The president’s office said in a statement that Bangladesh’s parliament was disbanded on Tuesday. This came one day after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina quit and left the country because of violent protests that called for her removal. It was made public hours after leaders of striking students set a deadline to dissolve parliament and said a “strict program” would begin if their deadline wasn’t met. Monday, Army Chief General Waker-Uz-Zaman said that Hasina had quit after weeks of deadly protests and that the military would set up a temporary government. Hasina, who is 76 years old, had been in charge…
Author: David
A filing with the SEC shows that Warren Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, cut its position in Apple by about half, to $84.2 billion. Even though the company still has a lot of Apple stock, Buffett cut his holdings in it by 13% earlier this year, indicating that he wasn’t against selling “a little Apple” for tax reasons. The Financial Times calculated that Berkshire Hathaway made a lot of money on the sale. Before starting to buy Apple stock in 2016, Buffett had mostly avoided tech investments. This could mean that Buffett no longer believes in Apple, or he could just…
Elon Musk has been talking about Dojo for years. It is the AI machine that will be the core of Tesla’s AI plans. It’s so important to Musk that he just recently said that the AI team at the company will “double down” on Dojo as Tesla gets ready to show off its robotaxi in October. But what does Dojo really mean? Why is it so important to Tesla’s long-term plan? In short, Dojo is Tesla’s own machine that it uses to train its “Full Self-Driving” neural networks. Tesla wants to make Dojo even better so that it can fully…
Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina quit and left the country on Monday, according to news sources. More than 300 people were killed in some of the worst violence the country has seen since it was founded more than 50 years ago. A source told AFP, “She and her sister have left Ganabhaban, which is the official home of the Prime Minister, for a safer place.” It was her wish to record a speech. “But she couldn’t find a chance to do that,” the person said. Waker-Uz-Zaman, the army chief of Bangladesh, told the people of the country that a political…
The Turkish government didn’t say why the ban was in place or how long it would last. However, reports say the ban was a reaction to the Meta-owned platform taking down posts about the death of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. The Information and Communication Technologies Authority of Turkey said Friday morning that Instagram was blocked for 85 million people in the country. A post on the authority’s website said, “Instagram.com has been blocked by a decision on the date of 02/08/2024.” This was reported by local media. Turkish news outlets say that more than 50 million people in the country…
On Meta’s Q2 2024 earnings call the day before, CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about how his newest social media experiment, Threads, had reached “almost” 200 million people. The platform has now reached that number. In a post on Threads, Instagram’s CEO Adam Mosseri revealed that the app’s 200 million active users mark. Meta got to that weight in just 13 months. Mosseri wrote, “I’m happy to say that we passed the 200M mark on @threads.” “I hope that Threads can give people ideas that bring them together and help this wonderful community grow.” Threads has grown a lot. The text-based…
Microsoft has a complicated past with OpenAI. As part of a long-term partnership, Microsoft is said to have invested $13 billion in the company that makes ChatGPT. As part of the deal, Microsoft is the only cloud provider for OpenAI and uses its models in both business and consumer goods. When the tech giant filed with the SEC on Tuesday, it was the first time it called the company a “competitor.” Along with Anthropic, Amazon, and Meta, OpenAI joined a long list of AI rivals in Microsoft’s annual 10K. Thanks to OpenAI’s new SearchGPT feature, which was announced last week,…
In a memo sent to workers on Thursday, Intel said it would be letting go of more than 15% of its staff, or 15,000 people. After a bad earnings report and forecasts for the second quarter, the huge hiring is part of a big plan to cut spending by $10 billion by 2025. “Our sales have not grown as we had hoped, and we have not yet fully benefited from strong trends like AI,” CEO Pat Gelsinger wrote in a memo to workers. “Our margins are too low and our costs are too high.” We need to take bigger steps…
We’ve all been there. You’re on a road trip and get off the highway to get gas or food. After a while, Google Maps barks at you to get back on the road. Even though the company has a lot of cash and AI chips, the app still won’t let you stop when you need to. Somewhere in my brain, I thought that Wednesday, when Google said it was adding two new features to Maps, this would finally be the day that this problem would be solved. Google did not announce either of the features that would allow you to…
Apple is finally putting out some of the Apple Intelligence tools that it talked about at its June Worldwide Developers Conference. However, the spread is only happening with developer beta versions of iOS 18.1 right now. If you don’t want to deal with buggy software in its early stages, you might want to wait for the stable version later this year or the public beta release of Apple Intelligence features. You can only use Apple Intelligence features if your language and area are set to U.S. English and you are on the developer beta. This doesn’t change where you can…
