Amazon failed to adequately alert more than 300,000 customers to serious risks—including death and electrocution—that US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) testing found with more than 400,000 products that third parties sold on its platform. The CPSC unanimously voted to hold Amazon legally responsible for third-party sellers’ defective products. Now, Amazon must make a CPSC-approved
Month: July 2024
Meanwhile, Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge, and other dating apps, has seen mixed results on its apps. Together with Bumble, which offended many with a disastrous ad campaign earlier this year (the company apologized), the big apps have lost $40 billion in market value since 2021. Bumble reported 10 percent growth in revenue year
A few weeks ago, a Google search for “deepfake nudes jennifer aniston” brought up at least seven high-up results that purported to have explicit, AI-generated images of the actress. Now they have vanished. Google product manager Emma Higham says that new adjustments to how the company ranks results, which have been rolled out this year,
Even if Trump were to restrict the reserve to bitcoin seized through law enforcement activity, his administration must also weigh up the opportunity cost associated with holding onto bitcoin. Whereas some assets such as bonds generate a consistent income stream for holders, bitcoin does not, making it expensive to hold. “The question comes down to
The death of the US government’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) is starting to result in disconnection of internet service for Americans with low incomes. On Friday, Charter Communications reported a net loss of 154,000 internet subscribers that it said was mostly driven by customers canceling after losing the federal discount. About 100,000 of those subscribers
Several of the most prominent alt-weekly newspapers in the United States are running search-engine-optimized listicles about porn performers, which appear to be AI-generated, alongside their editorial content. If you pull up the homepage for the Village Voice on your phone, for example, you’ll see reporting from freelancers—longtime columnist Michael Musto still files occasionally—as well as
Meta’a AI Studio handbook says that users can customize a chatbot by providing a detailed description, along with a name and image, and then specifying how it should respond to specific input. Llama will then draw on those instructions to improvise its responses. Meta says Instagram users can “customize their AI based on things like
On July 13, as word spread that a would-be assassin had narrowly missed killing Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a trading frenzy began. Within an hour of the shooting, the price of TRUMP, a cryptocurrency inspired by the former president, had jumped up by more than a third, from $6.34 to $8.69.
For someone just getting into this weird craft, BASIC felt positively thaumaturgic. It was spellcasting: You uttered words that brought iron and silicon to life, and made them do things. (As the software engineer Erin Spiceland puts it, coding is “telling rocks what to think.”) If you were, as I was, marinated in Tolkien and
Trump’s speech is an hour behind. A half hour into the wait, restless attendees start chanting “Trump.” The woman sitting in front of me murmurs her own chant: “Bitcoin, bitcoin—that’s what they should be chanting.” She must have gotten the memo: It’s not a Trump rally; it’s a bitcoin rally. When Trump finally takes the
Former president Donald Trump outlined a plan to turbocharge crypto growth and make the US a crypto mining powerhouse in his keynote address to the 2024 Nashville Bitcoin Conference on Saturday. Trump announced that if elected, he would create a strategic bitcoin reserve in the US. “It will be the policy of my administration to
Many of yesterday’s talks were littered with the acronyms you’d expect from this assemblage of high-minded panelists: YC, FTC, AI, LLMs. But threaded throughout the conversations—foundational to them, you might say—was boosterism for open source AI. It was a stark left turn (or return, if you’re a Linux head) from the app-obsessed 2010s, when developers
Steve Jobs is 28 years old, and seems a little nervous as he starts his speech to a group of designers gathered under a large tent in Aspen, Colorado. He fiddles with his bow tie and soon removes his suit jacket, dropping it to the floor when he finds no other place to set it
Angry T-Mobile customers have filed a class action lawsuit over the carrier’s decision to raise prices on plans that were advertised as having a lifetime price guarantee. “Based upon T-Mobile’s representations that the rates offered with respect to certain plans were guaranteed to last for life or as long as the customer wanted to remain
After months of speculation about its search ambitions, OpenAI has revealed SearchGPT, a “prototype” search engine that could eventually help the company tear off a slice of Google’s lucrative business. OpenAI said that the new tool would help users find what they are looking for more quickly and easily by using generative AI to gather
