The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price.

The LinkedIn algorithm can feel like a mysterious gatekeeper, deciding which posts reach only a few connections and which break free into wider feeds. For professionals, creators, and brands, ...

Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price. Unhappy with their meager profits, they meet one night in a ...

An artificial-intelligence algorithm that discovers its own way to learn achieves state-of-the-art performance, including on some tasks it had never encountered before. Joel Lehman is at Lila Sciences ...

Taking a page from the private insurance industry’s playbook, the Trump administration will launch a program next year to find out how much money an artificial intelligence algorithm could save the ...

Matthew Alvarado sells cannabis by the book now, but he sold pot illegally and paid the price. He was incarcerated multiple times, and says the Cannabis Reentry Employment Assistance and Training ...

The White House has answered what had been one of the major outstanding questions regarding its pending deal to transfer TikTok’s US operations to a majority American ownership group: Under the ...

A new evolutionary technique from Japan-based AI lab Sakana AI enables developers to augment the capabilities of AI models without costly training and fine-tuning processes. The technique, called ...

At first glance, biology and quantum technology seem incompatible. Living systems operate in warm, noisy environments full of constant motion—while quantum technology often requires extreme isolation ...

Every time a new slang word gets coined on the Internet, linguist Adam Aleksic is thrilled. “It’s definitely good for me in that I stay in business,” says Aleksic, who studies the origins of words and ...

If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get organized. You might, for example, break the problem into pieces and tackle the easiest pieces first. But this kind of sorting has a cost.