Have you ever thought about why chatbots like ChatGPT say things like “Sorry, I can’t do that” or some other nice no? OpenAI is only giving a small glimpse into the thinking behind its own models’ rules of behaviour, like following brand guidelines or not making NSFW material. Big language models (LLMs) don’t have any built-in limits on what they can or will say. In some ways, that makes them so useful, but it also makes them imagine and fool easily. Any AI model that deals with people needs to have some rules about what it can and can’t do.…
Author: David
Match Group owns several dating apps, such as Tinder and Hinge. On Tuesday, the company posted its first-quarter earnings report, which shows that Tinder’s paying users have gone down for the sixth quarter in a row. Hinge, on the other hand, has more users who are willing to pay for the app. In the first quarter of 2024, Tinder had 10 million paid users, which is 9% less than the same time last year. Also, Hinge now has 1.4 million paid users, which is 31% more than the same time last year. Because of changes in the way people use…
The company said on Thursday that TikTok will begin automatically labelling AI-generated video that was made on other platforms. With this change, if a creator puts on TikTok content that was made with a service like OpenAI’s DALL·E 3, it will have a label that says “AI-generated” next to it to let people know that it was made with AI. Content Credentials is a technology from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), which was started by Microsoft and Adobe. The social video platform is using it to do this. Content Credentials add certain metadata to content, which TikTok…
As of Wednesday, Samsung Medison, a division of Samsung Electronics that makes medical devices for diagnostic imaging, said it would buy Sonio, a company in Paris that makes AI-powered software for ultrasound workflows, for about $92.7 million (KRW 126 billion). The French company’s AI assistant is meant to help obstetricians and gynecologists evaluate and record ultrasound exams. The company has also been given FDA 510(k) approval for Sonio Detect, a product that uses deep learning algorithms to improve the image quality of ultrasound scans in real time. The company that makes Samsung Medison said that Sonio’s software would help it…
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, has said that lidar devices are a “crutch” for self-driving cars. In fact, his company has bought so many from Luminar that it is now their biggest buyer. In the first quarter of 2024, Tesla brought in “more than 10%,” or a little more than $2 million, of Luminar’s income, the lidar company said in its earnings report released Tuesday. Luminar said that its sales dropped 5% from the fourth quarter of 2023 to the current quarter. It mostly said this was because “lower sensor sales to non-automotive customers.” But “sensor sales to Tesla,…
Google launched its digital wallet in India on Wednesday, with local features. This comes almost two years after the app was remade in the U.S. as a digital wallet platform. According to an exclusive story from TechCrunch last month, Google Wallet will work in India along with the current Google Pay app. Google Pay will still be the company’s payments app in India. In February, Google switched from the Pay app to Wallet in the U.S. “Google Pay isn’t going away.” At a news conference in New Delhi, Ram Papatla, general manager and India engineering lead for Android at Google,…
The U.K.-based startup Wayve has raised $1.05 billion in Series C funding led by SoftBank Group. The money will be used to build a self-learning system for self-driving cars instead of a rule-based system. This is one of the biggest AI fundraises ever in the UK and one of the twenty biggest AI fundraises ever in the world. Nvidia and Microsoft, which was already a partner, also took part in the raise. Yann LeCun, who is the head of AI at Meta, was one of Wayve’s early backers. The Cambridge-based business Wayve was started in 2017 and raised $200 million…
The launch of Boeing’s Starliner tonight has been pushed back “out of an abundance of caution.” The historic launch was supposed to happen just two hours ago. It is said that the scrub was necessary because of a problem with the oxygen release valve on the upper stage of the Atlas V rocket. On May 7, 10, and 11, there are backup launch times. The mission will be Boeing’s first try to send astronauts to the International Space Station. It has been years in the making and has cost over $1 billion more than planned. After fixing the problem with…
The Met Gala is a big deal, whether you like or dislike celebrities. Those of us who aren’t too jaded get to see all the biggest stars take the biggest fashion risks of the year. Unlike an award show, this event supports avant-garde extravagance. It’s funny that Ed Sheeran’s outfit looks like something Troy Bolton wore in High School Musical 3. For those who think the whole thing is dull. The Met Gala This Year, Though, Was A Test “Oh, Katy Perry. “That’s it,” one X post said. Katy Perry looks like she is wearing a big dress in the…
In November of last year, Adam D’Angelo was at the center of one of the biggest scandals in the tech business. The board of OpenAI, the $80 billion startup that started the AI trend, fired its CEO, Sam Altman, all of a sudden, but then brought him back a few days later. Altman was fired by the board, and D’Angelo was (and still is) on the board that hired him back. Because of the changes that followed, he was the only one who held their seat while most of the other board members left. OpenAI was having a rough time,…
