The Best of WIRED
20+ most popular WIRED articles, as voted by our community.
New this Week
These are fresh off the press.
Did Social Media Kill the Pop Song?
A new study found that song lyrics are now angrier, more repetitive, and vain. Consensus wavers, but what remains incontestable is social media’s impact on the music we hear most.
Tesla’s Layoffs Won’t Solve Its Growing Pains
The car company popularized EVs. Now, facing intense competition from China, it has to figure out what to do next.
Trending
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The Keys to a Long Life Are Sleep and a Better Diet—and Money
Nobel Prize–winning biologist Venki Ramakrishnan explores the science and charlatans of life-extension.
To Build a Better AI Supercomputer, Let There Be Light
OpenAI and other AI leaders think new leaps in machine intelligence will require new forms of computer hardware. One proposal involves connecting GPUs with light.
Here Come the AI Worms
Security researchers created an AI worm in a test environment that can automatically spread between generative AI agents—potentially stealing data and sending spam emails along the way.
These Companies Have a Plan to Kill Apps
Apps made the smartphone. Now, companies are increasingly leveraging AI to envision a world without them.
8 Google Employees Invented Modern AI. Here’s the Inside Story
They met by chance, got hooked on an idea, and wrote the “Transformers” paper—the most consequential tech breakthrough in recent history.
WIRED on Apple
One More Thing
Flawless curves, milled aluminum, walled garden—yup, sounds like an Apple product!
Podcast Listeners Really Are the Holy Grail Advertisers Hoped They'd Be
After a month of Apple's Podcast Analytics tools being available to creators, everyone's hopes have been validated.
WIRED on Artificial Intelligence
How Amazon Rebuilt Itself Around Artificial Intelligence
The Alexa voice platform and other deep learning projects have made Amazon an AI leader.
How ChatGPT and Other LLMs Work—and Where They Could Go Next
Large language models like AI chatbots seem to be everywhere. If you understand them better, you can use them better.
WIRED on Digital Life
A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?
In 1995, a WIRED cofounder challenged a Luddite-loving doomsayer to a prescient wager on tech and civilization’s fate. Now their judge weighs in.
A New Tool Shows How Google Results Vary Around the World
Search Atlas displays three sets of links—or images—from different countries for any search.
WIRED on Facebook
Inside Facebook's Hellish Two Years—and Mark Zuckerberg's Struggle to Fix it All
How a confused, defensive social media giant steered itself into a disaster, and how Mark Zuckerberg is trying to fix it all.
Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?
From protecting privacy to saving the free press, it may be the single best way to fix the internet.
WIRED on Facial Recognition
The Secret History of Facial Recognition
Sixty years ago, a sharecropper’s son invented a technology to identify faces. Then the record of his role all but vanished. Who was Woody Bledsoe, and who was he working for?
Why Is Google Slow-Walking Its Breakthroughs in AI?
The company’s new facial-recognition service comes with limitations to prevent abuse, which sometimes lets competitors take the lead.
WIRED on Gadgets
A New Artificial Intelligence Makes Mistakes—on Purpose
A chess program that learns from human error might be better at working with people or negotiating with them.
This Battery Breakthrough Could Change Everything
The green-tech guru is backing an energy storage breakthrough that could power the future.
WIRED on Open Source
Google Just Open Sourced the Artificial Intelligence Engine at the Heart of Its Online Empire
In a dramatic departure, Google is open sourcing software that sits at the heart of its online empire.
An Open Source Bid to Encrypt the Internet of Things
IoT is a security hellscape. One cryptography has a plan to make it a little bit less so.
WIRED on Privacy
The Creator of Signal Has a Plan to Fix Cryptocurrency
MobileCoin aims to make cryptocurrency transactions quick and easy for everyone, while still preserving privacy and decentralization.
How Facebook and Other Sites Manipulate Your Privacy Choices
Social media platforms repeatedly use so-called dark patterns to nudge you toward giving away more of your data.
WIRED on Science Fiction
Why Science Fiction Is the Most Important Genre
Historian Yuval Noah Harari believes sci-fi has the power to shape public opinion.
What Sci-Fi Can Teach Computer Science About Ethics
Schools are adding ethics classes to their computer-science curricula. The reading assignments: science fiction.
WIRED on Technology
People Are Dating All Wrong, According to Data Science
Large data sets provide intriguing—and dismaying—insights into who we're drawn to and how much that matters for our romantic happiness.
AI is An Ideology, Not A Technology
At its core, "artificial intelligence" is a perilous belief that fails to recognize the agency of humans.
Popular
These are some all-time favorites with Refind users.
The High-Stakes Race to Engineer New Psychedelic Drugs
As psychedelic therapies for mental health go mainstream, companies are recruiting chemists to create patentable versions of hallucinogens. Critics say it’s all a bad trip.
How a Saxophonist Tricked the KGB by Encrypting Secrets in Music
Using a custom encryption scheme within music notation, Merryl Goldberg and three other US musicians slipped information to Soviet performers and activists known as the Phantom Orchestra.
The Web3 Movement’s Quest to Build a ‘Can’t Be Evil’ Internet
Crypto dreamers want to free us from Big Tech and exploitative capitalism—using only the blockchain, game theory, and code. What could possibly go wrong?
If Humans Went Extinct, Would a Similar Species Evolve?
It's comforting to believe that another advanced civilization would develop if humanity met its end. Not so fast.
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