The companies are seeking damages in the amount of at least $2,500 per violation, as well as asking OpenAI to remove all copyrighted articles from data training sets.The…

President Biden will issue an executive order Wednesday seeking to restrict the sale of sensitive American data to China, Russia and four more countries, a first-of-its-kind attempt to keep personally identifying information from being obtained for blackmail, scams or other harm.The president will ask the Justice Department to write rules restricting the sale of information about Americans’ locations, health and genetics to China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela, as well as any entities linked to those countries. The restrictions would also cover financial information, biometric data and other types of information that could identify individuals and sensitive information…