Last year, as cryptocurrency company FTX and sister trading firm Alameda Research were melting down, Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison held an all-hands meeting and told staff that Alameda had taken customer deposits from FTX and could not pay them back. When asked in the meeting by an employee whose idea it had been to use customer funds, “Sam, I guess” was Ellison’s answer.

Today, at the end of Ellison’s testimony during the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, or SBF for short, prosecutor Danielle Sassoon asked why she had qualified her answer. The “I guess,” explained Ellison, was just a vocal tic. It wasn’t a question. It had been Bankman-Fried’s idea the

When artificial intelligence image generators first rolled out, they seemed like magic. Churning out detailed imagery in minutes was, from one angle, a technical marvel. From another angle, though, it looked like mere mimicry.

The models were trained on billions of images without anyone asking the humans behind them for permission. “They have sucked the creative juices of millions of artists,” says Eva Toorenent, an illustrator who serves as the Netherlands adviser for the European Guild for Artificial Intelligence Regulation. “It is absolutely horrifying.”

As AI company valuations soared, the people whose work provided the bedrock for their products saw no compensation. Many artists ardently

Today, an international team of researchers shared an extraordinarily detailed atlas of human brain cells, mapping its staggering diversity of neurons. The atlas was published as part of a massive package of 21 papers in the journal Science, each taking complementary approaches to the same overarching questions: What cell types exist in the brain? And what makes human brains different from those of other animals?

With hundreds of billions of cells tangled together, mapping the whole brain is like trying to plot every star in the Milky Way. (The inner workings of each cell are mini worlds of their own.) But just as better telescopes make the universe clearer to

Dozens of applications and interviews, hours spent tweaking resumes, and a conference and career fair-turned-Hunger Games. Finding a job in tech is a mess.

The past year has brought a reckoning for the once unsinkable industry. Tech companies around the world laid off more than 400,000 workers in 2022 and 2023, according to Layoffs.fyi, a site that tracks job losses across the industry. A year after many of those cuts began, job seekers are still facing a tough market, fighting for a smaller number of spots in a job sector that once promised high salaries, lavish perks, and security.

The tech job market “doesn’t show

When it comes to originals, Netflix and Amazon have the deepest libraries of prestige movies. But ever since CODA won the Best Picture Oscar, it’s become clear that some of the best movies are on Apple TV+. 

As with any streaming service, not every film on the roster is a winner, but from Billie Eilish documentaries to Sundance darlings, Apple’s streaming service is building up a strong catalog to run alongside its growing slate of beloved TV shows.

Below are WIRED’s picks for flicks you should prioritize in your queue. Once you’re done, hop over to our list of the best movies on Netflix and the best movies on Disney+. If you’re feeling a little more episodic, our guide

Artificial intelligence abounds, and it’s only making its way deeper and deeper into every scrap of technology we use. Generative AI in particular is an invention that seems destined to follow us far into the future, so it’s best to try to make sense of where it’s headed.

This week on Gadget Lab, we’re sharing an episode of Wondery’s Business Wars podcast, where we talk about the rise of AI over the past few years, where the future of artificial intelligence is going, and whether the many movies about AI actually predicted what’s to come.

Listen to the Business Wars podcast at Wondery, or wherever

For about 10 minutes last week, I felt like I was Judge Dredd, riding the burly Lawmaster motorcycle from the 1995 film. People on the cobbled streets of Red Hook, Brooklyn, stared at me as I rode by on a futuristic-looking vehicle, and I fought the urge to yell, “I am the law!”

I was riding Infinite Machine’s P1, an electric Vespa-like scooter from a brand-new company started up by two brothers in Brooklyn, Eddie and Joseph Cohen. Eddie studied product design and did a stint in marketing at Apple. He founded a company called Walden, which designs

The recent announcement that HS2 may still extend to Euston station instead of terminating in the suburbs could be good news for a group of scientific alchemists planning to conjure concrete from London clay.

The boring for HS2 will produce more than a million tonnes of waste overall, and that clay will need to be carted away on the surface.

Meanwhile, vast quantities of cement will be shipped in by lorry to make concrete for HS2’s tunnels at great environmental cost. The manufacture of cement produces 8% of the world’s carbon emissions, and the industry would be the world’s third biggest emitter after China and the US if it were a

It’s been one of the wettest years in California since records began. From October 2022 to March 2023, the state was blasted by 31 atmospheric rivers—colossal bands of water vapor that form above the Pacific and become firehoses when they reach the West Coast. What surprised climate scientists wasn’t the number of storms, but their strength and rat-a-tat frequency. The downpours shocked a water system that had just experienced the driest three years in recorded state history, causing floods, mass evacuations, and at least 22 deaths.

Swinging between wet and dry extremes is typical for California, but last winter’s rain, potentially intensified by climate

“Whenever my 6-year-old daughter gets asked what she wants to be when she grows up, she says, ‘An influencer.’ The thought of it freaks me out. What should I do?”

—Under the Influence

Dear Under,

Your question made me think about Diana Christensen, a main character in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film Network, played by Faye Dunaway. Christensen is a young network news executive who is meant to represent the moral bankruptcy of a generation that was raised on TV (one character calls her “television incarnate”). While charismatic and highly capable, she is also rampantly amoral, viciously competitive, and so obsessed with ratings that she famously has an orgasm while discussing viewership numbers.