Donald Trump, who will be president in January, seems to be thinking about expanding American territory in a way that, if he’s serious, would be on par with the Louisiana Purchase or the deal that got Alaska from Russia. He has been making fun of Canadian officials for the past week by saying that the US could take in its northern neighbor and make it the 51st state. He said he would take over the Panama Canal, which was built by the US and has been run by its named country for 25 years. And on Sunday, he brought up…
Author: David
NASA’s cutting-edge Parker Solar Probe is about to get 3.8 million miles (6.2 million kilometers) from the Sun, which will be the closest it has ever been. This will happen on Christmas Eve. The spaceship was launched in August 2018 and will be there for seven years to help scientists learn more about our star and predict space weather events that could affect life on Earth. The spaceship would be about four yards (meters) from the end zone at that point if the distance between Earth and the Sun is the same as the length of an American football field.…
There will be a strike at more than 300 Starbucks (SBUX) shops in the U.S. on Tuesday, and more than 5,000 workers are expected to walk off the job. The strike will last for five days, ending later on Christmas Eve. Starbucks Workers United, which speaks for workers at 525 stores across the country, said that on Monday, more than 60 stores in 12 big U.S. cities, such as New York, Los Angeles, Boston, and Seattle, were closed. The strike happened because talks between Starbucks and the union had broken down over pay, staffing, and schedules. The union also said…
The US is going to ban TikTok in less than a month, but President-elect Donald Trump told Reuters on Sunday that he’d like to keep the app around. Trump told supporters at an event in Phoenix, Arizona, “We’re going to have to start thinking because, you know, we did go on TikTok and we had a great response with billions and billions of views.” “A chart was brought to me. It was a record, and it was so beautiful to look at. I thought, ‘Maybe we should keep this sucker around for a while.'” It is said that Trump met…
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is trying an iOS app that can be used by anyone for its chatbot Grok. Until now, only X users could use Grok. The app can receive real-time data from the web and X and is now live in Australia and a few other countries in beta. It has generative AI features like rewriting text, summarising long paragraphs, a little Q&A, and it can also make images from text prompts. “Grok is an AI-powered assistant that is meant to be as honest, helpful, and interested as possible.” The listing says, “Get answers to any question,…
OpenAI released o3, a new family of AI thinking models, on Friday. The company says that o3 is more advanced than o1 and everything else it has released. This seems to be because of scaling test-time compute, which we wrote about last month. However, OpenAI also says that it trained its o-series of models using a new safety approach. OpenAI shared new research on “deliberative alignment” on Friday. This is the latest way that the company makes sure AI reasoning models stay in line with the values of the people who build them. This is how the company got o1…
Bluesky, a social network, has released a new version of its app that adds a different tab for mentions in notifications, protections against username squatting, and new ways to sort replies. Along with v1.96, the company said it would add a new tab called “mentions” that would let you see these posts separately. Up until now, all of your alerts were in one tab. People who want to steal your Bluesky username can’t do it because Bluesky reserves your original Bluesky username with the.bsky.social suffix when you change your username to a custom domain. The platform said it only holds…
In 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke to Congress about how dangerous AI can be. In that case, he told American politicians that he didn’t own any shares in OpenAI. This is something he has said many times, saying that he only runs the company because he loves it. At the same time, Altman recently said that he did have a share in OpenAI through a Sequoia fund, which he has since sold. Altman was asked what kind of stake he might have if OpenAI is able to become a for-profit business in an interview with Bari Weiss that came…
Google has released what it calls a new “reasoning” AI model. It’s still in the testing phase, though, and based on our short tests, it could be much better. The new model can be found in Google’s AI prototyping tool, AI Studio. It’s called Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental, which is a mouthful. A model card says that it is “best for multimodal understanding, reasoning, and coding” and that it can “reason over the most complex problems” in tech, math, and physics. Gavin Kilpatrick, who is in charge of products at AI Studio, wrote on X that Gemini 2.0 Flash…
Apple made some big changes to the base models of the iPhone 16 line, but the iPhone 16 Pro models looked the same as they have for the past few years. But it looks like Apple is making some big changes to the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s design, at least if these fake renders from the Russian YouTube account Wylsacom are correct. Based on the rumours that this mock-up is based on, the iPhone 17 Pro Max will look nothing like the iPhones that came before it. A new horizontal triple-lens camera section is on the back panel. It looks…