The government of President Joe Biden wants to fund projects that use digital twins to make the process of making semiconductors better. Digital twins are computer models that are used to test and improve real-world processes and objects. Automobile companies, for instance, want to use digital twins of their plants to try out new ways of making things without stopping production. The Biden administration said it would be accepting applications for what it thinks will be a total of $285 million in funding for work that includes building and supporting combined physical and digital facilities, industry demonstration projects, training for…
The 122-megapixel pictures taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which is 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, are making progress in astronomy. Really cool stuff. But the space agency’s newest sky-peeper does something different: it uses 36 pixels to do groundbreaking science in space. There really are 36 pixels, not 36 megapixels. A project called XRISM, which stands for “crism,” is a partnership between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). It was launched into space last September and has been searching the universe ever since for answers to some of science’s hardest problems. Resolve, the mission’s imaging tool,…
“I think the Space Force will be involved in going to the moon at some point,” says a Republican politician. As humanity continues its trip into space to find new things and possible ways for people to stay alive, there is a chance that superpowers will try to get ahead in this race to strengthen their control over the world. Some of the most powerful countries in the world are thinking about sending their armies into space to keep their rivals in check. This is in addition to science explorations and trying to figure out how these things work. Ken…
As you enter Startups Weekly, Haje will tell you about all the important news in the world of startups for the past week. If you sign up here, it will come to your email every Friday. Musk’s 10-month-old baby, xAI, is getting close to a huge $6 billion funding round. The social network X, which used to be called Twitter and is also part of Elon’s tech family, has already bought shares. At first, the deal was only meant to bring in $3 billion, but as more people wanted to join, the price went up. Musk’s friends from Sequoia Capital,…
X, which used to be Twitter, now uses Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok to power a feature in the Explore section of the app that summarizes the personalized popular stories. A post and screenshots from the X Engineering team on Friday say that Premium subscribers will be able to read a summary of posts on X that are related to each popular story on the For You tab in Explore. The “For You” page shows you the news and stories that are popular in your network and are being shared across X’s platform, along with other suggestions. It’s one of…
In a new filing, Google fights back against Epic Games’ many suggested solutions to the problem that a court found Google did things on its Play Store that hurt competition. After the jury’s decision at the end of last year, both sides made their points for why Google should have to change how it acts because of the decision. Epic Games, for its part, made a very long list of demands, such as being able to use the Play Store’s library of apps and games for six years, being able to put its own app store on Google Play for…
There will be new iPad Pros, iPad Airs, the Apple Pencil, and maybe even the M4 chip. It’s still hard to believe that the “Let Loose” event on May 7 is even going to happen. This event was planned even though Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference is still more than a month away. The company felt there was enough news to support its own event. The focus will be on iPads, such as the iPad Pro and iPad Air. The Apple Pencil, which has been ignored for a long time, is finally getting some love. It was, after all, the…
Microsoft has made it clear again that U.S. police forces can’t use Azure OpenAI Service, the company’s fully managed, enterprise-focused wrapper around OpenAI tech, to use generative AI for facial recognition. New language added to Azure OpenAI Service’s terms of service on Wednesday makes it clearer that integrations with Azure OpenAI Service can’t be used “by or for” U.S. police departments for facial recognition. This includes integrations with OpenAI’s current image-analyzing models and maybe even future models. There is a new bullet point that says “any law enforcement globally” can’t use “real-time facial recognition technology” on mobile cameras like body…
National space agencies have always been the only ones allowed to explore Mars. But NASA is trying to change that by giving private companies a dozen research projects as a way to get them involved in future missions to the Red Planet. It’s the second time in a month that the agency has shown it wants private companies to help with trips to Mars. Earlier this month, they pretty much scrapped the original Mars Sample Return mission in favor of an alternative that hasn’t been decided yet but is likely to be run by private space companies. Nine companies were…
It’s still not clear how many Americans were affected by the cyberattack two months after hackers broke into Change Healthcare systems and stole and then encrypted business data. CEO of UnitedHealth Group, which owns Change Healthcare, Andrew Witty said last month that the stolen files contain personal health information for “a substantial proportion of people in America.” At a House meeting on Wednesday, Witty was asked for a more specific answer. When pushed, he said that the breach affected “maybe a third [of Americans] or somewhere on that level.” Witty said he couldn’t give a more exact answer because the…
