Month: September 2024

This story originally appeared in Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In 2023, the fast-fashion giant Shein was everywhere. Crisscrossing the globe, airplanes ferried small packages of its ultra-cheap clothing from thousands of suppliers to tens of millions of customer mailboxes in 150 countries. Influencers’ “#sheinhaul” videos advertised the company’s trendy styles

According to market-fixated tech pundits and professional skeptics, the artificial intelligence bubble has popped, and winter’s back. Fei-Fei Li isn’t buying that. In fact, Li—who earned the sobriquet the “godmother of AI”—is betting on the contrary. She’s on a part-time leave from Stanford University to cofound a company called World Labs. While current generative AI

OpenAI made the last big breakthrough in artificial intelligence by increasing the size of its models to dizzying proportions, when it introduced GPT-4 last year. The company today announced a new advance that signals a shift in approach—a model that can “reason” logically through many difficult problems and is significantly smarter than existing AI without

A federal judge has cleared the way for betting on election results in the US for the first time in the modern era, overturning a prohibition imposed on gambling companies by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, a financial regulator. In November, the CFTC was sued in the District of Columbia by New York-based Kalshi, which

“Amazon prides itself on being an ambitious and innovative company, but it’s making quite a problem for itself with its air freight cargo growth,” Archer says. “If Amazon is serious about climate progress, that’s a really easy place to start: stop flying so much.” Amazon is no stranger to climate criticism. Its overall emissions have

The vast majority of these coins never get off the ground. Others attract early attention, then tank after the creator sells off their holdings without warning. A minority of the coins hold value over a longer period. Meme coins serve no strict purpose other than to act as a vehicle for financial speculation. Fluctuations in

What do you mean by that? Because your insurance company, whoever it may be, uses a PBM, a pharmacy benefit manager. The PBM has negotiated with a pharmacy what the reimbursement rate is. Except they basically said, “Here’s what we’re going to reimburse you.” [His Apple Watch buzzes.] You can go ahead and check that.

It always seemed difficult for the newspaper where I used to work, The Garden Island on the rural Hawaiian island of Kauai, to hire reporters. If someone left, it could take months before we hired a replacement, if we ever did. So, last Thursday, I was happy to see that the paper appeared to have

A new “empathic voice interface” launched today by Hume AI, a New York–based startup, makes it possible to add a range of emotionally expressive voices, plus an emotionally attuned ear, to large language models from Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral, and OpenAI—portending an era when AI helpers may more routinely get all gushy on us. “We

The previous October, Sawicky organized a weeklong protest alongside environmental activist group Greenpeace and brandished various anti-bitcoin signs at anyone who entered the Riot facility. Only a few other people turned out in support, leaving Sawicky dejected: “I could not have been more disappointed and disgusted by my fellow humans,” she said, when we first

NetworkOcean isn’t alone in its ambitions. Founded in 2021, US-based Subsea Cloud operates about 13,500 computer servers in unspecified underwater locations in Southeast Asia to serve clients in AI and gaming, says the startup’s founder and CEO, Maxie Reynolds. “It’s a nascent market,” she says. “But it’s currently the only one that can handle the

Apple has been ordered to pay €13 billion ($14.4bn) of unpaid taxes to the Irish state, in a court ruling that ended a decade-long fight between Europe and the big tech company. In a judgment handed down on Tuesday, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) agreed with a European Commission ruling in 2016, which found

When Elon Musk shared an image showing Kamala Harris dressed as a “communist dictator” on X last week, it was quite obviously a fake, seeing as Harris is neither a communist nor, to the best of our knowledge, a Soviet cosplayer. And, as many observers noted, the woman in the photo, presumably generated by X’s

Some of these features won’t be available until next year, but Apple’s push to add artificial intelligence to the iPhone is still likely to drive a boom in sales, optimistic analysts say. Whereas in years past the iPhone’s hardware upgrades were the big draw, now the lure is how Apple’s hardware, like its custom chips,

Google argues that it faces fierce competition from Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and others. It further contends that customers benefited from each of the acquisitions, contracts, and features that the government is challenging. “Google has designed a set of products that work efficiently with each other and attract a valuable customer base,” the company’s attorneys wrote

But X also makes it clear the onus is on the user to judge the AI’s accuracy. “This is an early version of Grok,” xAI says on its help page. Therefore chatbot may “confidently provide factually incorrect information, missummarize, or miss some context,” xAI warns. “We encourage you to independently verify any information you receive,”

Wells says Polestar, which was contacted for this piece, hasn’t distanced itself sufficiently from Volvo. “There’s not enough space between the design language of the two brands,” he offered. Indeed, Volvo’s new EV flagship, the EX90, is basically a family-friendly version of the Polestar 3, as it has nearly the same underpinnings. To set itself

My first story for WIRED—yep, 31 years ago—looked at a group of “crypto rebels” who were trying to pry strong encryption technology from the government-classified world and send it into the mainstream. Naturally I attempted to speak to someone at the National Security Agency for comment and ideally get a window into its thinking. Unsurprisingly,

Less than two years after taking over Twitter, now X, Elon Musk has managed to lose the company access to its third largest market and reportedly more than 40 million users. And despite his bravado online, he seems to have backed himself into a corner. Brazil’s decision to block X is the culmination of an

The social network X has been largely inaccessible in Brazil since Saturday, after the country’s Supreme Court ordered all mobile and internet service providers to block the platform. The court order followed a months-long dispute between Judge Alexandre de Moraes and X CEO Elon Musk over the company’s misinformation, hate speech, and moderation policies. With

It’s been one year since New York enacted a law that barred most whole-apartment rentals for short-term stays on platforms like Airbnb. Since then, the number of stays under 30 days has plummeted in the city, but Airbnb is raising questions about whether the lawmakers’ stated goals—lowering rents and opening up apartments for full-time residents—have

The Internet Archive has lost a major legal battle—in a decision that could have a significant impact on the future of internet history. Today, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled against the long-running digital archive, upholding an earlier ruling in Hachette v. Internet Archive that found that one of the Internet

In 2012, Amazon quietly acquired a robotics startup called Kiva Systems, a move that dramatically improved the efficiency of its ecommerce operations and kickstarted a wider revolution in warehouse automation. Last week, the ecommerce giant announced another deal that could prove similarly profound, agreeing to hire the founders of Covariant, a startup that has been

Impersonators have descended on a soon-to-be-announced crypto venture tied to presidential candidate Donald Trump and his family, capitalizing on gaps in information about the project to promote inauthentic crypto tokens. Led by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., the sons of the former president, the Trumps have embarked on a campaign to promote an upcoming

The first wave of major generative AI tools largely were trained on “publicly available” data—basically, anything and everything that could be scraped from the internet. Now, sources of training data are increasingly restricting access and pushing for licensing agreements. With the hunt for additional data sources intensifying, new licensing startups have emerged to keep the