Lex Fridman has done many long interviews on his popular podcast. Even so, the episode with the legendary programmer John Carmack has an unhinged director’s-cut feel to it. Over five hours, Carmack dishes on everything from vector operations to Doom. But it’s something Fridman says, offhand, that really justifies the extended run time: “I think
Paid autonomous vehicle service is coming to Los Angeles, thanks to a decision by California regulators today to allow Alphabet subsidiary Waymo to operate in the city. Under the new ruling, Waymo is also permitted to launch service in a large section of the San Francisco Peninsula. The decision by the California Public Utilities Commission
Elon Musk started the week by posting testily on X about his struggles to set up a new laptop running Windows. He ended it by filing a lawsuit accusing OpenAI of recklessly developing human-level AI and handing it over to Microsoft. Musk’s lawsuit is filed against OpenAI and two of its executives, CEO Sam Altman
If all that is true—and there’s no way to tell right now—Groq might well pose a threat to the dominance of Nvidia. Ross is careful when discussing this. “Let’s be clear—they’re Goliath, and we’re David,” he says. “It would be very, very foolish to say that Nvidia is worried about us.” When asked about Groq,
“Let’s remember that Elon Musk has multiple competing AI efforts, but notably [he founded] xAI, a competing AI company,” says David Shrier, professor of practice, AI and innovation at London’s Imperial College Business School. He adds that the lawsuit may be an attempt to slow down xAI’s competition. Regardless, Shrier believes Musk’s lawsuit reflects broader
Soon after Elon Musk took control of Twitter, now called X, the platform faced a massive problem: Advertisers were fleeing. But that, the company alleges, was someone else’s fault. On Thursday that argument went before a federal judge, who seemed skeptical of the company’s allegations that a nonprofit’s research tracking hate speech on X had
As generative AI systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini become more advanced, they are increasingly being put to work. Startups and tech companies are building AI agents and ecosystems on top of the systems that can complete boring chores for you: think automatically making calendar bookings and potentially buying products. But as the tools
Last year Stack Overflow became one of the first websites to announce it would charge AI giants for access to content used to train chatbots. Now the popular Q&A service for coders has signed up its first customer—Google—in what CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar says is the start of a “meaningful” new stream of revenue. The deal
Google was forced to turn off the image-generation capabilities of its latest AI model, Gemini, last week after complaints that it defaulted to depicting women and people of color when asked to create images of historical figures that were generally white and male, including vikings, popes, and German soldiers. The company publicly apologized and said
Every six months, the automotive research company J. D. Power surveys some 5,000 US electric vehicle owners about their experiences driving their battery-powered cars. The latest edition of this survey, out this week, found that EV’s perennial bugbear is still bugbearing. In fact it has gotten worse: Drivers say they are even more dissatisfied with
The US government has launched an investigation into the national security risks posed by foreign-made vehicles with internet connectivity—especially those made in China. At a briefing on Wednesday, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo even raised the specter of Beijing remotely triggering mayhem on US highways. “Imagine if there were thousands or hundreds of thousands of
Amazon has become the second company ever to have its lobbyists banned from the European Parliament, amid accusations that the company does not take the institution seriously. The ban, which means the 14 Amazon employees who had access to the European Parliament can no longer enter the building without an invitation, follows the company’s decision
All these firms seek to capitalize on what Apple recognized a decade ago: The software and connectivity now built in to new autos gave tech incumbents a jump on traditional auto-builders. But those advantages haven’t always proven out. Project Titan had plenty of other challenges. High-profile executives from tech companies, tech-inspired automakers like Tesla, and
The US Supreme Court seems torn over whether to trigger a radical transformation of the internet. The nation’s highest court heard arguments Monday over state laws in Florida and Texas that restrict how platforms like Facebook and YouTube moderate speech. If the court lets them take effect, social media feeds could look very different, with
In his spare time, Tony Eastin likes to dabble in the stock market. One day last year, he Googled a pharmaceutical company that seemed like a promising investment. One of the first search results Google served up on its news tab was listed as coming from the Clayton County Register, a newspaper in northeastern Iowa.