Once again, TikTok users can make music videos with songs from UMG’s library. This includes songs by Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, and Ariana Grande, among others. That’s because, after months of fighting, the social media site and Universal Music Group (UMG) have finally come to an agreement on how to license material. There was no information about how much the deal cost. The move comes at a very bad time for the business. TikTok is once again in danger of being banned in important countries, such as the United States. So getting this deal with UMG is important not only…
Radeon was fined $1.1 million by the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday. The order says that the company that made gaming accessories lied to customers when it said that its flashy Zephyr mask was approved as N95-grade. In the middle of a global pandemic, these companies lied when they said that their face mask was the same as a N95 approved respirator, according to a statement from FTC Bureau of Consumer Projection Director Samuel Levine. “The FTC will continue to take action against companies that make false or unproven claims to get people to make decisions about their health and…
Tesla has fired most of its charging team, even though it has recently won over big automakers like Ford and General Motors and made its connection the standard in North America. Tesla’s network of Superchargers has been seen as one of its biggest benefits for a long time. There are a lot of them, and they work much better than other charging networks. The connector technology, which is called the North American Charging Standard (NACS), is now being used by almost all big automakers in North America. The Information was the first to report that CEO Elon Musk told executives…
TikTok might be going around the App Store to avoid paying fees. New information shows that the social video app run by ByteDance is giving some of its users a link to a website where they can buy the coins that are used to tip digital creators. Usually, these coins are bought through an in-app payment, which means Apple gets 30% of the price. There’s a chance that most people can’t see the feature. This could be on purpose, or it could be that only testers or high-spenders can see it. In any case, people who can see the new…
Is an IDE with AI the way of the future for making software? GitHub is throwing out the idea. GitHub launched Copilot Workspace before its annual GitHub Universe conference in San Francisco early this fall. Copilot Workspace is a development environment that uses “Copilot-powered agents” to help developers use natural language to come up with ideas, plan, build, test, and run code. Jonathan Carter, who is in charge of GitHub’s software research and development team called GitHub Next, says that Workspace is like a more general version of Copilot, GitHub’s AI-powered coding assistant. It builds on new features like Copilot…
Employees who were laid off say that Google fired people from key teams like Flutter, Dart, Python, and others before its annual I/O developer meeting in May. The news was shared on social media by those who were affected. Google told TechCrunch that they were letting people go, but they wouldn’t say which teams or jobs were affected or how many people were let go. Alex GarcÃa-Kummert, a spokesperson for Google, said, “As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the big opportunities ahead.” “To get ready for these chances, many of our teams made changes…
Finally, there is one thing that everyone can agree on: big tech companies like Facebook and Google are too powerful. A poll by the Pew Research Center found that 78% of American adults think social media companies have too much power over politics. Of those polled, 84% were Republicans and 74% were Democrats. In general, this point of view has grown 6% more common since the last election. The way Americans feel about social media is similar to how their lawmakers feel. Recently, attempts to hold social media companies accountable have been some of the few political issues that have…
Federal safety officials are looking into Ford’s BlueCruise hands-free driving assistance system after it was used in two recent crashes into stationary cars that killed several people. ODI, which is part of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, stated on Monday that BlueCruise was involved in both accidents. One was in Texas in February, and the other was in Pennsylvania in early April. These people are the first known to have died in crashes involving BlueCruise. BlueCruise is now offered on the Mustang Mach-E and some Ford F-150s, including the Lightning, Explorers, and Expeditions. The investigations into the two crashes…
OpenAI, the company that made the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, has gotten another news licensing deal in Europe. The Financial Times in London is the latest publication that OpenAI is paying to access its material. Like other publishing licensing deals OpenAI has made in the past, the financial details of this one are not being made public. The latest agreement between OpenAI and a publisher sounds a little cozier than other recent ones, like the ones with Axel Springer in Germany or the AP, Le Monde, and Prisa Media in France and Spain. The two companies are calling it a…
The European Union will apply its most important market fairness and contestability rules to Apple’s iPadOS, the Commission announced today. This means that the Digital Markets Act (DMA) will now apply to four Apple-owned platforms, which increases the regulatory risk for the tech giant by including its tablet ecosystem. There are six months left for Apple to make sure that iPadOS is in line with the DMA. Apple may have to make big changes to how it runs its tablet platform in the EU to make sure it meets a lot of DMA rules. For example, so-called “gatekeepers” won’t be…