Meta’s AI goals have been boosted by the fact that 500 million people in India use WhatsApp. Susan Li, CFO of Meta, said on Wednesday that India is the biggest market for Meta AI use. This is a big deal because the product just came out in India a few months ago. Li said on Meta’s earnings call for the second quarter that since it launched, people have used Meta AI for billions of searches. “We’re seeing especially good signs on WhatsApp in terms of engagement and retention,” she said. “At the same time, India has become our biggest market…
He says, “This wasn’t the right time for me or North Carolina.” The governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, dropped out of the race to be Kamala Harris’ running mate in the next election. The New York Times said that the governor made this public by posting it on his X handle. But it wasn’t clear what the choice was until Cooper made his statement on Monday night. Cooper said in a statement, “I strongly support Vice President Harris’ campaign for president.” The thought of being nominated for this part made me feel good. I know she will win. “This…
Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the Palestinian group Hamas, was killed early Wednesday morning in Iran, the group said. This caused fears of a wider escalation in a region already shaken by Israel’s offensive in Gaza and a conflict getting worse in Lebanon. The Revolutionary Guards of Iran confirmed Haniyeh’s death and said they were looking into it. He had just been to an event swearing in the new president of the country. Another official news source in Iran, IRNA, confirmed that Haniyeh had been killed and said that one of his bodyguards had also been killed at their home…
Last week, Google had both good and bad news. The good news is that for the first time, the cloud business made $10 billion for the quarter. This includes Google Workplace software as a service and Google Cloud infrastructure services. With that, it must not have been as painful to miss out on its second possible $20 billion purchase in less than a month. The first deal that didn’t go through was the long-rumored one to buy HubSpot, a CRM and marketing software company based in Boston. We never got a price for that, but the market value of the…
OpenAI started rolling out ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode on Tuesday. This was the first time users could hear GPT-4o’s very realistic voice replies. A small group of ChatGPT Plus users will be able to use the test version today. According to OpenAI, the feature will slowly be added to all Plus users in the autumn of 2024. When OpenAI first showed off GPT-4o’s voice in May, it shocked people with how quickly it responded and how much it sounded like the voice of a certain person. Sky’s voice sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson’s, who played the voice of the…
Very right-wing Late Monday night, Israeli nationalists broke into two military bases to protest the arrest and questioning of nine Israel Defence Forces reservists who are thought to have raped and abused a Palestinian prisoner so badly that he had to be taken to the hospital. On social media videos, guards at the Sde Teiman military camp and prison, which is near Beersheba in southern Israel, yell and push military police who came to question the reservists, which seems to be to protect the suspects. Israeli troops have been fighting Hamas in Gaza since their horrific terrorist attack on October…
As the failed electric vehicle (EV) startup Fisker goes through bankruptcy, one question that keeps coming up is: does Heights Capital Management, which is Fisker’s only secured backer, deserve to be at the front of the queue to get the money from the liquidation? Heights has kept saying “yes” without any doubt. But as the sides got ready for a hearing on Monday morning, new information came to light. Things were looking good until a last-minute change of plans threw everything off. Fisker and Heights agreed late Sunday night to work together for the next three weeks to come up…
Last year, Meta had a huge hit with Segment Anything, a machine learning model that could quickly and accurately find and outline anything in a picture. CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off the update on stage at SIGGRAPH on Monday. It uses video, which shows how quickly the field is changing. A vision model looks at a picture and pulls out the parts: “this is a dog, this is a tree behind the dog” (hopefully, not “this is a tree growing out of a dog”). This process is called segmentation. Even though this has been going on for a long time,…
Apple has put out a technical study that talks about the models it used to make Apple Intelligence possible. Apple Intelligence is a set of generative AI features that will be coming to iOS, macOS, and iPadOS in the coming months. In the paper, Apple responds to claims that it trained some of its models in an unethical way by saying again that it did not use private user data but instead used a mix of publicly available and licensed data for Apple Intelligence. In the paper, Apple says, “The pre-training data set is made up of……data we have licensed…
It was decided by a federal district court in New York that U.S. border officers need a warrant before they can search the electronic devices of Americans and foreigners crossing the U.S. border. The July 24 ruling is the latest court opinion to go against the U.S. government’s long-standing legal case that federal border agents should be able to access travellers’ devices at ports of entry, such as airports, seaports, and land borders, without a warrant from the court. Civil rights groups that pushed for the decision were happy with it. The decision makes it clear that border agents need…