In September 2017, Singapore-based lawyer Pav Gill took a job at Wirecard, a high-flying German payments business worth tens of billions of euros. Not long after he started, he heard from a colleague that an executive at Wirecard Asia, the region Gill was responsible for, had allegedly been teaching staff how to trick auditors into
Reddit didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment for this story. Unwanted Offer Reddit’s investment offer to users is known as the Directed Share Program. “Because you have helped make Reddit what it is today, you now have the opportunity to become Reddit owners at the same price as institutional investors,” the company wrote
Bitcoin was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto, an enigmatic figure about whom almost nothing is known. Fifteen years ago, Satoshi brought the idea of an electronic cash system into being with the help of a small cast of oddballs. This week, some of those early collaborators—now crypto-celebrities in their own right—took to the witness box of
Two words in this statement popped out to me like a flying dinosaur in a mixed-reality headset: when possible. When I flagged this in a subsequent call, Roku reassured me that a fix for my issue will happen. In the worst-case scenario, if the problem won’t be solved in the next OS, sufferers will be
How big is your concern that these constraints will spur China to spin up competitive AI chips? China has things that are competitive. Right. This isn’t data-center scale, but the Huawei Mate 60 smartphone that came out last year got some attention for its homegrown 7-nanometer chip. Really, really good company. They’re limited by whatever
The experiments found that about 73 percent of about 500 people using that new design clicked results that kept them inside Google’s ecosystem—an increase over the 55 percent who did so when the design Google is phasing out in Europe was tested with a smaller pool of roughly 250 people. Yelp also tested a variation
Advance, the owner of Condé, owns 30 percent of Reddit with other investors, board members, and employees holding the rest. Among them, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, an early user and investor in Reddit, has 8.7 percent of the company, according to Thursday’s filing. Some of Reddit’s power users in the US could join the ranks
When veteran engineer and executive Pat Gelsinger returned to Intel as CEO in 2021, the once-great chipmaker was in a slump. After failing to adapt to the mobile era and then missing several steps in cutting-edge microprocessor manufacturing, it was now also falling behind in supplying chips to feed the tech industry’s growing hunger for
Tell ChatGPT the audience it’s writing for. OpenAI via David Nield Produce Prompts for Other AI Engines ChatGPT is a very capable prompt engineer itself. If you ask it to come up with creative and effective inputs for artificial intelligence engines such as Dall-E and Midjourney, you’ll get text you can then input into other
It started around 3:30 in the morning on the East Coast, reports flooding in about an AT&T service outage. Customers complained across Reddit and X and logged their issues on Downdetector, a site that, well, detects when services go down. The impact appears to be widespread; AT&T users from New York to Atlanta to Dallas
Bock says the shift is partly due to mass layoffs; employers are more able to flex their muscles in a tighter labor market. But there’s also a broader psychological shift. “After years of tech workers being pampered, of ‘bring your whole selves to work’ and ‘work from anywhere,’ executives are now overcompensating in the other
Gina Raimondo, the US secretary of commerce, spoke at Intel’s event today and compared the US government’s current focus on revitalizing its chip industry to the space race of the 1960s. “The fact that we are so overly dependent on a couple of countries in Asia that we need for life-saving medical equipment, cars, every
A month later, the world saw images of mass graves in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, dead limbs sticking out of the sand. Outside our building one morning, on an old brick wall that was previously empty, was a fresh message, the paint still wet: “Russians, go home.” My boyfriend went back to Russia so
“An artist friend of mine got me an AI-generated painting as a gift. I can see she tried to personalize the concept, and it’s nicely framed, but part of me still feels a little cheated. Is that fair?” —No Returns Dear No Returns, There’s something implicitly paradoxical about feeling “cheated” by a present. A gift
Earning up to $60 per hour, Jay was an early recruit, joining Remotasks the month before OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT to the world. Since then, the platform has been accelerating its search for expert data laborers. In January 2024, WIRED found, the company published job ads seeking speakers of more than 20 different European languages, as