FedEx spokesperson Adam Snyder says the company reminds contractors to closely monitor working conditions. “We encourage our team members and service providers across FedEx to take precautions in the hot weather by staying hydrated, taking frequent breaks, and recognizing the signs of heat related illnesses,” he says. UPS spokesperson Becky Biciolis-Pace says the company is
Month: July 2023
The bird is dead, but zombie Twitter is not. Since Elon Musk bought Twitter, the platform has survived rate-limiting, massive staff cuts, suspensions of journalists, hemorrhaging ad dollars, exorbitant API price hikes, and a frenzy of new competitors. This week it survived becoming not Twitter, as the site suddenly rebranded to X. During its first
While Vasquez and Uber may find some closure in the plea deal, self-driving expert Bryant Walker Smith says the NTSB should revisit the Slack issue to find the truth. “I don’t want the story of the first automated vehicle fatality to be a lie. Or be a matter of disputes,” says Walker Smith, a law
Last weekend, I turned to Google Search for help figuring out how many stamps I needed to put on an 8-ounce piece of mail. (Naturally, I was sending a copy of the latest issue of WIRED!). It’s the exact sort of question that I hoped Google Search’s new generative AI feature, which I’ve been testing
“We don’t take ID or anything. So long as you look over 18, we scan your iris,” said Ana Howard, the contractor hired to lead onboarding in London. But everyone that registers is “one hundred percent informed and knows what they’re signing up for,” she added. Everyone who got scanned got a free T-shirt. On
For three months in late 2020, nearly 7,200 US adults on Facebook and 8,800 on Instagram received a radically different experience than the services’ billions of other users. When they scrolled through their newsfeeds, Facebook and Instagram showed them the newest posts as determined by the clock, not those judged most relevant by an algorithm.
In the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, Meta set out to conduct a series of ambitious studies on the effects its platforms—Facebook and Instagram—have on the political beliefs of US-based users. Independent researchers from several universities were given unprecedented access to Meta’s data, and the power to change the feeds of tens of thousands
The United States military is not the unrivaled force it once was, but Alexandr Wang, CEO of startup Scale AI, told a congressional committee last week that it could establish a new advantage by harnessing artificial intelligence. “We have the largest fleet of military hardware in the world,” Wang told the House Armed Services Subcommittee
In May, a fake image of an explosion near the Pentagon went viral on Twitter. It was soon followed by images seeming to show explosions near the White House as well. Experts in mis- and disinformation quickly flagged that the images seemed to have been generated by artificial intelligence, but not before the stock market
Meta’s license for Llama 2 also requires companies with more than 700 million monthly active users to establish a separate license agreement with Meta. It is not clear why, but the clause creates a barrier to other tech giants building on the system. The model also comes with an acceptable use policy, which prohibits generating
Tech is responsible for more than half of all exports, and the country collects 50 billion shekels ($13.5 billion) a year from the sector. Wiz is among those distancing itself from its home country. Israeli companies have long operated with one foot in Israel and the other in bigger markets, like the US, where they can
A fleet of robot ships bobs gently in the warm waters of the Persian Gulf, somewhere between Bahrain and Qatar, maybe 100 miles off the coast of Iran. I am on the nearby deck of a US Coast Guard speedboat, squinting off what I understand is the port side. On this morning in early December
“The defense forces and the startup communities are different worlds,” Nataliia Kushnerska, Brave1’s project lead, says. “In this project, everybody receives what they need. The general staff and Ministry of Defense receive really great solutions they can actually use. The Ministry of the Economy receives a growing ecosystem, an industry that you could use to
The last time Elon Musk flipped the bird at his users, it was to switch Twitter’s logo to a grinning Shiba Inu—a hilarious inside joke that pumped the value of the dogecoin cryptocurrency, in which Musk was an investor, by 30 percent. A class action is still pending. Over the weekend, the former richest man
Wrote Doughty, “Defendants ‘significantly encouraged’ the social-media companies to such extent that the decisions (of the companies) should be deemed to be the decisions of the government.” Doughty’s ban, which is now on hold as the White House appeals, attempts to set the bounds of acceptable conduct for government IRUs. It provides an exemption for