When I saw Google’s newest ad for the first time, I thought, “Is it just me, or is this kind of bad?” It stopped making me wonder after the fourth or fifth time I saw it. It all starts with a dad telling his daughter how much he loves Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and that she “might even be the world’s number one Sydney fan.” She wants to write a love letter to the Olympic gold medallist, but she needs her dad’s help. That’s when things get weird. Yes, this is an ad for Google’s Gemini AI, so the dad tells Gemini,…
The U.K. will get Zapp’s first electric two-wheeler next month. One of Zapp Electric Vehicles’ goals is to make its electric two-wheeler name a worldwide EV business. Parhlo World has learnt exclusively that India will be one of the places where it is launched. The i300, an electric two-wheeler for city riding, will be the company’s first product. It will be released in the UK as early as next month, and then it will go to Thailand. In an interview with Parhlo World, Zapp founder and CEO Swin Chatsuwan said that the company is now expanding to India, which is…
After lowering import taxes in South Asia, Apple lowered the prices of its iPhone models by 3 to 4 percent in India. The price cuts start at 300 rupees ($3.6), which is about $3.6, and go up to 6,000 rupees ($71.7) for the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max lines. This is the first time Apple has dropped the prices of the Pro models from this generation in India. India cut the basic customs duty on cell phones from 20% to 15% in its yearly budget earlier this week, which led to this move. Statistics from the industry show that…
Google is making changes to the free version of Gemini, its AI-powered robot, so it can keep up with competitors like Anthropic and OpenAI. The updates are meant to make the platform work better and be open to more people. Google stated in May that Gemini 1.5 Flash would be a lightweight multimodal model that would be available on the web and on phones starting Thursday in 40 languages and about 230 countries. Google says that Gemini 1.5 Flash improves quality and latency, with gains that are especially clear in reasoning and understanding images. Besides being better for Google, running…
It’s possible that OpenAI wants to get into the search game and compete with big names like Google and Bing as well as newcomers like Perplexity. Thursday, the company showed off SearchGPT, a search tool that will use web sources to give “timely answers” to questions. SearchGPT looks a lot like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is a chatbot tool. You type in a question, and SearchGPT gives you web-based data and pictures with links to relevant sources. You can then use a sidebar to ask more questions or look into other connected searches. There are searches that look at where you…
The India-based company Jio has teamed up with the Taiwanese fabless semiconductor giant MediaTek to make digital dashboards for the electric scooter market, which is growing quickly. The relationship was announced Thursday at an event for the business world in New Delhi. It will bring MediaTek chips, an Android-based operating system, and hardware made by Jio to electric scooters in India and maybe even other emerging markets. The information shown to the driver is run by AvniOS, which is built on Android, and is powered by MediaTek MT8766 and MT8768 system-on-chips. The deal could be good for both of the…
After looking into how Meta handles explicit pictures made by AI, the Oversight Board, the company’s semi-independent watchdog group, is now telling the company to improve its rules about these kinds of images. That’s what the Board wants Meta to do: change the word “derogatory” to “non-consensual,” and move Meta’s rules about these kinds of pictures from the “Bullying and Harassment” section to the “Sexual Exploitation Community Standards” section. The rules that Meta has now about explicit images made by AI go beyond the “derogatory sexualized Photoshop” rule that is in its part on bullying and harassment. The Board also…
Apple announced on Wednesday that Apple Maps is now available on the web as a public test. This means that you can use your browser to access the service. With this start, Apple Maps goes up against Google Maps, which has been online for a long time. Maps on the web can be used in English and works with Safari and Chrome on Macs, iPads, and PCs, as well as Chrome and Edge on PCs. In the future, Apple aims to add support for more languages, browsers, and platforms. You can use Apple Maps on the web just like you…
Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, says that the company is still in the “early days” of its plans to add support for high-fidelity music players. During Tuesday’s earnings call for the company, an executive talked about a new tier called “deluxe.” The first news about Spotify HiFi came out in 2021. It was going to be a high-end subscription level. At the time, the business said that the tier would let people improve the sound quality to a “lossless audio format of CD quality.” It’s now the middle of 2024, and the company still hasn’t released the grade. During the…
Elon Musk says he will show off Tesla’s prototype “robotaxi” at an event on October 10. He had planned to do this on August 8, but changed his mind. Musk also said that Tesla would show off “a couple of other things,” but he didn’t say what those things were. The comments made on Tuesday during Tesla’s second-quarter earnings call mostly back up Bloomberg’s original story about the delay, including the fact that Musk wanted to change some parts of the prototype. Musk said earlier this month that he had asked for a “important design change to the front.”Musk said…