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ended a long-running investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot driver assistance system after looking at hundreds of crashes where it was used incorrectly. Thirteen of these crashes were fatal, and “many more” involved major injuries. At the same time, the NHTSA is starting a new review to see if the fix Tesla made to the Autopilot recall in December works well enough. In papers made public on Friday, the NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation said it had finished “an extensive body of work” that showed “Tesla’s weak driver engagement system was not appropriate for Autopilot’s permissive…
Google Cloud, Google’s cloud computing business, had a hugely successful fiscal quarter, way above what analysts had predicted. This caused Alphabet, Google’s parent company, to see its stock rise more than 13% after regular trading hours. In the first quarter of 2024, Google Cloud’s income jumped 28% to $9.57 billion. This was due to the high demand for generative AI tools that use cloud infrastructure, services, and apps. That keeps the division’s good run going. In the previous quarter (Q4 2023) it saw year-over-year growth of 25.66%. It went from $191 million to $900 million, which is a growth of…
One reliable source close to the deal says that xAI, Elon Musk’s 10-month-old AI rival to OpenAI, is raising $6 billion at a pre-money value of $18 billion. If the terms of the deal don’t change, the deal should go through in the next few weeks. Investors will get a quarter of the company. The terms of the deal have already been changed once. Late last week, Jared Birchall, who runs Musk’s family office, told potential investors that xAI was raising $3 billion at a $15 billion value before the money was raised. Because so many people wanted to get…
Meta’s Twitter/X competitor Threads is rising steadily. As Mark Zuckerberg said during the company’s Q1 2024 results call, the social network now has more than 150 million monthly active users. This is up from 130 million in February. Threads has made progress toward connecting with ActivityPub, the decentralized system that makes networks like Mastodon work, since the last quarterly earnings call. The company let people over 18 in the U.S. connect their accounts to the Fediverse in March so that their posts would appear on other sites. Also, by June, the company wants to give its API to a lot…
When the European Union stepped in, TikTok took down a game-like function in that area. TikTok is having more and more legal problems in the US, so the news, which happened late Wednesday night local time, wasn’t given much attention. The EU started looking into a “task and reward” feature on the TikTok Lite app two days before TikTok did. They were worried that it could be too addicting for young people and put their mental health at risk. People can use this function to get points for doing things like liking and watching TikTok videos. Early this month, ByteDance,…
Years ago, IBM made the smart decision to stop trying to be a pure cloud infrastructure provider. It knew it could never compete with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Since then, it has helped IT departments handle complicated hybrid environments by buying a number of well-known companies with its money. It started when the company bought Red Hat for $34 billion in 2018, then Apptio for the same amount of money last year, and on Wednesday, it announced that it would be buying cloud management company HashiCorp for $6.4 billion. Big Blue gets a set of cloud lifecycle management and security…
Soon, X, the company that used to be Twitter, will release a TV app just for movies posted to the social network. Yesterday, Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, said that the new app will bring “real-time, engaging content to your smart TVs.” An early movie that Yaccarino shared shows that the app’s interface looks a lot like YouTube’s. The app will have an algorithm for trending videos that will help users stay up to date with relevant popular content. It will also have AI-powered topics that will sort videos by theme. Cross-device viewing will also be possible through the app.…
Tesla has been going through some big changes, and now we know why: “Pressure” on EV sales has caused the company to change its product plan. There are now “more affordable models” in the new, faster plan, which the company says will come out next year. Or, if you believe Tesla CEO Elon Musk, which is a big if because of how bad he is at keeping promises, maybe as early as the end of 2024. The shocking news sent the company’s stock up more than 11% in trading after the market closed on Tuesday. Even though Musk and other…
Senate passed a bill that will ban TikTok if its owner, ByteDance, doesn’t sell it within a year. The bill was part of the foreign aid deal. The bill was passed by the Senate 79–18 on Tuesday, after the House passed it with a huge majority over the weekend. To become law, President Joe Biden must sign the bill. The White House says that he plans to do that on Wednesday. In March, the House passed a similar bill that would have banned TikTok or forced its sale with a six-month time limit. The Senate never did take up that…
As of today, Amazon announced a new grocery delivery service for Prime users and people in the U.S. who have an EBT card (Electronic Benefit Transfer). This service is available in 3,500 cities and towns. Last year, the company tested grocery service in three cities: Columbus, Ohio; Denver, Colorado; and Sacramento, California. People with an Amazon Prime membership pay $9.99 a month, while people with a registered EBT card pay $4.99 a month. The Amazon site lets subscribers get free deliveries on food orders over $35 from Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods Market, and other nearby grocery and specialty stores like…