TikTok is one of the tech companies that could be most impacted by the outcome of the US elections. But as the election result looms, employees there found themselves surprisingly disengaged from the high-level political drama that could decide the app’s fate. A San Jose-based product manager, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized
I appreciate that. We own this mistake. So your name is Nazir Ali, but when you say “we”— We are not going to give you any personal information that might be harmful for us. Everyone is writing about us, and they are telling us that we are scammers. Would you be comfortable telling me about
Four years ago, one of Vice President Kamala Harris’ top donors—the billionaire cofounder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman—celebrated the IPO of Airbnb, a company he was heavily invested in, by fashioning Monopoly boards where the game’s “jail” space is replaced by “government regulation.” Since Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, many billionaire tech investors have come
Michal Kosinski is a Stanford research psychologist with a nose for timely subjects. He sees his work as not only advancing knowledge, but alerting the world to potential dangers ignited by the consequences of computer systems. His best-known projects involved analyzing the ways in which Facebook (now Meta) gained a shockingly deep understanding of its
The messages, potentially misleading US citizens or stoking hate towards various groups, will have been seen by many times more people than actually made a purchase. Those running the network of Facebook pages in Nigeria may simply believe that US-focused clickbait is the best way to boost the number of people who see their scams.
Despite stunning AI progress in recent years, robots remain stubbornly dumb and limited. The ones found in factories and warehouses typically go through precisely choreographed routines without much ability to perceive their surroundings or adapt on the fly. The few industrial robots that can see and grasp objects can only do a limited number of
Silicon Valley has been an epicenter of global innovation for decades. But the Valley, and its associated personalities, companies, and trends, has never been home to more undiluted power than it is today. Think about it: Elon Musk, among the world’s richest people, is essentially underwriting US presidential candidates while subsidiaries of his interstellar-centric company
The European Union has launched a formal investigation into Chinese shopping platform Temu, citing concerns that the platform is selling illegal products and has been designed in a way that is addictive for consumers. “There is a real suspicion that not enough is done—not in an effective way—to really prevent the dissemination of illegal products,”
Michael Calore: Only 54 percent? Lauren Goode: Yeah, no, 38 percent said fair, which did surprise me. Michael Calore: That is very surprising. Zoë Schiffer: No love for their fellow employees. Lauren Goode: And then 12.6 percent, I was like, are these people trolling? Said they hope to see more. Zoë Schiffer: Oh my God.
Managing such a gargantuan array of chips to develop Llama 4 is likely to present unique engineering challenges and require vast amounts of energy. Meta executives on Wednesday sidestepped an analyst question about energy access constraints in parts of the US that have hampered companies’ efforts to develop more powerful AI. According to one estimate,
Mittelsteadt adds that Trump could punish companies in a variety of ways. He cites, for example, the way the Trump government canceled a major federal contract with Amazon Web Services, a decision likely influenced by the former president’s view of the Washington Post and its owner, Jeff Bezos. It would not be hard for policymakers
Over the past year, Cisco publicly looked like one of the few tech companies that had avoided internal backlash over its response to the war in Gaza. Chuck Robbins, the CEO of the Silicon Valley giant known for its routers, cybersecurity services, and WebEx video calling, issued a statement last November acknowledging the suffering of
Some Medium writers and editors do applaud the platform’s approach to AI. Eric Pierce, who founded Medium’s largest pop culture publication Fanfare, says that he doesn’t have to fend off many AI-generated submissions and that he believes that the human curators of Medium’s boost program help highlight the best of the platform’s human writing. “I
Eric Lander is a Big Science heavyweight. A geneticist, molecular biologist, and mathematician, he led the International Human Genome Project and is founding director of the powerful Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His countless accolades include a MacArthur “genius” grant and 14 honorary doctorates. When Joe Biden became president, he tapped Lander to be
As ZachXBT has pursued that career as a crypto vigilante, he has also kept his mask firmly in place. Online, he appears only as his avatar, a kind of platypus cartoon figure in a detective’s trench coat or sometimes a hoodie. To avoid retaliation from his many enemies in the world of crypto criminals and