The California Supreme Court on Thursday ruled unanimously that drivers for app-based companies including Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash will remain independent contractors, as opposed to employees. The decision, upholding a state ballot measure called Proposition 22, was considered a major victory for the gig-economy companies. The question of whether those who drive for the companies
New Jersey itself is a home to many large pharmaceutical companies—and if these companies use AI to design new drugs, nearby data centers are vital, Sullivan says. “If you’re three people at a desk trying to develop the next Google, the next Tesla—in the AI space or in any space—this computing power is scarce. And
Several years before ChatGPT began jibber-jabbering away, Google developed a very different kind of artificial intelligence program called AlphaGo that learned to play the board game Go with superhuman skill through tireless practice. Researchers at the company have now published research that combines the abilities of a large language model (the AI behind today’s chatbots)
This is a new issue for the automotive industry. “One of the beautiful things about automotive has been that it tends to move much more slowly than consumer electronics,” says Phil Amsrud, an associate director of automotive at the market research firm S&P Global Mobility. That gives auto manufacturers and suppliers plenty of time to
Just before 1:00 am local time on Friday, a system administrator for a West Coast company that handles funeral and mortuary services woke up suddenly and noticed his computer screen was aglow. When he checked his company phone, it was exploding with messages about what his colleagues were calling a network issue. Their entire infrastructure
On January 29, in testimony before the Georgia Senate Judiciary Committee, Hunt-Blackwell urged lawmakers to scrap the bill’s criminal penalties and to add carve-outs for news media organizations wishing to republish deepfakes as part of their reporting. Georgia’s legislative session ended before the bill could proceed. Federal deepfake legislation is also set to encounter resistance.
Most tech moguls hope to sell artificial intelligence to the masses. But Mark Zuckerberg is giving away what Meta considers to be one of the world’s best AI models for free. Meta released the biggest, most capable version of a large language model called Llama on Monday, free of charge. Meta has not disclosed the
Losing traction while driving at high speed is generally very bad news. Scientists from the Toyota Research Institute and Stanford University have developed a pair of self-driving cars that use artificial intelligence to do it in a controlled fashion—a trick better known as “drifting”—to push the limits of autonomous driving. The two autonomous vehicles performed
The people of San Francisco haven’t always been kind to Waymo’s growing fleet of driverless taxis. The autonomous vehicles, which provide tens of thousands of rides each week, have been torched, stomped on, and verbally berated in recent months. Now Waymo is striking back—in the courts. This month, the Silicon Valley company filed a pair
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s decade-in-the-making effort to understand how handing out free money affects recipients and the broader economy delivered its first big results Monday. OpenResearch found that when it gave some of the poorest Americans $1,000 a month for three years with no strings attached, they put much of the money toward basic needs
On Friday, when a CrowdStrike update caused millions of Microsoft systems to crash around the world, many businesses were faced with a choice: Go cash-only, or close until systems came back online. This quickly caused chaos in Australia, whose government has explicitly encouraged businesses to go cashless. Pictures posted on social media showed card-only self-checkout
Andreessen talks about the proposal as if it were Putin himself invading Atherton, California, the elite zip code where he resided until recently. If this tax is imposed, he says, investors will exit the market and innovations won’t be funded. “Number one, you kill startups and venture capital. So congratulations, you kill the technology industry,
With high hopes of finding some hidden gems in our home cities and $100 (£77) each burning a hole in our pockets, we—Natasha Bernal in London and Amanda Hoover in New York—asked AI to plan out the perfect day. We decided to use Littlefoot, an AI-powered local discovery chatbot that can generate experiences in 161
The outages could result in “millions” being lost by organizations impacted who have had to halt their operations or stop business, says Lukasz Olejnik, an independent cybersecurity consultant, who says the CrowdStrike update appears to be linked to its Falcon Sensor product. The Falcon system is part of CrowdStrike’s security tools and can block attacks
I am by no means a skilled coder, but thanks to a free program called SWE-agent, I was just able to debug and fix a gnarly problem involving a misnamed file within different code repositories on the software-hosting site GitHub. I pointed SWE-agent at an issue on GitHub and watched as it went through the