OpenAI announced on Monday that ChatGPT-powered internet search will be open to all users. This makes OpenAI an even bigger threat to Google’s dominance. The tech company in San Francisco added search engine features to its ChatGPT generative AI chatbot at the end of October, but only paid users could use them. The company said that the new public feature lets users get “fast, timely answers” with links to relevant web sources. This is information that they could only get by using a standard search engine before. With the update to ChatGPT, the AI robot can give you information from…
Twitter’s Threads is testing a tool that will let you schedule posts, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said. People who get to test this function won’t be able to plan when to reply. According to him, they want to find a good mix between giving people more control over their Threads posts and still letting people talk to each other in real time. In the three-dot menu in the composer, people who are part of the test will see a link to plan posts. All of your planned posts will show up in the drafts folder. You can change…
It is now being looked into by two Digital Services Act (DSA) authorities. On Tuesday, the European Union said it had started a formal process to look into election risks, especially the recent elections in Romania. The investigation will mostly look into TikTok’s recommender systems and the “risks linked to the coordinated inauthentic manipulation or automated exploitation of the service,” as the Commission put it. The EU will also look at how TikTok handles political ads and material that people pay for. The group said in a press release, “As for both parts, one of the things the Commission is…
For a Facebook security breach that touched millions of users and that the company told everyone about in September 2018, Meta was fined €251 million, which is about $263 million. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) issued the fine on Tuesday in line with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It is not the biggest GDPR fine Meta has received since the rules went into effect more than five years ago, but it is a significant punishment for a single security breach. Since July 2017, when the company was still called Facebook, a video upload feature came out with a…
In early 2025, Waymo will start trying its self-driving car technology in Tokyo. This will be the first time that the Alphabet company’s robotaxis have driven on public roads outside of the U.S. Waymo is taking its technology on “road trips” to different places to test it. Each city has its own challenges, which is why the move to Japan is part of this program. The Waymo robotaxis will have to deal with moving on the left side of the road and a very crowded city in Tokyo. Up until now, those road trips have mostly been to a dozen…
Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI researcher, was found dead in an apartment in San Francisco eight days before his body was found. The 26-year-old’s name was in a lawsuit against his former company that could have big effects on the future of AI and the internet. The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December of last year, saying they used “millions” of stories from the newspaper without permission to train their popular ChatGPT model. The companies have said they didn’t break any copyright laws. Business Insider saw court papers that show on November 18 the lawyers for the…
Apple (AAPL) has a lot to be happy about on the 44th anniversary of its initial public offering (IPO). The tech industry leader has had a year of pretty steady growth, with shares going up by almost 29%. This week, Apple also released a software update that adds a link between Siri and ChatGPT, which is a long-awaited step forward for artificial intelligence (AI). Apple has been in the spotlight a lot lately since the iOS 18.1 update added Apple Intelligence. Users are still getting used to the new AI features on their iPhones. Some of the new tools that…
Preeti Lobana has been hired by Google to run its India business. This is a key post that had been open since July, when Sanjay Gupta was promoted to Asia-Pacific president. Lobana used to be vice president of advertising technology at Google. He now leads the company as it promotes its AI products in India, where competition in the digital market is growing. In 2016, she started working for Google. India is one of Google’s most important foreign markets. The company has spent billions of dollars to help Indians of all ages get online and to digitise their businesses. The…
OpenAI has finally put out the real-time video features for ChatGPT that it showed off almost seven months ago. During a livestream on Thursday, the company said that Advanced Voice Mode, ChatGPT’s tool for having conversations that sound like they are between people, is getting better. People who have paid for ChatGPT Plus, Team, or Pro can use the app to point their phones at things and get responses almost instantly. With advanced voice mode and vision, you can also share your screen and see what’s on someone else’s screen. It can, for instance, explain different settings choices or offer…
Microsoft has shown off the newest member of its Phi family of creative AI models. Microsoft says that the new model, called Phi-4, is better than the ones that came before it in a number of ways, especially when it comes to answering maths problems. That’s partly because the training data was better. As of Thursday night, Phi-4 can only be used for study under a Microsoft research license agreement and on Microsoft’s brand-new Azure AI Foundry development platform, which has very limited access. The size of this Microsoft small language model is 14 billion parameters, and it will be…