Google added that part of the problem it faces in generating AI Overviews is that, for some very specific queries, there’s an absence of high quality information on the web—and there’s little doubt that Lynn’s work is not of high quality. “The science underlying Lynn’s database of ‘national IQs’ is of such poor quality that
Artificial intelligence might now be solving advanced math, performing complex reasoning, and even using personal computers, but today’s algorithms could still learn a thing or two from microscopic worms. Liquid AI, a startup spun out of MIT, will today reveal several new AI models based on a novel type of “liquid” neural network that has
For eight months, the criminal investigator who pioneered cryptocurrency tracing as a law enforcement technique has, in a bizarre twist of fate, been detained and then jailed in Nigeria facing charges of money laundering and tax evasion. Now, he may finally be coming home. On Wednesday in Abuja, a court ruled that criminal charges against
T-Mobile and AT&T say US regulators should drop a plan to require unlocking of phones within 60 days of activation, claiming that locking phones to a carrier’s network makes it possible to provide cheaper handsets to consumers. “If the Commission mandates a uniform unlocking policy, it is consumers—not providers—who stand to lose the most,” T-Mobile
Demos of AI agents can seem stunning, but getting the technology to perform reliably and without annoying (or costly) errors in real life can be a challenge. Current models can answer questions and converse with almost humanlike skill, and are the backbone of chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. They can also perform
In the week before the documentary was released, online betting markets had Len Sassaman, a cryptographer who moved in similar online circles as Satoshi, as the most likely candidate to be revealed as the Bitcoin creator. Sassaman took his own life in 2011 at the age of 31, shortly after Satoshi disappeared. The case for
Perplexity did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement emailed to WIRED, News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson compared Perplexity unfavorably to OpenAI. “We applaud principled companies like OpenAI, which understands that integrity and creativity are essential if we are to realize the potential of Artificial Intelligence,” the statement says. “Perplexity is not
In both cases, Biofuel claims, the firms shipped equipment from China to its hosting facility in Eastern Kentucky, then walked away with the bitcoin produced, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid energy bills and hosting fees. Biofuel reached a settlement with Touzi in early 2022 for $60,000, but despite having handed back
Analysts at the US Department of Homeland Security shared an internal report to local agencies in August, warning them about the economic risks of using Chinese utility storage batteries. It warns that the dependence on Chinese batteries could hurt developing a secure supply chain in the US. The document, first obtained by national security transparency
Michelle Barlak, public relations manager for The Seeing Eye, which provides guide dogs for people with visual impairments, tells WIRED that the organization has received “frequent and increasing reports of rideshare access denials from Seeing Eye dog handlers.” A survey by the nonprofit Guide Dogs for the Blind found 83 percent of members said they
As I leave my house on an overcast Tuesday morning to walk the dog, I’m accosted by a neighbor who cheerily calls down the street: “I hear you have an OnlyFans now!” I start to wonder if I’ve made a terrible mistake. OnlyFans has—how shall I put it—a reputation. Like many online platforms, it matches
A TikTok video of actor Brian Baumgartner, from the American version of The Office, calling for the overthrow of the president of a small European country was an early sign that this would be no ordinary election. Late last year, Baumgartner appeared among a lineup of American celebrities addressing Maia Sandu, the current, pro-European president
John Graham-Cumming doesn’t ping me often, but when he does I pay attention. His day job is the CTO of the security giant Cloudflare, but he is also a lay historian of technology, guided by a righteous compass. He might be best known for successfully leading a campaign to force the UK government to apologize
While the biometric-scanning Orb and the World network have their roots in crypto tokens, “crypto” wasn’t an oft-mentioned word during the event. Instead, Altman and Blania emphasized World’s blockchain service, digital asset management, and virtual communication tools. Blania claimed during the press briefing that, in the future, World hopes to build the “largest finance network”
SpaceX is seeking approval for changes to Starlink that the company says will enable gigabit-per-second broadband service. In an application submitted to the US Federal Communications Commission on October 11, SpaceX claims the requested “modification and its companion amendment will enable the Gen2 system to deliver gigabit-speed, truly low-latency broadband and ubiquitous mobile connectivity to