Damon Beres

Here is a nonexhaustive list of objects Apple recently pulverized with a menacing hydraulic crusher: a trumpet, a piano, a turntable, a sculpted bust, lots and lots of paint, video-game controllers.
These are all shown being demolished in the company’s new iPad commercial, a minute-long spot titled “Crush!” The items are arranged on a platform beneath a slowly descending enormous metal block, then trash-compactored out of existence in a violent symphony of crunching.

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Recent weeks have seen the introduction of new consumer gadgets whose entire selling point revolves around artificial intelligence.

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In last week’s newsletter, I described artificial intelligence as data-hungry. But the technology is also quite thirsty, relying on data centers that require not just a tremendous amount of energy, but water to cool themselves with.

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Generative AI is famously data-hungry. The technology requires huge troves of digital information—text, photos, video, audio—to “learn” how to produce convincingly humanlike material.

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Computers may have seemed magical to you once, portals to an unpredictable expanse of knowledge and entertainment. Then they became ubiquitous, perhaps a little boring, and occasionally horrifying.

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When I was a kid, I felt hypnotized by the shelves in my best friend’s apartment. They contained, it seemed, endless volumes of Japanese-language books—including, most crucially to a child’s eye, comics such as Dragon Ball and Urusei Yatsura.

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When I was a kid, I felt hypnotized by the shelves in my best friend’s apartment. They contained, it seemed, endless volumes of Japanese-language books—including, most crucially to a child’s eye, comics such as Dragon Ball and Urusei Yatsura.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a limited-run series in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.
Earlier this week, my colleague Ian Bogost published a provocative article about a trend in higher education: the opening of distinct colleges of computing, akin to law schools. New programs at MIT, Cornell, and soon UC Berkeley follow an uptick in the number of students graduating with computer-science majors.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. Sign up here.What will next year hold for AI? In a new story, Atlantic staff writer Ross Andersen looks ahead, outlining five key questions that will define the technology’s trajectory from here.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. Sign up here.Artificial intelligence is changing the way some scientists conduct research, leading to new discoveries on accelerated timetables.

There is a tension at the heart of ChatGPT that may soon snap. Does the technology expand our world or constrain it? Which is to say, do AI-powered chatbots open new doors to learning and discovery, or do they instead risk siloing off information and leaving us stuck with unreliable access to truth?Earlier today, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, announced a partnership with the media conglomerate Axel Springer that seems to get us closer to an answer.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. Sign up here.Earlier this year, The Atlantic published a story by Gary Marcus, a well-known AI expert who has agitated for the technology to be regulated, both in his Substack newsletter and before the Senate.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. Sign up here.It’s been an unbelievable few days for OpenAI, the influential company behind products such as ChatGPT, the image-generating DALL-E, and GPT-4. On Friday, its CEO, Sam Altman, was suddenly fired by the company’s board.

On Saturday, my wife delicately removed the phone from my hands. It was making me seem a little crazed, she said. I had been on it all day. Closing on a story, refreshing Slack, scrolling through social media, checking my email. I had just texted a friend to recommend an accessory for a vacuum cleaner; it felt like it demanded my urgent attention, the way everything else on the screen did. “i got a horse hair attachment for thr vacuum it js so amazjng,” I had typed, just like that.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Apple’s recently unveiled Vision Pro presents an all-screen future, but generative AI’s growth in recent months has also hinted at ways we might move toward the opposite experience.

A man approaches his children in a dim room. They’re dipping wands into a dish of soap and blowing bubbles. He smiles and raises a finger to his brow, where a headset rests, covering his eyes. He taps a button to capture a video of the kids playing. He’ll be able to revisit it later on the couch, smiling at the memory, which is saved forever in brilliant 3-D.This scripted scene is part of Apple’s pitch, made earlier today, for the future of personal computers.

One might assume that when your boss finally comes to tell you that the robots are here to do your job, he won’t also point out with enthusiasm that they’re going to do it 10 times better than you did. Alas, this was not the case at BuzzFeed.Yesterday, at a virtual all-hands meeting, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti had some news to discuss about the automated future of media.

You can now know everything about your baby at all times. An expectant parent of a certain type—cash-flush and availed of benzodiazepine, or maybe just fretful—will be dizzied by the options.

I cradled my first iPhone like an egg after I bought it. The year was 2011; the season was winter. The ground was slushy, but I was too nervous to take the thing on the subway. It was an absolute luxury, by far the fanciest and, I felt, most fragile thing I owned—more Fabergé than farmstand.The precise model was the iPhone 4, which looked like an ice-cream sandwich from the side and felt about as sturdy.