All eyes are on how the new Trump administration in the U.S. will deal with China Tech in the coming years. In the meantime, one of the biggest apps to come out of the country has been hacked by its northern neighbor. Due to concerns for national security, Canada has directed that ByteDance’s operations in Canada be shut down. This includes the offices of TikTok Technology Canada, Inc. The risks don’t apply to the app itself—people can still download, use, and make content for TikTok, and businesses can still put ads on it. The country’s Minister of Innovation, Science, and…
Author: David
Pebble is a rival to X. Gabor Cselle used to be the CEO and co-founder of Pebble. He has now joined OpenAI to work on a secret project. According to LinkedIn, Cselle has worked at OpenAI since October, but he only told everyone about it in a post on X yesterday. He wrote, “Will share more about what I’m working on when the time is right.” “I am already learning a lot.” This is Cselle’s second time starting a business. He gave his first one to Google, which was a mobile email startup backed by Y Combinator. Namo Media, his…
The controversial update to X’s block function is now live. It lets people see your public posts even if you have blocked them. Some people are against this change because they think it’s unsafe for blocked users to see their posts. People who have been blocked still can’t follow, interact with, or send direct texts to the person who blocked them. In an old version of X’s help page, it says that users who are blocked can’t see a user’s list of followers and people they follow. The company has since changed the page to remove that mention. Users can…
Meta announced on Sunday that Threads, its social network, now has 275 million monthly active users (MAUs). “Every month, more than 275 million people use @Threads. Thanks to everyone who has helped us so far. Adam Mosseri, who runs Threads and Instagram for Meta, said, “There’s a lot more to do and a lot of things to fix, but there’s something exciting about this place.” When it started in July 2023, Threads was meant to take advantage of the millions of users who were leaving X after Elon Musk bought it. It quickly gained users and is now one of…
Finally, OpenAI’s answer to Google is here. The company released ChatGPT Search on Thursday. It is an improvement over the SearchGPT version it showed off this summer. OpenAI says that ChatGPT Search, which is part of the ChatGPT platform, will draw from a number of online sources to give “timely answers” to questions. ChatGPT Search uses a tweaked version of OpenAI’s GPT-4o model to pull information and pictures from the web, such as sports scores, news, stock quotes, and more, along with links to relevant sources. You can then ask follow-up questions to make your search more specific. You can…
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a Reddit AMA that one big reason the company can’t ship goods as often as it’d like is that it doesn’t have enough computing power. “These models have all become very complicated,” he wrote in answer to a question about why OpenAI was taking so long to make its next crop of AI models. “We also have a lot of restrictions and have to make tough choices about how to use our computers to work on many great ideas.” There are a lot of stories that say OpenAI has had trouble getting enough computer…
Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, hinted on Thursday at a better, “agenttic” version of the company’s Alexa helper, which would be able to do things for users. During Amazon’s Q3 2024 earnings call, he said, “I think that the next generation of these assistants and generative AI applications will be better at not only answering questions and summarizing, indexing, and aggregating data, but also taking actions.” “And I think we’d be pretty good at that with Alexa.” As Jassy said, Amazon is still “re-architecting the brain” of Alexa with “a new set of foundation models” that the company wants…
Reports say that OpenAI is working with TSMC and Broadcom to make its own AI chip. It is also starting to train its AI with AMD chips along with Nvidia chips. According to Reuters, OpenAI has given up on its plans to build a network of chip plants, at least for now. The company will instead focus on making chips in-house. Reuters claims that OpenAI and Broadcom have been working together for months to make an AI chip for running models. This chip could be ready as early as 2026. Also Read: Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang, Ceo of Nvidia,…
Today, Elon Musk’s social network X changed the prices and limits of its APIs. It also announced yearly plans with a discount. The company raised the price of the basic API tier from $100 to $200 and said that this plan would get more destinations and higher limits. We are adding new pricing choices and limits to our Self Serve X API. Here are the most important parts. Â Launching annual subscriptions, which can be bought at a price! Basic: the monthly fee will go up from $100 to $200, and there will be more endpoints and higher boundaries. Free:…
