Business

After major investor Volvo decided to decrease its stake and cut funding for Polestar early this year, the EV company went in search of $1.3 billion of new funding. It raised a $950 million lifeline three-year loan from a banking syndicate led by BNP Paribas, and told investors it has plans to continue raising the

A month after Hamas militants from Gaza attacked an Israeli music festival last October, the Hebrew rap duo Ness & Stilla premiered “HarbuDarbu” on YouTube. The military hype song celebrates Israeli forces waging war in Gaza and has drawn over 25 million views; its critics have termed the song a violent and hateful anti-Palestinian “genocide

SpaceX has adopted similar tactics in its battles against federal regulators. After the National Labor Relations Board in January accused the company of illegally firing eight workers for criticizing Musk in an internal letter, SpaceX filed a lawsuit alleging that the agency’s structure is unconstitutional. The overturning of Chevron in particular means “we’re clearly going

Cultivated meat firm Upside Foods has cut its workforce as the industry continues to struggle with bans from legislators and a significant downturn in venture capital funding. In an email sent to employees, Upside CEO Uma Valeti wrote that 26 people would leave the company and that executive and leadership teams would be restructured to

“People make fun of me about the fridges,” said Tassos Stassopoulos. “I am fridge-obsessed.” As the founder and managing partner of Trinetra, a London-based investment firm, Stassopoulos has pioneered an unusual strategy: peeking inside refrigerators in homes around the world in order to predict the future—and monetize those insights. By the time of his refrigeration

For the past eight months, Europeans uncomfortable with the way Meta tracks their data for personalized advertising have had another option: They can pay the tech giant up to €12.99 ($14) per month for their privacy instead. Launched in November 2023, Meta introduced its “pay or consent” subscription model as fines, legal cases, and regulatory

In 2016, Google engineer Illia Polosukhin had lunch with a colleague, Jacob Uszkoreit. Polosukhin had been frustrated by a lack of progress in his project, using AI to provide useful answers to questions posed by users, and Uszkoreit suggested he try a technique he had been brainstorming that he called self-attention. Thus began an 8-person

She refused to give up her password, and was, according to the prosecutors’ description, so demoralized by the earlier hacking theft of the majority of her funds that she told the men to simply shoot her. Instead, they stole her engagement ring, two iPhones, a laptop, the charger for the neurostimulator used by the other

In late April a video ad for a new AI company went viral on X. A person stands before a billboard in San Francisco, smartphone extended, calls the phone number on display, and has a short call with an incredibly human-sounding bot. The text on the billboard reads: “Still hiring humans?” Also visible is the

“Then on the other extreme, [the left-wing New Popular Front] have been so vocal about all the taxation measures they want to bring back that it looks like we’re just going back to pre-Macron period,” Varza says. She points to France’s 2012 “les pigeons” (or “suckers”) movement, a campaign by angry internet entrepreneurs that opposed

Amazon’s cloud division has launched an investigation into Perplexity AI. At issue is whether the AI search startup is violating Amazon Web Services rules by scraping websites that attempted to prevent it from doing so, WIRED has learned. An AWS spokesperson, who talked to WIRED on the condition that they not be named, confirmed the

One of the key ingredients that made ChatGPT a ripsnorting success was an army of human trainers who gave the artificial intelligence model behind the bot guidance on what constitutes good and bad outputs. OpenAI now says that adding even more AI into the mix—to help assist human trainers—could help make AI helpers smarter and

Some Fortune 500 companies have begun testing software that can spot a deepfake of a real person in a live video call, following a spate of scams involving fraudulent job seekers who take a signing bonus and run. The detection technology comes courtesy of GetReal Labs, a new company founded by Hany Farid, a UC-Berkeley

Two activists disrupted the Amazon Web Services Summit in Washington, DC, on Wednesday to protest Project Nimbus, Amazon and Google’s $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government. The protest, which interrupted the keynote speech from Dave Levy, AWS worldwide public sector vice president, is the latest in a series of recent protests that

Hello, and welcome to WIRED Travel, WIRED’s new destination for coverage of all things transportation, aviation, vacation, and more. Of course, innovations in travel technology, from next-generation electric vehicles to fuel-sipping, climate-friendly aircraft, are all mainstays of WIRED’s coverage already. But we’re excited to pull it all together in one place and have the opportunity

The Rimac Group describes Verne, its new autonomous ride-hailing service, as its “next impossible thing.” First, founder Mate Rimac established his eponymous electric hypercar company in Croatia, a country with no history of carmaking. That went well. Porsche, Hyundai, and Softbank all took stakes. The Volkswagen Group gifted him a majority stake in Bugatti in return

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