Six years ago, as Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert were sketching out ideas for Everything Everywhere All at Once, their interdimensional martial arts fantasy about a frazzled mother battling a series of increasingly comical and cosmic challenges, the writer-directors found themselves facing their own Nietzschean problems. Along with personal and career anxieties and undiagnosed struggles, there was a basic quandary about the story they wanted to tell: Could a movie set in the absurd chaos of infin
OpenAI, the San Francisco-based company best-known for its massive GPT-3 natural language model, announced on Wednesday it is releasing a second version of its text-to-image AI model. Like its predecessor, the new DALL-E 2 is a neural network that creates images based on natural language phrases fed in by the user. But while the original DALL-E‘s images were low-resolution and conceptually basic, images generated by DALL-E 2 are five times more realistic and accurate, OpenAI research
r/Place, the five-day collaborative digital artwork project on Reddit, ended on Tuesday, and the result is a captivating tapestry of the human experience. The project, which began as an April Fools’ Day experiment in 2017, allows any Reddit user to post a single colored pixel on a shared blank canvas, every five minutes. Over five days, a mosaic gradually emerges—and it is, by design, a product of myriad people, places, and perspectives, with the five-minute wait time making it imp
Pinterest, the virtual pinboard that has 431 million active users worldwide, is doing its part to take on the climate crisis: On Wednesday, the company announced it would ban any content that makes false claims around climate change.
The new climate misinformation policy sprang up due in part to a growing interest among users in sustainability-themed content. “We know that Pinners are coming to Pinterest to find ideas to incorporate sustainability into their lives, ” says Sarah Br
Laura Shin is a crypto journalist, host of the Unchained podcast, and former senior editor at Forbes. Below, she shares five key insights from her new book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze. Listen to the audio version—read by Laura herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
- Power is shifting from business people to coders. My book tells the story of Ethereum, the second-largest crypto asset by market capitalizati
Travel apps and sites are plentiful, to be sure. But instead of creating a list of me-too offerings with overwhelming interfaces that try to be all things to all people, we thought we’d focus on a few hidden gems that do one thing, do it well, and save you time in the process. If you’re finally back in travel mode for work or play, give them a try. Flight Penguin If you’re looking for the best prices on flights, you have no shortage of sites and services to help you do so. H
Someday, a tech giant may hold a major event in person again. But this year’s Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) won’t be it. Now officially on the schedule for June 6-10, the venerable event will stream live for free, as it did in 2020 and 2021. In a small nod to the virtue of in-person gatherings, Apple will invite selected coders and students to its Apple Park HQ on WWDC’s first day to watch the keynote and “state of the union” session. However, eve
It’s been a whirlwind 48 hours for Elon Musk and Twitter. If you haven’t been following along, here’s a quick summary of events:
On Monday, it was revealed through a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that Musk had taken a hefty 9.2% stake in Twitter, making him the single largest shareholder of the company. At the time, the stake was worth roughly $3 billion. That day, Musk posted a poll on Twitter, asking if users would like the social media platform
Growing up in suburban Potomac, Maryland in the 1980s, Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games–one of the most successful gaming companies in history–wasn’t much of a gamer. His interests lay in the games themselves. The software. The internal logic humming along in the background. The stuff that made everything work. Sweeney spent much of his time back then teaching himself to program on an Apple II, eventually using that skill to first create his own games and later his
Picture this: You’re on Mars. (You own a house there in this scenario.) The sun is setting on this otherworldly red planet, with the sky throwing incredible shades of brilliance in your eyes, blinding rays deflecting off the sheen of your rare Lamborghini. You cruise along, blasting DJ Steve Aoki tunes into the 95% carbon dioxide, 0.1% oxygen atmosphere. Everything oozes glamour. You’re in the future. Wait, a reality check: You’re actually in your boring, Earthly l