Just before the holidays, WhatsApp revealed that it had added new video calling features, such as the ability to choose who can join a group video call, better resolution, and a new look for the call tab on the desktop. Meta has taken another step towards making WhatsApp a good alternative to Google Meet or Zoom for both personal and business talks. You can already call everyone in a group chat because the texting app lets you do that. But sometimes you don’t need or want to call everyone in the group and bother them. Now, the company is adding…
The honest selfie-sharing app BeReal, which is popular with Gen Z, changed how it asks users to agree to tracking right after it was bought by the French mobile games company Voodoo this summer. A privacy report has been made against the pop-up that happened as a result. If the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is broken, companies can be fined up to 4% of their global annual sales. European private rights not-for-profit Group The complaint, which was made by noyb, says that BeReal is using sneaky methods (also known as “dark patterns”) to get people to agree to…
A few years ago, Australia passed a law that requires platform giants like Meta, which owns Facebook, and Google, which owns YouTube, to work with news publishers to pay for resharing media. Big Tech had to make deals with local news sites because of the News Media Bargaining Code. But Meta has stopped advertising news around the world on its platforms, and in March, it shocked Australian publishers by telling them that deals worth about $70 million would not be renewed. After Meta’s shocking move a few months ago, the Australian government is getting ready to respond. According to the…
Skype, the phone and messaging app owned by Microsoft, has quietly stopped letting users add cash to their accounts and buy Skype phone numbers. This is bad news for anyone who still uses it. Instead, Skype is switching into SaaS mode, which means that users are being forced to sign up for monthly plans for both local and international Skype-to-phone calls. This will likely affect millions of people. Microsoft said last year that Skype had 36 million daily active users, which is the most current information they gave out. Microsoft did not make the change official: It wasn’t known about…
Google revealed Willow, its newest and best quantum computer chip, on Monday. The tech world was interested in Google’s claims about the chip’s speed and dependability, but it was an even stranger claim tucked away in a blog post about the chip that really got people’s attention. Hartmut Neven, the founder of Google Quantum AI, said in a blog post that this chip was so fast that it must have drawn computer power from other worlds. So, the chip’s work shows that there are multiple universes and that “we live in a multiverse.” This Is The Passage: It’s amazing how…
Generative AI has been used in a lot of bad ways, like making up academic papers and copying artists. Now it seems to be showing up in state efforts to influence people. A recent report from the Massachusetts-based threat intelligence company Recorded Future says that commercial AI voice generation products, such as tech made public by the hot startup ElevenLabs, “very likely” helped with a recent campaign. The report talks about a Russian-backed effort to weaken Europe’s support for Ukraine. It was called “Operation Undercut,” and it used AI to make voiceovers for fake or false “news” videos. The videos…
A California district court judge said on Tuesday that Automattic and its CEO Matt Mullenweg must allow WP Engine to access WordPress.org again. Mullenweg owns this site and it is a library for themes and plugins. Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin said that WP Engine should be able to access WordPress.org, themes, plugins, and sites the same way they did on September 20, when Mullenweg called WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress” at an event and started a public war against it. Soon after, he stopped WP Engine from going to WordPress.org. A third-party WordPress hosting company called WP Engine sued Automattic…
Data-mining software company Palantir Technologies recently passed Pentagon contractor and aerospace supplier RTX in market cap. This shows that the outlook for the military industry is changing. Palantir provides AI-powered tools to government, civilian, and business clients. This year, the company’s shares have gone up 345%, valuing the business at $174 billion at the end of the trading day on Friday. That is more than RTX, which has a market cap of $157 billion and has grown 40% this year. RTX is the parent company of Raytheon, Collins Aerospace, and Pratt & Whitney. It’s also more than Boeing’s $115 billion,…
(Parhlo World) -The Information reported on Sunday that President-elect Trump’s transition team has asked Google, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, and three other big tech companies to a meeting in the middle of December to talk about how to stop people from selling drugs online. The report also said that on Thursday, staff from the three tech giants, as well as Snap and TikTok, were emailed by someone working for Trump’s transition team and Jim Carroll, who was Trump’s drug czar during his first term. The emails were meant to invite the staff to a call. The person told the Information that…
Mom of Elon Musk, Maye Musk, was on FOX Business not long ago. She talked about how people see billionaires, her son’s friendship with Trump, and even how she sat in on Elon’s meetings. Maye had some interesting things to say about Elon Musk and how the media talk about him when she talked to host Stuart Varney. Maye said right away that she likes “to sit in on meetings” with Vivek Ramaswamy and her son, among other well-known people. She gave a sneak peek into these meetings by saying that they had just talked about getting government workers back…
OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot platform, ChatGPT, now has a new, very expensive membership plan. Confirming rumors that came out this morning, OpenAI announced ChatGPT Pro, a new $200-a-month plan that gives users full access to all of OpenAI’s models, including the o1 “reasoning” model. “Power users of ChatGPT will be interested in ChatGPT Pro,” said Jason Wei, a member of OpenAI’s technical staff, during a livestreamed press conference on Thursday. “These are the people who are already pushing the models to the limits of their abilities in tasks like math, programming, and writing.” o1 and other thinking models try to check…
This year, Bluesky has grown very quickly thanks to a lively community of posters, the ability for users to make their own changes, and a decentralized system that doesn’t force users to follow the decisions of a billionaire CEO. But one thing that isn’t clear about Bluesky is how the platform will make money in the long run and whether it will use ads, which are a popular way for websites to make money. So far, $15 million has been raised for the business, and CEO Jay Graber tells Parhlo World that other investors are already interested. Bluesky has hinted…
A commercial robotaxi service has been started in Abu Dhabi by the ride-hailing giant Uber and the Chinese company WeRide, which makes technology for self-driving cars. This is Uber’s first foreign service for self-driving cars. Uber has been quickly forming agreements with self-driving car companies in a wide range of industries, such as delivery, ride-hailing, and trucking. Wayve, Serve Robotics, Aurora Innovation, Waabi, and other companies are also partners. Still, investors are worried that companies like Waymo and maybe even Tesla, which are making new technologies, will be too good for companies like Uber to compete with. Waymo announced plans…
Display expert Ross Young says that Apple’s long-rumored folding iPhone will come out in late 2026. It will give the “stagnating” market for foldables a new spark. For years, we’ve been hoping for an iPhone that folds in half, and more and more people think it will happen in 2026. There’s more rumours about a folding iPhone. A new report from a well-known industry expert says Apple will enter the foldables market in 2026 and give the whole industry a boost. It comes from Ross Young of Display Supply Chain, a company that helps tech companies plan for the future…
Because of an unprecedented cyberattack on phone companies like AT&T and Verizon, U.S. officials have told people to use encrypted texting apps to keep their messages safe from hackers in other countries. It was called “Salt Typhoon” by Microsoft, and it was one of the biggest leaks of U.S. information in history. It hasn’t been fully fixed yet. During a news call on Tuesday, officials refused to say when the country’s phone lines would be free of outsiders. Government sources told NBC News that China broke into AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen Technologies to spy on users. A representative for the…
Trump’s choice to lead the Drug Enforcement Administration is pulling out just two days after being named. He is claiming the “gravity” of the job as the reason. On Sunday, Trump chose Chad Chronister, who is the sheriff of Hillsborough County, Florida, to lead the DEA. He said it was the “honour of a lifetime” and that he was “deeply humbled by this opportunity to serve our nation” at the time. But on Tuesday, Chronister wrote on X that he had changed his mind. “Over the past several days, as the gravity of this very important responsibility set in, I’ve…
People thought it was one of the worst tech deals ever when Elon Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter. After two years, an election, and a boom in creative AI, it seems like a better deal now. Wedbush Securities tech analyst Dan Ives said soon after the deal finished in October 2022 that it would “go down as one of the most overpaid tech acquisitions in the history of M&A deals on the Street.” Musk borrowed $13 billion to buy Twitter, which is now called X. This deal has turned out to be the worst merger financing deal for banks…
Another safety expert has told OpenAI that they are leaving the company. Rosie Campbell, a policy worker at OpenAI, wrote on Substack on Saturday that her last week at the company was over. She said she was leaving because Miles Brundage, the senior policy assistant who led the AGI Readiness team, quit in October. The AGI Readiness team was broken up when he left, and its members were sent to work in different parts of the company. The AGI Readiness team told the company how safe it is for the world to handle AGI, which is a hypothetical form of…
This is how Amazon’s AWS cloud computing unit has slowly become a big player in the call/contact center space. In 2017, Amazon launched Amazon Connect, a cloud-based (and AI-focused) call center service. These days, businesses like U.S. Bank, Air Canada, and Dish Network use the site for customer service. The company announced a number of updates to Connect at its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. These updates, which are driven by the Amazon Q platform and focus on AI, are not a surprise. The company that made AWS first started out as a voice-only service that worked on bringing AI…
These days, it seems like every tech company and startup is working on an AI agent or program that can complete complex tasks with little to no human intervention. When they become accessible, these agents will have a lot of complicated tasks to accomplish, like making hotel and trip reservations and payments. The founders of the new business /dev/agents, who were instrumental in creating Android in the early days of smartphones, feel that a new OS is necessary to unleash the full potential of AI agents. Android co-founder and CEO David Singleton (shown above) stated, “As a developer, it was…