Month: June 2024

Brussels has accused Microsoft of illegally abusing its dominance in the business-software market at the expense of smaller rivals, following a complaint at the height of the pandemic by US competitor Slack. The European Commission said on Tuesday it found that Microsoft was restricting competition by selling its video-conferencing software Teams together in bundles with

In late March, a smoke shop in Dyersburg, Tennessee, announced the arrival of a new product in its store: a disposable nicotine vape with an LCD display that can be connected to a smartphone via Bluetooth. Marketed under the brand name RAMA, the strawberry- and kiwi-flavored vape looks more like a cell phone from the

The music industry has officially declared war on Suno and Udio, two of the most prominent AI music generators. A group of music labels including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Group has filed lawsuits in US federal court on Monday morning alleging copyright infringement on a “massive scale.” The plaintiffs seek

Markdown became a core part of how I wrote. The simplicity and flexibility meant I would live the dream of write once, run anywhere. It did lead to some ambiguity, though. Gruber would probably say this is by design. His emphasis throughout the Markdown documentation is on the syntax of Markdown, not—say—the resulting HTML. His

Apple has become the first big tech company to be charged with breaking the European Union’s new digital markets rules, three days after the tech giant said it would not release artificial intelligence in the bloc due to regulation. On Monday, the European Commission said that Apple’s App Store was preventing developers from communicating with

In R. C. Sherriff’s novel The Hopkins Manuscript, readers are transported to a world 800 years after a cataclysmic event ended Western civilization. In pursuit of clues about a blank spot in their planet’s history, scientists belonging to a new world order discover diary entries in a swamp-infested wasteland formerly known as England. For the

The Eiffel Tower is 330 meters tall, and the nearest pizza parlor is 1.3 miles from my house. These facts were astoundingly easy to ascertain. All I had to do was type some words into Google, and I didn’t even have to spell them right. For the vast majority of human history, this is not

When OpenAI announced GPT-4, its latest large language model, last March, it sent shockwaves through the tech world. It was clearly more capable than anything seen before at chatting, coding, and solving all sorts of thorny problems—including school homework. Anthropic, a rival to OpenAI, announced today that it has made its own AI advance that

That concentration of power is uncomfortable for European governments. It makes European companies downstream customers of the future, importing the latest services and technology in exchange for money and data sent westward across the Atlantic. And these concerns have taken on a new urgency—partly because some in Brussels perceive a growing gap in values and

When users first found out about Adobe’s new terms of service (which were quietly updated in February), there was an uproar. Adobe told users it could access their content “through both automated and manual methods” and use “techniques such as machine learning in order to improve [Adobe’s] Services and Software.” Many understood the update as

More than 1,100 self-identified STEM students and young workers from more than 120 universities have signed a pledge to not take jobs or internships at Google or Amazon until the companies end their involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract providing cloud computing services and infrastructure to the Israeli government. The pledgers included undergraduate

Short-term rentals can function as a quick release valve for a city expecting an influx of visitors, increasing capacity for a short time nearly instantly. In fact, despite the usual hype around the Olympic Games, there are still many places to stay in Paris this summer. A search on Airbnb for a two-person stay during

Before Orkut launched in January 2004, Büyükkökten warned the team that the platform he’d built it on could handle only 200,000 users. It wouldn’t be able to scale. “They said, let’s just launch and see what happens,” he explains. The rest is online history. “It grew so fast. Before we knew it, we had millions

Neither database mandates nor generally contains up-to-date versions of the records that UBI Charitable and OpenResearch had said they provided in the past. The original YC Research conflict-of-interest policy that Das did share calls for company insiders to be upfront about transactions in which their impartiality could be questioned and for the board to decide

Google, too, has funneled money into its Anthropic AI developments, and its CEO, Sindar Pichai, warned of continuous cuts throughout 2024, which began in January. That comes despite Google reporting strong growth. “We’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” says Bailey Tomson, a Google spokesperson. In 2023 and 2024,

