Many of the most successful and widely used machine-learning models are trained with the help of thousands of low-paid gig workers. Millions of people around the world earn money on platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk, which allow companies and researchers to outsource small tasks to online crowdworkers. According to one estimate, more than a million people […]
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Gene editing has made pigs immune to a deadly epidemic
When covid-19 began to race around the world, countries closed businesses and told people to stay home. Many thought that would be enough to stop the coronavirus. If we had paid more attention to pigs, we might have known better. When it comes to controlling airborne viruses, says Bill Christianson, “I think we fool ourselves […]
Contact tracing apps now cover nearly half of America. It’s not too late to use one.
California’s exposure notification system launched statewide on December 10, which means that almost half of all Americans now live somewhere covered by an app that will warn them if they’ve been close to someone with covid-19. We’re watching these rollouts closely as part of our Covid Tracing Tracker, which monitors the development of contact tracing […]
No One Knows How Deep Russia’s Hacking Rampage Goes
A supply chain attack against IT company SolarWinds has exposed as many as 18,000 companies to Cozy Bear’s attacks. Powered by WPeMatico
A Letter to My Pandemic Baby
On this week’s Get WIRED podcast, an editor captures the bizarre world of 2020 for his unborn daughter. Powered by WPeMatico
How to Use ProRAW on Your iPhone 12 Pro
Apple’s update that enables RAW camera capture—and makes your photos more editable—is now available. Powered by WPeMatico
The Streaming Wars Could Finally End in 2021
With Disney’s announcement of 22 new series, and Warner Bros. teaming up with HBO Max, the battle for every last subscriber will come to a head next year. Powered by WPeMatico
Pregnant in the pandemic? It helps to have good Wi-Fi.
As covid-19 has taken over the US, medical providers have looked for any possible way to keep people home and out of hospitals without compromising care. We’re only now coming to grips with the unintended consequences of changes meant to slow the spread of the coronavirus and relieve strain on the medical system. One of […]
Kids are sick of Zoom too—so their teachers are getting creative
A few times a week, Vincent Buyssens’s students in Mechelen, Belgium’s Thomas More University College get on Instagram while he’s lecturing about creative strategy. They swipe through stories, add posts to their profile, and get lost in rabbit holes. But they’re not being surreptitious about it; in fact, Buyssens requires those taking his college course […]
Tiny four-bit computers are now all you need to train AI
Deep learning is an inefficient energy hog. It requires massive amounts of data and abundant computational resources, which explodes its electricity consumption. In the last few years, the overall research trend has made the problem worse. Models of gargantuan proportions—trained on billions of data points for several days—are in vogue, and likely won’t be going […]