Google’s Project Astra is a big attempt to make AI apps and “agents” that can understand in real time and across multiple modes. Tech from Project Astra won’t be released until at least next year. The timeline was given by Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, during the company’s Q3 results call on Tuesday. He said, “Google is building places where AI can see and think about the world around you.” “Project Astra shows us what the future will be like.” Things like this will be available as early as 2025, thanks to our work. Google showed off Project Astra at…
The hardest part of Kat and Mike Stickler’s divorce was figuring out how to split their TikTok account, which had millions of fans and made them a lot of money, according to the WSJ. More and more couples and divorce lawyers are having trouble figuring out how to value social media accounts and what to keep when a pair breaks up. Kat Stickler took over the couple’s TikTok account, and her growing fan base helped her buy a new house. Her husband, on the other hand, had his YouTube account shut down. Reports say he changed careers and is now…
The web interface for Google Calendar is being updated to match Google’s Material Design 3 standards, and dark mode support is being added. The company said that the change makes controls like buttons, dialogues, and sidebars more “modern and clear.” You can see that the edges of buttons and dialogue boxes have been rounded off in screenshots on the Google Workspace blog. The colour schemes have also been tweaked. Google is also changing the Calendar UI’s buttons and fonts to make them easier to read. For me, the best thing about this change is that it now works in dark…
India now has YouTube’s affiliate program, which lets video uploaders tag products in their videos and make referral fees. This comes just in time for the Indian holiday season. The business is working with Flipkart, an online store owned by Walmart, and Myntra, a fashion store, to let people add products to their catalogues. Creators must have at least 10,000 subscribers and have their channels mentioned in the partner program in order to be able to join the affiliate program. Some YouTube creators in India can already list their own products on their channels. Now, creators can also tag goods…
The first chief economist at OpenAI is Aaron Chatterji. He was previously the chief economist at the Commerce Department under President Joe Biden and a senior economist on President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. Since Chatterji is also a professor of business and public policy at Duke, he will be in charge of research at OpenAI that looks at how AI might affect job chances and economic growth. Notably, Chatterji helped make sure that the 2022 CHIPS Act was carried out by the Biden administration. This law gave the U.S. government about $280 billion to fund the development of…
As of Tuesday, LinkedIn users started to notice that their follower numbers were going down quickly, and sometimes by hundreds of users all at once. Since LinkedIn hadn’t said anything public at the time, a lot of people started to think that the problem might have been caused by them getting rid of fake accounts. Some people even talked to people who knew about the problem and said it was because the company decided to get rid of fake, idle, or duplicate accounts. Others used the chance to talk about how they could help LinkedIn users keep their accounts from…
Metal 3D printing is a well-known method, but it’s often too hard to use on a large scale because it’s too complicated, expensive, or inaccurate. With $14 million from Nvidia and Boeing, Freeform wants to change that by creating a new method for adding metal to metal prints that, as the company says, changes the game. There is also an AI aspect to this. Erik Palitsch, who is CEO, and TJ Ronacher, who is president, were both co-founders and worked at SpaceX as chief architects and lead analysts on the Merlin engines and other projects. They saw the promise of…
As of Monday, the Indian company Groww said in a statement that it had paid $159.4 million in taxes when it moved its headquarters from the U.S. to India. Almost a dozen Indian startups are moving their headquarters from the U.S. and Singapore to India in order to better follow Indian rules and make it easier for them to go public in the country. Moving to a new home country causes a tax event for both owners and the new business. The U.S. and many other developed markets still have slow IPO markets, but India has become a hotbed for…
