Gadget Lab: Weekly Tech News

Do you know what TCP/IP means? (Hint: you’re using it right now.) What about CDMA? Or GPT? While the concepts and the execution of these technologies are clear to most of us who have been on the internet nearly our whole lives, the acronyms we use to define them are often inscrutable. On this week’s episode, we welcome WIRED’s AI reporter Will Knight onto the show. Along with our hosts Michael Calore and Lauren Goode, the trio takes turns quizzing each other on what exactly these acronyms stand for. Michael is asked to unpack various terms from the early internet era, Lauren is tested on acronyms from the mobile era, and Will tells us what all the AI-related abbreviations mean. Everyone does a pretty good job even if nobody earns a perfect score. Play along at home; maybe you can best our hosts with your arcane knowledge of internet minutiae.Show NotesRead Steven Levy’s story about the Google research paper that kickstarted the transformer-based AI boom.Recommendations:Will recommends the book The Rise and Fa