The legal fight between OpenAI and The New York Times over data to train its AI models may still be going on. Of course, OpenAI is moving forward with deals with other companies, such as some of the biggest news outlets in France and Spain. OpenAI said on Wednesday that it had signed deals with Le Monde and Prisa Media to add news from France and Spain to its ChatGPT robot. OpenAI said in a blog post that the agreement will bring current events coverage from brands like El País, Cinco Días, As, and El Huffpost to ChatGPT users where…
Author: David
After U.S. officials gave the go-ahead, SpaceX will try to launch the huge Starship rocket into orbit for the third time early Thursday morning. Within a 110-minute time that starts at 7:00 a.m. CT, the company hopes to go live. SpaceX tests the Starship at its huge Starbase campus near Boca Chica, Texas. The launch will be livestreamed on SpaceX’s website and the social media site X at 6:30 a.m. CT, though. So far, SpaceX has sent the 400-foot-tall rocket up for two test runs. During the first one, in April, both the upper stage (also known as Starship) and…
LG Electronics isn’t a well-known brand when it comes to smartphones anymore, but the company still thinks that stuff like robots will be big in the future. Today, the company announced that it will invest $60 million in Bear Robotics, a Californian startup that makes server robots for restaurants and other places that are powered by artificial intelligence. These robots are autonomous tray towers on wheels that are meant to replace waiters. LG Electronics now has the most shares in Bear thanks to the investment. According to PitchBook, Bear’s last round of funding in 2022 put the value of the…
Reddit’s plans for its initial public offering (IPO) are becoming clearer after a new S-1 filing came out Monday morning. It sets the price range for its stock at $31 to $34 per share at the start. Its value should reach about $5.4 billion if buyers agree to pay its high end range. If 158.98 million shares are issued, Reddit would be worth $4.93 billion, which is the low end of this range of $31 billion. Others have come up with a possible valuation that is closer to or higher than $6 billion by taking into account employee or other…
There was a lot of talk that a recent picture of Kate Middleton and her kids was made by AI, so the Duchess of Cambridge had to address the issue. Middleton said in a statement, “Like many amateur photographers, I do sometimes try out editing.” In case the family picture we shared yesterday caused any confusion, I’d like to say sorry. There’s something off about the picture. It’s like four people are smiling and looking right into your soul. The hands, though. It’s the right number of hands—eight hands for four people—but they all look little off. Kate’s arms are…
After being questioned recently, Sen. Katie Britt talked about a story she told during her response to Vice President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech on Sunday. Britt gave a sharp answer in which she criticised Biden’s policies on the border and immigration. She also told the story of a woman who was sexually assaulted in a trafficking operation run by drug cartels. The Alabama member said the victim told her the abuse started when she was 12 years old. But the story made people wonder right away about the timing and other facts. According to Sean Ross, a…
After a busy week of talks, China’s annual parliamentary sitting ended on Monday with a big hole in the schedule. A press meeting by the prime minister is usually the last thing that happens at the National People’s Congress. But for some reason, the practice was stopped this year and for the rest of the term. Officials said it wasn’t necessary because reporters could ask questions in other ways. Even though top officials talked about being open, many people saw it as another sign of control and consolidation, which became a theme of the meeting. For the first time in…
Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI will open-source Grok, its chatbot rivaling ChatGPT, this week, the entrepreneur said, days after suing OpenAI and complaining that the Microsoft-backed startup had deviated from its open-source roots. xAI released Grok last year, arming it with features including access to “real-time” information and views that countered “politically correct” approach. The service is available to customers paying for X’s $16 monthly subscription. Musk helped co-found OpenAI with Sam Altman nearly a decade ago as a counterweight to Google’s dominance in artificial intelligence. But OpenAI, which was required to also make its technology “freely available” to the…
Lahore, March 9, 2024 – Pakistan Super League titans Multan Sultans have joined hands with the Pakistan Polio Eradication Programme to support the noble cause of polio eradication in Pakistan.An initiative led by the Punjab Emergency Operations Centre Coordinator Mr Khizer Afzaal, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between Multan Sultans and the National Emergency Operations Center for Polio Eradication at an event in Islamabad. Multan Sultans General Manager Ms Hijab Zahid and Coordinator of the NEOC Dr Shahzad Baig signed the MoU, while senior Polio Programme leadership and members of the Multan Sultans squad were in attendance. “We…
Today, X introduced Articles, a new type of long-form post. Users can write posts with text formatting, other X posts, and embedded videos and images. This tool is only available to Premium+ subscribers and verified organizations. It’s similar to a post on a content management system like WordPress or an article on Medium. By posting an article, the company’s @Write account told people about the new feature on the site. The social network run by Elon Musk raised the length limit for long posts to 25,000 characters for paid users last year. Engadget pointed out that the limit for a…
