Month: January 2023

Elon Musk’s Twitter needs every penny. With millions of dollars in allegedly unpaid rent and bills, plus $13 billion owed to lenders who financed his takeover, there is “still much work to do” if the company is to avoid bankruptcy, Musk said last month. Twitter recently auctioned off an estimated $1.5 million of furniture and equipment from its San Francisco headquarters, down to

In 2004, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin engaged in a comically passive-aggressive IPO road show. They eschewed business suits for casual garb, refused to answer many questions from finance bigwigs, and warned investors that instead of focusing on profits, the newly public company might apply its resources “to ameliorate a number of the

In recent years, the Saudi government has tried to push international aviation regulators to forbid or prevent the public dissemination of ADS-B data, though that proposal hasn’t gone far. Musk, on the other hand, has threatened legal action against those sharing the location of his private jet. Stanford says their position has always been to

“It’s personally embarrassing for myself to have to explain to friends and family members why I’m getting fired,” says one former Meta employee who was fired as part of the company’s layoffs in late 2022 and requested anonymity to avoid jeopardizing her future job prospects.  But it isn’t just the suddenness. It’s also the dehumanizing way that

For some residents of San Francisco, the robotic future of driving is just a tap away. Ride-hailing services from GM subsidiary Cruise and Alphabet company Waymo allow them to summon a driverless ride with an app. But some riders have become perhaps too comfortable with the technology. In a letter filed with a California regulator yesterday, city agencies complained

For years, the cryptocurrency economy has been rife with black market sales, theft, ransomware, and money laundering—despite the strange fact that in that economy, practically every transaction is written into a blockchain’s permanent, unchangeable ledger. But new evidence suggests that years of advancements in blockchain tracing and crackdowns on that illicit underworld may be having

When high school English teacher Kelly Gibson first encountered ChatGPT in December, the existential anxiety kicked in fast. While the internet delighted in the chatbot’s superficially sophisticated answers to users’ prompts, many educators were less amused. If anyone could ask ChatGPT to “write 300 words on what the green light symbolizes in The Great Gatsby,” what would stop

Flying premium from San Francisco to Los Angeles, a common trip for some Californians, could generate 101 kilograms of carbon emissions, or perhaps 142 or even 366 kilograms—depending on what source you search online. The wide range of estimates stems from what some climate experts view as a growing problem, with Google at the center. More people

But the union’s success overcoming this bureaucracy in Coventry has piqued the interest of Amazon workers around the world, who are trying to organize a global movement to challenge the company. As Amazon’s third largest market (after the US and Germany), unions consider the UK as a critical cog in the mission to internationalize the

Humanity may not exactly be winning its battle to avert climate change, but the electrification of cars has begun to look like a success story. Ten percent of new passenger vehicles sold around the world last year were electric, powered by batteries instead of gasoline—the extraction of which costs the world not only in noxious carbon

Early last year, the government of Bangladesh began weighing an offer from an unnamed Chinese company to build a smart city on the Bay of Bengal with infrastructure enhanced by artificial intelligence. Construction of the high-tech metropolis has yet to begin, but if it proceeds it may include face recognition software that can use public cameras to identify missing

Meta has cut ties with a subcontractor that provided moderators for its African markets, just weeks before the tech giant is due to appear in a Kenyan court to face allegations of human trafficking and union busting. The company has ended a contract with outsourcing company Sama, which former employee Daniel Motaung accused last year of imposing

A Plante Moran analysis shared with WIRED shows Tesla’s share of the North American EV market declining from 70 percent in 2022 to just 31 percent by 2025, as total EV production grows from 777,000 to 2.87 million units. In Europe, Tesla’s decline is already underway. Schmidt says data from the first 11 months of

How long will the naked eye be able to spot the difference between images made by generative artificial intelligence and art created by humans? Ari Melenciano, an artist who works at Google’s Creative Lab, squints at her computer screen during our Zoom chat and scans artwork created with generative AI. “I mean, I can barely tell

One of the top concerns when it comes to the harms of social media and political polarization in the United States is the fear of echo chambers or people operating in media bubbles. If people are only hearing opinions they already agree with or seeing stories that align with their worldview, they may become more