People who make content are very busy. Most of them work more than 20 hours a week to add new information to their own websites. That doesn’t give the crowd much time to get involved. But Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes that AI could resolve this issue. Zuckerberg talked about his dream for the future with internet star Rowan Cheung. He said that creators will have their own “bots” that reflect their personalities and “business objectives.” Zuckerberg says that creators will use these bots to do some community outreach so that they have more time to do other, probably more…
The people in the town are likely to hold special poojas every day until the official Democratic candidate for president is named. On Monday, there were special prayers at the Dharma Sastha Temple in Painganadu-Thulasendrapuram village, which is where Kamala Harris’ grandfather was born. The US vice president seemed to be the favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination. People in the village, which is 350 km from Chennai, celebrated Harris’s election as vice president in 2020 by making rangolis in front of their houses and feeding a lot of people. On Monday, from 9:30 am to 10:00 am, they…
Telegram, a messaging app, now has 950 million active users. The company’s founder Pavel Durov said on his channel on Monday that they want to hit 1 billion users this year. Durov said last week that the company also plans to release an app store and an in-app browser that can read web3 pages this month. It passed 900 million users in March. When asked by the Financial Times at the time, Durov said that the company hopes to make money next year. The speed at which Telegram is adding web3 technology to its app seems to be increasing. The…
Brian Kim, the founder of the South Korean internet giant Kakao, was given an arrest warrant by a court in Seoul on charges of manipulating stock prices during the company’s takeover of K-pop agency SM Entertainment in 2023. Thursday, the Seoul Southern District Court said that Kim should be arrested because of “concerns of evidence destruction and flight.” The hearing took place on Monday. He could go to jail for up to 20 days while the police look into the case more before charging him. The founder has been very important to Kakao’s strategic decisions, so this could affect how…
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, made an offer to buy cybersecurity startup Wiz for $23 billion, but Wiz turned it down, according to a person who knows about the talks. The offer is a big jump from Wiz’s last private value of $12 billion, but the company’s management team and investors have decided to stay independent, the person said. In an email to Wiz’s 1200 workers around the world, CEO Assaf Rappaport said, “It’s hard to say no to such humble offers, but with our great team, I feel confident in making that choice.” Based in New York Wiz…
One of India’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, WazirX, has “temporarily” stopped all trading on its website. This comes just a few days after a security breach cost the company about $230 million, which is almost half of its reserves. In a tweet on Sunday night, the Mumbai-based exchange said that the cyberattack had made it much harder to keep the important 1:1 collateral ratio with assets. This makes people even more worried about WazirX’s reserves and its ability to fully repay its customers. This week, WazirX stopped customers from withdrawing money because someone got into one of the exchange’s multi-signature wallets…
Since Vice President Kamala Harris dropped out of the race, President Joe Biden may not be running again. Biden said he “fully supports and endorses Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year” when he announced his plans. Harris, on the other hand, said she “intention is to win and earn this nomination.” That being said, it’s not clear if other Democratic politicians will run against her for the ticket at an open convention or in some other way. If Harris is chosen, the Democrats will have a presidential candidate with ties to the Bay Area and the…
The next big Google tech event is on August 13 at 10 a.m. PT. That gives the Made By Google show, which usually happens in the middle of fall, about two months early. In a big deal, the company will also unveil its newest top phone, the Pixel 9, before the iPhone 16. Apple will show off its newest product in September. Google hasn’t explained why they changed things. Not even a month away from what has already become the strangest presidential election in modern U.S. history, there may be too much noise. The company also has a lot to…
The latest small AI model from OpenAI, GPT-4o mini, was released on Thursday. The company says that starting today, a cheaper and faster AI model called GPT-4o mini will be made available to developers as well as to customers through the ChatGPT web and mobile app. Next week, enterprise users will be able to get in. The company says that GPT-4o mini does better than the best small AI models in the business at tasks that require reasoning with both text and images. As small AI models get better, developers like them more because they are faster and cheaper than…
It’s clear that Elon Musk doesn’t like Joe Biden. But since Musk officially backed Donald Trump for president this year and is said to be giving him money, Biden is returning the favor. Musk and other famous and rich Silicon Valley VCs are now being directly urged by the president to back Trump’s campaign. The next post Biden made on Musk’s social media site X after testing positive for COVID said, “I’m sick.” In the next post, he revealed a trick: “of Elon Musk and his rich buddies trying to buy this election.” A few hours before, Biden’s campaign sent…