Hey, folks. Ready for a wet, hot summer? Better keep the Paxlovid handy. The Plain View When I spoke to Shopify’s CEO and founder, Tobias Lütke, earlier this month, I was the first to tell him about an unfortunate headline that had just appeared: “Is Shopify the next WeWork?” Lütke, who goes by Tobi, was
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. WIRED: I want your take on the current moment. What the hell is going on with crypto? Is this an existential crisis? Changpeng “CZ” Zhao: When you get hundreds of millions of people trading assets, it just goes through cycles. It is definitely not an existential
Sebastian Siemiatkowski, the cofounder and CEO of Klarna, looks slightly frayed down the barrel of his webcam as he explains over Google Meet why everything is fine at the fintech despite increasingly frenzied warnings of a looming recession. Klarna is a European heavyweight, currently the bloc’s most valuable private tech company. Since launching in 2005,
When Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify before Congress in 2018, he was asked by Senator Orin Hatch how Facebook made money. Zuckerberg’s answer has since become something of a meme: “Senator, we run ads.” Between July 2018 and April 2022, Meta made at least $30.3 million in ad revenue from networks it removed
When Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify before Congress in 2018, he was asked by Senator Orin Hatch how Facebook made money. Zuckerberg’s answer has since become something of a meme: “Senator, we run ads.” Between July 2018 and April 2022, Meta made at least $30.3 million in ad revenue from networks it removed
Homes in cities are less likely to have off-street parking than those in rural or suburban areas, and 78 percent of resident-owned American homes have a garage or carport, versus just 37 percent for those that are rented, according to US census data. “This burden is certainly felt more heavily by those living in urban
An Airbus A320-232 with the tail number YU-APH made its first flight on December 13, 2005. Since then, the aircraft has clocked millions of miles, flying routes for Air Deccan, Kingfisher Airlines, Bingo Airways, and Syphax Airlines before being taken over by Air Serbia, the Eastern European country’s national flag carrier, in 2014. For eight
In a statement sent before the results were announced, Apple spokesperson Josh Lipton wrote, “We are fortunate to have incredible retail team members and we deeply value everything they bring to Apple. We are pleased to offer very strong compensation and benefits for full time and part time employees, including health care, tuition reimbursement, new
But it calls itself a person. Person and human are two very different things. Human is a biological term. It is not a human, and it knows it’s not a human. It’s a very strange entity you’re describing because the entity is bound by algorithmic biases that humans put in there. You’re right on point.
This week, a US Department of Transportation report detailed the crashes that advanced driver-assistance systems have been involved in over the past year or so. Tesla’s advanced features, including Autopilot and Full Self-Driving, accounted for 70 percent of the nearly 400 incidents—many more than previously known. But the report may raise more questions about this
Jamie Burke, the CEO of crypto venture fund Outlier Ventures, says that crypto has been behaving exactly like a stock and that the two are moving in lockstep because the lines between them have blurred. The vertiginous price highs and feverish hype around crypto have sucked in a lot of new money as institutional and
Hi, folks. Interesting that congressional hearings about January 6 are drawing NFL-style audiences. Can’t wait for the Peyton and Eli version! The Plain View The world of AI was shaken this week by a report in The Washington Post that a Google engineer had run into trouble at the company after insisting that a conversational
In May, the venture capital firm Sequoia circulated a memo among its startup founders. The 52-page presentation warned of a challenging road ahead, paved by inflation, rising interest rates, a Nasdaq drawdown, supply chain issues, war, and a general weariness about the economy. Things were about to get tough, and this time, venture capital would
Opponents of the antitrust push targeting Big Tech have lobbed all kinds of arguments to try to weaken support for new legislation. They may finally have found one that sticks. This week, a group of four Democratic senators led by Brian Schatz, of Hawaii, sent a letter to Amy Klobuchar asking her to pump the
Now head of the nonprofit Distributed AI Research, Gebru hopes that going forward people focus on human welfare, not robot rights. Other AI ethicists have said that they’ll no longer discuss conscious or superintelligent AI at all. “Quite a large gap exists between the current narrative of AI and what it can actually do,” says
Thank you to everyone who wrote in last month to confirm that, indeed, only journalists care what happens to Twitter. As Elon Musk’s bizarre dance between buying the company and trash-talking it into oblivion continues, it’s a healthy reminder for us not to get too obsessed—though now that he may be getting access to the
After the famine, the flood. The past two years have been blighted by supply shortages—with just-in-time retailers struggling to ship their goods, electronics manufacturers staring down a shortage of computer chips, and supermarkets struggling to fill their shelves. Now, some retailers are struggling with the opposite problem: a deluge of stuff nobody wants to buy.