It was reported on Friday that a German branch of Sam Altman’s controversial crypto blockchain digital identity business, Worldcoin, had filed a court challenge against a suspension order from Spain’s data protection authority. This week, it came to light that the AEPD, the Spanish government agency, had told Worldcoin to temporarily stop reading people’s eyes or processing any more data they had already gathered from people in the market. According to what we reported on Wednesday, the AEPD said it would start a “urgency procedure” under Article 66 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) against Worldcoin. It said it…
Apple launched VisionOS 1.1 on Thursday. The most important change is that user personas are now better. In particular, the new update makes the hair and makeup look better, as well as the neck and mouth, as well as the eyes for EyeSight, which lets other people see your eyes when you wear the mask. Users can now set up their personas without touching the device. To do this, go to Settings > Persona and choose “Hands-free Capture” mode after the initial setup steps. Mobile Device Management (MDM), a way for businesses to control their devices, is also added to…
SpaceX said in a social media post Wednesday that it plans to launch its huge Starship rocket for the third time as soon as March 14. SpaceX is still waiting for the Federal Aviation Administration to give its OK for the launch. If they don’t, Starship will stay on the ground. But even though the FAA hasn’t given SpaceX the go-ahead for the next flight yet, there are signs that the company has been waiting for it and will soon. Teams at the Starbase facility in southwest Texas finished a very important “wet dress” practice for launch this past weekend.…
The company says that France will now have to pay the most in EU fees. As a result of a new tax in France that targets music streaming services, Spotify has announced that it will raise membership fees in that country. This comes almost three months after the company said it would stop spending in France. It started by pulling its support from two festivals, saying that there would be more action this year. Now we have a better idea of what “action” Spotify has been planning. The tax started on January 1 and will be a 1.2% fee on…
Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, said on Wednesday that people who use the chat app and have personal accounts can now pay a monthly fee to turn them into business accounts. This lets people list things like where they are and when they’re open, which could be useful for small shop and café owners. For business accounts, you can use color labels to organize your chats, set up automatic greetings or away notes, and set up shortcuts for quick replies. Durov said on his channel that Telegram is going to add more business features this month, such as a…
Spotify said today that it has put a new version of its app into the App Store that shows price and feature details for its different EU plans. The update, which hasn’t been approved by Apple yet, also has a link on Spotify’s website that lets users buy monthly plans. The European Commission fined Apple a huge €1.84 billion ($2 billion) earlier this week for acting in ways that hurt competition in the music streaming market. Merkel, who is in charge of competition in the EU, told reporters that Apple needs to stop its anti-steering actions. “From now on, Apple…
Not long ago, in 2021, Windows 11 got official support for Android apps. This was made possible by the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA), a virtual machine that Microsoft looked after. Thanks to a deal between Amazon and Microsoft, Windows 11 users could purchase and run almost all Android apps through the WSA. They could also do this through Amazon’s Android market, the Amazon Appstore. Now Windows 11 no longer works with approved Android apps and can’t get them from the Amazon Appstore either. Microsoft said today that it will no longer be supporting the WSA after a year. People…
OpenAI, the most valuable AI startup, said on Wednesday that it plans to throw out all of Elon Musk’s claims in a recent lawsuit. The company claimed that Musk, a billionaire businessman who helped start the company, didn’t have that much of an effect on its growth and success. In a blog post written by Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Sam Altman, Wojciech Zaremba, and OpenAI as a whole, the Microsoft-backed startup said that Musk had given them less than $45 million since they started in 2015, even though he had promised to give them as much as $1…
Your privacy may be at risk with the new X calling function. In an effort to make the simple and useful Twitter app into X, the app that does everything badly, Elon Musk added voice and video calling to X last week. This new feature is turned on by default, so anyone you talk to can see your IP address, and it’s very hard to figure out how to limit who can call you. “Audio and video calling are now available to everyone on X!” said X’s official news account in a post on Wednesday afternoon. Who do you want…
Don’t give up on deep tech just yet—quantum computers won’t be available on a large scale or with a proven track record for years to come. It looks like the market for high-level quantum computer science is picking up speed. This is the field that uses quantum principles to handle complicated calculations in fields like artificial intelligence and banking. A new company called Multiverse Computing from San Sebastian, Spain, has raised €25 million, which is about $27 million, in an equity funding round led by Columbus Venture Partners. The startup got €100 million ($108 million) in funding, which will be…
