My YouTube algorithm is sacred, with years of data about my preferences and viewing history fermenting into whatever videos it picks for my home screen. YouTube’s algorithm, while not perfect, sure knows what I want to see. The current top three videos on my front page are an Apple Watch analysis, a Big Brother season
Australians would be able to switch off social media algorithms under draft legislation to be proposed this week. Communications Minister Anika Wells, who last year helmed the government’s world-first social media ban for under-16s, said the digital duty of care laws would ensure “some basic safety protections on an industry that hasn’t had to observe
Before the internet learned to like, match, and swipe, it learned to ask one brutally simple question: hot or not? Launched in 2000, Hot or Not invited people to upload photographs of themselves and be rated by strangers on a scale from 1 to 10. It was crude, addictive, and, within weeks, one of the
As social media has evolved from a place to connect with friends to full-scale entertainment platforms, a startup called Yope is quietly building what it believes will be the future of online connection: social networks without algorithms, without ads, and without public content. Yope’s app, now backed by a $12.3 million round led by Northzone,
In 2017, Emily Olson, a stay-at-home mom who lives in Boulder, Colorado, started selling custom puppy prints and portraits on Etsy. His watercolors were simple and relatively inexpensive (images of saucer-eyed corgis and malamutes in mini-tuxedos, which sold for between $75 and $300 each), but dog owners loved them: “They were a labor of love,”
When Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical on artificial intelligence at the Vatican on Monday, he invited Christopher Olah, cofounder of Anthropic, to speak. The move signaled an unprecedented alliance between the Catholic church and Silicon Valley. But to understand how this partnership came about, we need to go back to Anthropic’s founding. Why