Instead, Ukraine wants to use the data that’s being gathered for its own defense sector. “After the war has finished, Ukraine companies will go to the market and offer solutions that probably nobody else has,” Bornyakov says. Over the past few months, Ukraine has been talking up its ambitions to leverage its battlefield innovations to
It’s been quite a year for ChatGPT, with the large language model (LLM) now taking exams, churning out content, searching the web, writing code, and more. The AI chatbot can produce its own stories, though whether they’re any good is another matter. If you’re in any way involved in the business of writing, then tools
The war, unsurprisingly, has made conservation a lot harder. Oleg Dyakov, a rewilding officer from Rewilding Ukraine’s head office in Odesa and one of the organization’s cofounders, recounts the hazards his teams have faced with a casual frustration. Marine mines drifting in from the Black Sea stalled the release of fallow deer, and monitoring activities
As he sat down across from me, my patient had a rueful expression on his face. “I had a date,” he announced. “It didn’t go well.” That wasn’t unusual for this patient. For years, he’d shared tales of romantic hopes dashed. But before I could ask him what went wrong, he continued, “So I asked
When I contemplate the return of the crypto wars—attempts to block citizens’ use of encryption by officials who want unfettered spying powers—I look back with dread on the late Middle Ages. I wasn’t alive back then, but one feature of those times lingers in my consciousness. Starting around 1337 and all the way until 1453,
Last month, a court in Kenya issued a landmark ruling against Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram. The US tech giant was, the court ruled, the “true employer” of the hundreds of people employed in Nairobi as moderators on its platforms, trawling through posts and images to filter out violence, hate speech and other shocking
The White House has struck a deal with major AI developers—including Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI—that commits them to take action to prevent harmful AI models from being released into the world. Under the agreement, which the White House calls a “voluntary commitment,” the companies pledge to carry out internal tests and permit external
Hanson and I talked about the idea of adding real intelligence to these evocative machines. Ben Goertzel, a well-known AI researcher and the CEO of SingularityNET, leads an effort to apply advances in machine learning to the software inside Hanson’s robots that allows them to respond to human speech. The AI behind Sophia can sometimes
Instead that slogan says less about what the company does and more about why it’s doing it. Helsing’s job adverts brim with idealism, calling for people with a conviction that “democratic values are worth protecting.” Helsing’s three founders speak about Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 as a wake-up call that the whole of Europe
The election sees Sumar and center-left PSOE facing off against the Popular Party, the traditional party of the right wing in Spain, and Vox, a new far-right party whose fiery anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant rhetoric—including a promise to expel all undocumented migrants—has seen its support soar in recent years. That’s a threat that many riders will fear,
The volume required can be huge. In the US, chip fabs use far less water than the agriculture and power generation industries, and semiconductors haven’t spurred political tensions over water resources at national scale, says Chris Miller, a history professor at Tufts University in Massachusetts and author of the recent book Chip War. Still, squeezes
Typically, this money would be funneled primarily to so-called prime manufacturers, who are attractive to the Defense Logistics Agency, the Defense Department’s procurement arm, because they have existing relationships with suppliers and can provide a one-stop shop for order fulfillment, says Bryan Rudgers, director of government and business development at Jamaica Bearings Group, a New
When prebiotic soda brand Olipop joined Threads, it didn’t post about the flavors it comes in or its claimed nutritional benefits. “Can u guys pls engage with this thread so my boss tells me he’s proud of me,” Olipop wrote in an early post. “I’m proud of you Oli,” TGI Fridays posted back. “Thanks dad
While the startup cofounders considered hoppy-tasting but hop-free beer potentially beneficial to brewers and the environment—as Denby said in a New York Times story after the paper was published—some hop farmers felt threatened. They feared engineered yeast could end a farming tradition and hollow out the soul of brewing, a dance of microorganisms, farmers, brewers,
Days after Meta launched its new app, Threads, this month, a software engineer at the company named Ben Savage introduced himself to a developer group at the World Wide Web Consortium, a web standards body. The group, which maintains a protocol for connecting social networks called ActivityPub, had been preparing for this moment for months,