It’s 10 pm and, like a vampire stirring in its coffin to greet the nocturne, my garbage bin comes to life. A semicircle of yellow lights on the lid starts flashing, an illuminated lock icon appears, and inside the bone-white, 27-inch container I can hear a steady churn of metal paddles slowly tumbling the eggshells,

But in a previously unreported response, Google’s US public policy head Mark Isakowitz wrote back a month later saying that newly relaxed sanctions still had not authorized those activities, “unfortunately.” Isakowitz instead urged Congress to work with the Biden administration “to identify additional means of ensuring Iranians’ access to vital communication and information tools.” Google’s

Last week, Reed Wilen, an elite gamer who uses the handle “Chicago” in Rocket League, a popular vehicular-soccer game, encountered a strange and troubling new opponent. The player seemed like a novice at first, moving their rocket-powered vehicle in a hesitant and awkward way. Then they caught and balanced the ball perfectly on the hood of

Amazon was hit with an unusually forceful safety citation by federal investigators in the US today. The findings appear to back up what some workers at the company have long alleged: that the online retail giant’s warehouse and fulfillment facilities are designed for speed over safety, causing lower-back injuries and other musculoskeletal disorders at high rates.

At the end of September, Rigetti reported $212 million in assets and a net loss of $49 million for the year to date. The SPAC deal was originally expected to net $458 million, pushing Rigetti’s valuation to about $1.5 billion, but after some investors pulled out it raised not much over half the expected amount. Quantum computing is

Britishvolt was meant to be the UK’s answer to Tesla. By 2024, it was supposed to be producing hundreds of thousands of lithium-ion batteries a year for the British automotive sector, and driving an industrial renaissance for the economically deprived northeast of the country.  Since its launch in 2019, the company had amassed nearly $2.5

Tens of thousands of people have been laid off at Amazon, Meta, Salesforce and other once-voracious tech employers in recent months. But one group of workers has been particularly shortchanged: US immigrants holding H-1B visas for workers with specialist skills. Those much-sought visas are awarded to immigrants sponsored by an employer to come to the

1 When Jay LeRette preaches the Word, he transforms from a mild Midwesterner—one who loves country gospel, rides a horse he has trained to roll over and grin, and has, himself, a whinnying laugh—into a human incandescence. Sixty-four, 5′ 5″, and dressed like a cowboy, he increases in stature; his voice crescendos to cracking. “The

Two years ago, Mary Louis submitted an application to rent an apartment at Granada Highlands in Malden, Massachusetts. She liked that the unit had two full bathrooms and that there was a pool on the premises. But the landlord denied her the apartment, allegedly due to a score assigned to her by a tenant-screening algorithm

Graham led research in November and early December that found Covid misinformation surged on Twitter after the platform lifted its ban on misleading health information. Since January 1, new analysis by Graham shows there have been more than 326,000 tweets and retweets containing “died suddenly” or “#DiedSuddenly,” with a spike of 5,000 in one hour on

“I am dubious that three unelected technocrats have somehow hit on the right way to think about noncompetes and that all the preceding legal minds to examine this issue have gotten it wrong,” she writes, as an unelected technocrat herself. The US Chamber of Commerce calls the proposed change an “unlawful action” and claims that

Arktis’ detectors can also be installed in doorways or used in luggage-handling locations. They work entirely passively but are different from Geiger counters, the best-known radiation detectors. Special material inside Arktis’ devices reacts when it is exposed to the subatomic particles emitted by radioactive substances. This reaction produces a tiny amount of light—scintillation—which is measured by

When ChatGPT—the ingenious, garrulous, and occasionally unhinged chatbot from OpenAI—was asked this week how much the company behind it is worth, its responses included: “It is likely that its worth is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more.” Microsoft, which is rumored to be weighing a $10 billion investment in OpenAI on top of an

In fact, the federal government has required that states applying for public charger money submit plans detailing how they’ll support a new workforce to service them. “One of the biggest things we’re really excited about is the continued emphasis on reliability,” says Walter Thorn, head of product at ChargerHelp, which provides operations and maintenance services