It took two months for Ukrainian officials to acknowledge the story was a myth. “The ghost of Kyiv is a superhero-legend, whose character was created by Ukrainians,” Ukraine’s Air Force Command said on Facebook on April 30. “Please do not fill the info space with fakes!” The Ghost of Kyiv was an early lesson for
Peer-to-peer car-sharing platforms are—cliché though it is—exactly like Airbnb for cars. But, unlike Airbnb, which is currently valued at $78.8 billion, car sharing has yet to take off—despite cars sitting idle 96 percent of the time. But now, with old-fashioned rentals expensive and hard to get hold of, car sharing might finally have its moment.
In Daniel McGehee’s informed opinion, it’s simply too late to put the genie back in the bottle. People drive an average of 29 miles a day in the US. They have phones. They’re going to want to use their phones while they’re driving. The question is, how can they do it safely, free from the
On the Thursday before he was supposed to start his new job at Coinbase, Sam Maher got an email with the subject line “Update to your Coinbase offer.” The update was that there was no offer. In response to “current market conditions,” the startup had eliminated a number of incoming positions, leaving Maher suddenly unemployed
Last October, on the day whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before her committee, Senator Amy Klobuchar gave a candid, if depressing, summation of the effect of all that DC spending: “We have not done a thing to update US competition, privacy & tech laws,” she tweeted. “Nothing. Zilch. Why? Because there are lobbyists around every single
Ingenuity, NASA’s autonomous Mars helicopter, was only meant to complete five flights. But since its history-making first flight in April 2021, the helicopter has flown 28 times, and preparation is underway for the 29th. Depending on dust levels and the schedule of the rover Perseverance, that flight could take place as soon as later this
The collaboration with Geely could give Jidu a big boost when it comes to the notoriously tricky business of making cars at high volume and with high reliability, says Tu Le, managing director of Sino Auto Insights, an analyst firm focused on China’s automotive sector. He adds that China’s auto industry is electrifying at a
According to Fox Cahn, apps that collect and store data on their own servers are particularly dangerous, both because the data can be sold and hacked, but also because law enforcement can serve companies with subpoenas for user data. In a recent report, STOP pointed out that some apps let users store data on their
A majority of Axon’s AI Ethics Board resigned in protest yesterday, following an announcement last week that the company planned to equip drones with Tasers and cameras as a way to end mass shootings in schools. The company backed down on its proposal Sunday, but the damage had been done. Axon had first asked the
A majority of Axon’s AI ethics board resigned in protest yesterday, following an announcement last week that the company planned to equip drones with Tasers and cameras as a way to end mass shootings in schools. The company backed down on its proposal Sunday, but the damage had been done. Axon had first asked the
Some analysts have suggested that the government believes YouTube is too popular to block without risking a political pushback or increasing the popularity of VPNs. But others argue that the Google exemption is connected to the company’s trump card, which is sitting in the pockets of roughly 75 percent of Russians. “Most smartphones in Russia
In late May, employees of the fintech startup Bolt saw a message from their CEO on the company’s Slack. It warned them that “restructuring” was coming, and they should look out for a calendar invitation: One group would join a meeting with human resources, meaning they were being laid off, while another would go to
However, as in the Amazon, identifying problem areas only gets you so far if there aren’t enough resources to act on those findings. The Nature Conservancy uses its AI model to inform conversations with land managers about potential threats to wildlife or biodiversity. Conservation enforcement in the Mojave Desert is overseen by the US Bureau