Category: 404 Media

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that glimpsed a bygone world, caught an 80-foot fish, outshone the stars, and declared scientific independence. First, a mysterious group of extinct human relatives were probably not as advanced as once thought, a finding that sheds light on their ...

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss the Supreme Court, the private jet, and AI on the TV. JOSEPH: I used to cover court cases and judge’s opinions a ...

Companies across tech, entertainment, banking, and many other industries are throttling their employees’ use of AI and pleading with workers to use less powerful models to stop AI costs from spiraling out of control, according to leaked Slack chats, screenshots of internal dashboards, emails, and more material obtained by 404 ...

We start this week with Joseph’s story about the Tokenpocalypse, which is companies scrambling to stop spending so much on AI after providers started charging per AI token. After the break, Joseph and Emanuel tell us about the ways companies are trying to do this, including using a tool to ...

🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. AI chatbots that were prompted to impersonate public figures produced responses that people perceived to be more authentic, coherent, and relevant than the real thing, a ...

A vulnerability in Apple’s “Hide My Email” tool lets almost anyone discover a person’s real email address that is supposed to be hidden by the feature, and Apple has failed to fix it for more than a year, according to a security researcher and 404 Media’s own tests. 404 Media ...

Meta just released a new ad for its creeper glasses. In the video, Kylie Jenner, the new face of the glasses called Starfire, goes through a day-in-the-life style video from her point of view. Mostly, she’s led around her own house in a haze by various vendors and assistants. Kylie’s ...

Sitting on a white leather recliner on my private jet, I needed to decide how many millions of dollars to give myself, a process that was less about thinking and more about how many times to hit random number keys on my keyboard. I watched 404 Media’s revenue graph go ...

Companies are deliberately making their AI tools speak like cavemen in an attempt to stop burning through AI tokens and curb their massive expenditure on AI, 404 Media has found. The tool turns the usually verbose outpost of LLMs like Claude Code, Codex, or Gemini into a much more to ...

Scammers are selling seeds for plants that don’t exist with spectacular, AI-generated images of technicolor leaves that bloom in the shape of birds, butterflies, and cat heads. This type of fake seeds scam predates widespread access to AI image generators, but the ability to easily create these images has made ...