Today is another day with another case against Elon Musk. On Monday, four former Twitter executives, including former CEO Parag Agrawal, sued Musk, saying they were owed more than $128 million in retirement pay. Musk fired Agrawal, Ned Segal (CFO), and lawyers Sean Edgett and Vijaya Gadde as soon as he bought Twitter (now X). Musk has “special ire” toward these former leaders, the lawsuit says, because they worked hard to keep Musk to his $44 billion promise when he tried to back out. In his biography of Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson says that Musk said he would “hunt every…
U.S. Capitol (AP) — A poll shows that more and more adults in the U.S. aren’t sure if 81-year-old President Joe Biden has the memory and sharpness for the job. This makes his upcoming State of the Union speech something of a real-time audition for a second term. A new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that about 60% of people don’t have much or any faith in Biden’s mental ability to be a good president. That’s a little more than in January 2022, when about half of those surveyed said the same thing. In…
Apple has had a lot of mistakes on the way to success, from AirPower to tablets that were never finished. Apple has canceled its plans to make its secret self-driving electric car available to the public. Instead, the company is now focusing on the hugely popular field of generative AI. For the project, the company hired well-known leaders from Ford and Tesla. Some workers lost their jobs because of it, while others moved to different parts of the company. It was said that “Project Titan” had been in the works since 2014. Apple has a history of shaking up different…
In court documents filed this week, Camshaft said that some $533 million it managed for Byju’s Alpha, a U.S. branch of the Indian edtech company Byju’s, was transferred to another 100% U.S.-based subsidiary of Byju’s. This disproved claims that the Indian company used the wealth manager’s services to steal money. In the court documents, Camshaft said that the money was sent to Inspilearn LLC, which is a Delaware-based branch of Byju’s. Also, Camshaft made it clear that Byju’s and none of its partners are limited partners in the hedge fund. In a statement to TechCrunch, Byju’s said that Camshaft’s information…
Press Release TiE ISLAMABAD IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE U.S. EMBASSY CELEBRATES A DECADE OF FOSTERING ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN PAKISTAN TiE Islamabad, in partnership with the U.S. Embassy, celebrated the 10-year milestone of the Pakistan Startup Cup on March 2, 2024 in Karachi. For the past 10 years, the Pakistan Startup Cup has been the go-to business plan competition for 10,000+ startups across 8-10 cities and has cultivated successful startups like Cowlar, PriceOye, Ghar Par, and many more. Karachi (March 3, 2024): TiE Islamabad and the U.S. Embassy celebrate the 10-year milestone of the Pakistan Startup Cup, Pakistan’s biggest startup competition with…
Elon Musk sued OpenAI, its co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, and related companies on Thursday, saying that the ChatGPT creators broke their original contracts by focusing on making money instead of the nonprofit’s original goal of developing AI that helps people. Musk was one of the first people to support OpenAI. He says that Altman and Brockman promised him that the company would be non-profit and work to compete with Google, which is why he helped start and fund it in 2015. The lawsuit says that OpenAI has changed its business plan to focus on making money by selling…
This week at MWC, the company showed off a device that gives failing smartphones a bright future. A lot of news outlets are interested in the Humane Ai Pin and Rabbit handheld for the different ways they use creative AI with hardware. Humane’s gear is especially meant to show what life is like after the smartphone. Of course, that makes you wonder: What exactly is wrong with the smartphone? Form factors have stopped changing, but these phones are still in billions of people’s hands. In the middle of the noise at Deutsch Telekom’s Mobile World Congress booth earlier this week,…
After seven days on the moon, Intuitive Machines’ first lunar lander finally lost power today. It was the first American spacecraft to reach the moon’s surface since 1972, and it was also the first spacecraft that was privately built. But the lander, which was named Odysseus, will be known for something else: the way it moved. Using a mix of cryogenic liquid oxygen and liquid methane in that propulsion system could open up new space possibilities and make future missions by other commercial providers less risky. Before the IM-1 mission from Intuitive Machines, this mix of propellants had never been…
Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), the group Elon Musk is suing for defamation, will have its day in court on Thursday. Last year, Elon Musk’s company X sued the CCDH, saying that it was “actively working to assert false and misleading claims about X.” Since it started in 2018, the charity has been studying how to find hate speech, extremism, and false information on social media sites. News outlets, including TechCrunch, often copy and paste its stories. The CCDH wrote about more hate speech on X after Musk took over Twitter. They said that unbanned accounts, like neo-Nazi Andrew…
Want A Free Car? Fuel-cell cars like the 2023 Toyota Mirai can be bought for $52,000, but if you act quickly, you can save $40,000. With the $15,000 in free hydrogen over six years and the option for a loan with no interest, Toyota is pretty much paying people $3,000 to get rid of their cars. If you can find the hydrogen to run it, it would be great. Shell announced three weeks ago that it would be stopping its hydrogen filling stations in California. This discount from Toyota comes right after that. For the record, the oil company only…
