
Though the economy is still displaying some signs of strength with robust jobs report numbers and elevated levels of consumer spending, there are some notable, worrisome, and lingering trends in the entrepreneurial and startup space. Specifically, the number of companies that are going public, globally, continues to fall—a sign that, for investors and founders, we’ve definitely made an exit from the frothy pre-pandemic era.
The latest data confirms it: Global IPO volum

An ethics group devoted to artificial intelligence has declared GPT-4 to be “a risk to public safety,” and is urging the U.S. government to investigate its maker OpenAI for endangering consumers.
The Center for AI and Digital Policy (CAIDP) filed its complaint on Thursday with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), on the heels of an open letter earlier this week calling more generally for a moratorium on all generative AI. Some 1,200 researchers, tech executive

An open letter signed by Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Andrew Yang, and many others asks that companies like OpenAI (which Musk cofounded) stop releasing new AI models until the risks can be better understood and better managed. But the AI genie’s already well out of the bottle and expanding—and there may be no pausing that.
The concerns raised by the letter, in general, are valid. The core of the signatories’ argument is captured in this line: “[R]ecent mont

We are all bound by contracts: legal agreements that rule our work and personal lives. Contracts can be difficult to read and understand, with page after page of legalese seemingly written to deliberately confuse and obfuscate. Fortunately a new wave of artificial intelligence (AI) contract review tools can help both legal professionals and laypeople navigate even the most complex documents.
AI contract review software can help ordinary people by digging through legalese and summari

Superconductors make highly efficient electronics, but the ultralow temperatures and ultrahigh pressures required to make them work are costly and difficult to implement. Room-temperature superconductors promise to change that.
The recent announcement by researchers at the University of Rochester of a new material that is a superconductor at room temperature, albeit at high pressure, is an exciting development—if proved. If the material or one like it works reliably and

It would be “catastrophic” if the Space Force had to operate under fiscal 2022 funding levels, the military’s top space official told lawmakers on Tuesday.
Under a spending plan backed by a wing of the Republican party, dollars for research and development, launch, modernization, recruitment, missile defense, and domain awareness could all be at risk, said Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), the ranking member of the House appropriations subcommittee that oversees de

Way back in January 2021, just before the Biden administration was taking office, the Air Force announced that the U.S. Space Command, the home base for the military’s space operations, would be relocated. The headquarters has been based in Colorado Springs for decades, but the military decided to move the site across the country to Huntsville, Alabama.
“I single-handedly said ‘let’s go to Alabama,” President Donald Trump said of the decision a few

We can all use a little help every now and then, both at work and at home—that’s why the rich and famous have armies of personal assistants to help them out. We can’t all afford that, but artificial intelligence is coming to the rescue with a new wave of AI assistants to help get get things done, handling the tedious details of making things happen.
It’s a huge growth area, with billions of dollars invested in hundreds of companies creating AI assistants

Halfway through the Epic Games presentation at the 2023 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, a German actor named Melina Juergen scowled, sending ripples through the assembled crowd of developers in the Blue Shield of California Theater at Yerba Buena Center—and across the internet, as millions of people encountered the clip in their social media feeds.
The fascination with her expression had everything to do with the technology that made it possible. Juergen, known f

This story is from Fast Company’s new Plugged In newsletter, a weekly roundup of tech insights, news, and trends from global technology editor Harry McCracken, delivered to your inbox every Wednesday morning. Sign up for it here.
If you say that a human being is creative, the odds are pretty good that you mean it as praise. But in the burgeoning generative AI-infused chatbot wars, “creative” is a convenient code word for “playing fast and loose with the