Clean energy firms are reaping the rewards of this emerging shift. Aira, a Swedish firm that carries out heat pump installations, recently announced that it had struck a deal valued at €200 million ($214 million) for loan commitments from the bank BNP Paribas. This will allow Aira customers in Germany to pay for their heat

“What we have here is something incredibly simple,” said Tianwei Wu, the study’s lead author. “We can reprogram it, changing the laser patterns on the fly.” The researchers used the system to design a neural network that successfully discriminated vowel sounds. Most photonic systems need to be trained before they’re built, since training necessarily involves

While companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others had been upfront about their efforts in AI, for years Apple had been silent. Now, finally, its executives were talking. I got an advance look one day. Eager to shed the the impression that the most innovative of the tech giants was a laggard in this vital

It’s 10 pm on a Wednesday night and I’m standing in Blessed, a south London takeaway joint, half-listening to a fellow customer talking earnestly about Jesus. I’m nodding along, trying to pay attention as reggae reverberates around the small yellow shop front. But really, all I can really think about is: What’s in the bag?

Disclosure of ads has been an issue on Copilot as well. Though Microsoft says it labels all ads, Marcus Pratt, senior vice president for insights and technology at the ad-buying agency Mediasmith, says he’s encountered at least two searches in which links with indications that they are sponsored arguably haven’t been adequately disclosed. Last week,

Under CEO Elon Musk, Tesla has been credited with revolutionizing the auto industry, jump-starting the electric revolution, and racking up billions in profit in the process. Now Musk is set for a record payday worth around $50 billion, after the electric car company’s shareholders approved a compensation plan that had been previously blocked by a

Apple’s otherworldly, flying-saucer headquarters in Cupertino, California, felt like a suitable venue this week for a bold and futuristic revamp of the company’s most prized products. With iPhone sales slowing and rivals gaining ground thanks to the rise of tools like ChatGPT, Apple offered its own generative artificial intelligence vision at its Worldwide Developer Conference

Danish media outlets have demanded that the nonprofit web archive Common Crawl remove copies of their articles from past data sets and stop crawling their websites immediately. This request was issued amid growing outrage over how artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI are using copyrighted materials. Common Crawl plans to comply with the request, first issued

Many burned-out workers have likely dreamed of hiring a career coach or résumé writer. Now, LinkedIn is introducing chats with generative AI career experts based on real people. Other new AI tools within the platform will help people write résumés and cover letters or evaluate their qualifications for jobs posted. LinkedIn has ramped up its

The latest UK class action, brought by the retailers, seeks financial compensation for the company’s alleged historical practices. “The most obvious and principal effect is a loss of revenue and profits. Amazon is taking sales away from merchants, having been able to use competitor data to bring to market its own products,” claims Boris Bronfentrinker,

The pay package is just one in a series of measures that shareholders have already been asked to vote on by proxy, ahead of Thursday’s meeting. Others include whether Tesla’s incorporation should move from Delaware to Texas, whether the company should soften its hardline stance on labor negotiations, and whether the company should preemptively impose

In the latest battle between AI and the media, major Danish newspapers and TV stations are threatening to sue OpenAI unless the company compensates the country’s press for allegedly using their content to train its models. “We want remuneration for our work [which] they have used to train their model,” says Karen Rønde, CEO of

Giannandrea said that Apple had focused on reducing hallucinations in its models partly by using curated data. “We have put considerable energy into training these models very carefully,” he said. “So we’re pretty confident that we’re applying this technology responsibly.” That training wheels approach to AI applies across Apple’s offering. If it works as promised,

Apple is finally getting into the generative artificial intelligence game—with a little help from an unlikely partner in OpenAI. Apple CEO Tim Cook announced Apple’s long-awaited AI reboot at the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference in Cupertino, California, today. What the company is calling Apple Intelligence, available in beta this fall, includes a handful of features

Over 170 images and personal details of children from Brazil have been scraped by an open-source dataset without their knowledge or consent, and used to train AI, claims a new report from Human Rights Watch released Monday. The images have been scraped from content posted as recently as 2023 and as far back as the