Meta made a controversial move last year when it started charging users in the EU for ad-free access to Facebook and/or Instagram unless they agreed to be tracked and profiled so Meta could keep running its microtargeting ad business. This caused a lot of complaints from consumer rights groups. They are being brought under the bloc’s rules for protecting data. Right now, Meta charges users in the region €9.99 per month on the web (or €12.99 per month on mobile) if they don’t want to see ads on their linked Facebook and Instagram accounts. EU users can only use Facebook…
Nothing doesn’t like to keep quiet about new books. The London-based phone company’s media push is mostly based on slowly leaking information about its products. So far, it’s been a good strategy (though a bit annoying for someone who covers this world), since most of the products it’s announced are first-generation ones that get a lot of attention from people outside of the company’s loyal fan group. Nothing Phone (2a) is a great choice. It’s the third phone the company has made, but it’s clearly aimed at a different group of people than the main Phone (1) and Phone (2).…
Apple is ending its long-running, secret project to make an electric car that drives itself, leaders told the team in a short meeting Tuesday morning. Has learned that the company has stopped working on the project and is likely to lay off hundreds of workers. Bloomberg, which first reported that the project was scrapped, says that some of the remaining workers will be moved to work on Apple’s generative AI projects. Other people will be fired if they can’t find new jobs within the company in 90 days. One worker on the car project who asked to remain anonymous because…
The spacecraft landed on its side, which changed how the solar panels are positioned in relation to the sun, ending Intuitive Machines’ first trip to the moon early. The company said this in an update on Tuesday morning. The flight controllers were still trying to figure out how much life was left in the battery, which could be 10 to 20 hours. The spacecraft was supposed to work for seven to ten days after it arrived on the moon five days ago. Last week, Intuitive Machines made history when it landed its spaceship, Odysseus, close to the south pole of…
The Galaxy AI features will be added to more devices with the new One UL 6.1 update, which Samsung revealed today. The update will be available in late March. The Galaxy S23 line, S23 FE, Z Fold5, and Z Flip5 will get the new features. The Tab S9 Ultra, Tab S9+, and Tab S9 will also get them. It was first the Galaxy S24 series that got AI features, but soon even more Samsung users will be able to use them too. Since almost every tech company is adding to and improving their AI-powered features, it makes sense for Samsung…
Google today announced the start of Gemma, a new family of lightweight open-weight models. This comes just one week after the latest version of its Gemini models was released. These new models, starting with Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B, were “inspired by Gemini” and can be used for business or study. Google didn’t give us a full study on how these models compare to other models like those from Meta and Mistral; they only said that they are “state-of-the-art.” This is the same design that the company used for its Gemini models and its earlier PaLM models, the company did…
Change Healthcare, an American tech company that makes healthcare products, has admitted that its systems were hacked. The business issued a short statement saying it was “experiencing a network interruption related to a cyber security issue.” Change Healthcare wrote on its status page, “As soon as we learned of the outside threat, we disconnected our systems right away to protect our partners and patients and stop any further damage.” “The trouble is likely to last at least during the day.” The incident started early Tuesday morning on the East Coast of the United States, according to the incident tracker. It…
Uber is starting a service in Japan with partners Mitsubishi Electric and autonomous robotics startup Cartken. The service will use self-driving sidewalk robots to bring food to customers. The service will be available in some parts of Tokyo through the Uber Eats app by the end of March, the companies said. A representative for Uber said that the business’s hours would be made public closer to the launch date. Together, Uber and Cartken, a new company started in 2019 by former Google workers who worked on the short-lived Bookbot, already run a delivery service in Fairfax, Virginia, and Miami. They…
Byju’s says that its newly launched $200 million rights issue has been fully subscribed. However, the founder of the startup asked some of its biggest investors to take part, even though there is a disagreement between the edtech group and some of its biggest shareholders. The Bengaluru-based startup was valued at $22 billion in its most recent round of funding in early 2022. Last month, it said it would be trying to raise about $200 million through a rights issue. TechCrunch says that Byju’s lowered the pre-money value ask in the rights issue to between $20 million and $25 million.…
It’s 2024. No matter what, all devices should have batteries that last more than a day. As things stand, the range of gadgets is incredibly large. At this point, I would even say that the Apple Watch’s small battery is and always has been its biggest problem. At the moment, the Series 9 can run for 18 hours in normal mode and 36 hours in low power mode. When it comes to OnePlus’s future Watch 2, it promises an amazing 100 hours “in full Smart Mode.” These are the kinds of claims that should be taken with a grain of…