In Parhlo World ongoing Women in AI series, which aims to give women academics and others working in AI their well-deserved (and long-overdue) time in the spotlight, Marissa Hummon, chief technology officer at Utilidata, an energy company, was interviewed. Hummon is working to make the electric grid more sustainable. Hummon told Parhlo World, “The work I do at Utilidata is challenging the status quo of the utility industry.” He also said that AI will help the utility sector run more efficiently. “Utilities will be able to run a clean, modern, and reliable grid that will offer better service to the…
A new business wants to be one of Europe’s first “AI compute” hyperscalers, and it uses renewable energy as a big part of its pitch to potential users. There is more demand than ever for “compute” because of the AI gold rush. “Compute” includes the processing power, infrastructure, and tools needed to do things like run algorithms, run machine learning models, and process data. The demand for GPUs (graphics processing units) and other AI gear has helped Nvidia a lot. It has grown into a $3 trillion powerhouse thanks to this demand. Along with Nvidia, a whole industry of cloud…
The social network X (formerly Twitter) changed its Privacy Policy on Wednesday to say that it would let third-party “collaborators” use X data to build their AI models unless users choose not to. Elon Musk, the owner of X, used X user data to train xAI’s Grok AI chatbot, which led to a probe by the EU’s top privacy watchdog. The company hadn’t yet changed its policy to say that third parties could also use its data. The change to the policy suggests that X, like Reddit and other media outlets, is thinking about selling data to AI companies as…
Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, tells people who work from home to either go back to the office or quit. Reuters reported on Thursday that an Amazon executive recently told workers who don’t like the new five-day in-person work policy that “there are other companies around,” which is likely code for companies where they can work from home. Andy Jassy, Amazon’s CEO, told workers last month that there will be a full return-to-office starting in 2025. This is more than the three days that have been allowed for about the last year. Most tech CEOs have said no to remote…
The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, said on Thursday that Prabhakar Raghavan is leaving his job as executive in charge of the company’s search engine and ads products. Nick Fox, who has worked for Google for a long time, will take over for Raghavan, who is now top technologist. There was a statement from Pichai that Prabhakar was going to take a big step forward in his career. “He will become Chief Technologist, Google, after 12 years of leading teams across Google. This is a return to his computer science roots.” He will work closely with me and other Google…
While lawmakers in most countries are still talking about how to regulate AI, the European Union is already ahead of the game. Earlier this year, it passed a risk-based framework for controlling AI apps. The law went into effect in August, but the full pan-EU AI governance regime is still being worked out. For example, Codes of Practice are still being made. However, over the next few months and years, the law’s tiered provisions will start to apply to companies that make AI apps and models, so the compliance clock is already running. Checking to see if and how AI…
Dane Stuckey, who used to be CISO of analytics company Palantir, has joined OpenAI as its new CISO. He will work with Matt Knight, who is OpenAI’s head of security. In a post on X Tuesday evening, Stuckey told everyone about the change. “Safety is central to OpenAI’s mission,” he said. “We must meet the highest standards for compliance, trust, and security to protect the hundreds of millions of people who use our products, make sure that democratic institutions can get the most out of these technologies, and push the development of safe AGI for everyone.” I’m so looking forward…
As calls for quick action on climate change continue to grow, new tools are being developed around the world to help remove the heat-trapping greenhouse gases from the air. A Direct Air Capture (DAC) startup called Octavia Carbon is showing the way in Africa. Octavia was started in Kenya two years ago. It makes DAC machines that it uses to pull carbon out of the air and store it underground. Carbon is a greenhouse gas that is the main cause of global warming. After working on the technology for a while, Octavia started capturing carbon in February. Now, the company…
Even though Apple’s Vision Pro didn’t really change the market, the company is still working on headsets that mix the real and digital worlds. Mark Gurman of Bloomberg says that Apple’s next big mixed reality release could be as early as next year. It will be a Vision headset that costs around $2,000, which isn’t exactly cheap but less expensive than the $3,500 Vision Pro. It would cost less because Apple would use cheaper materials and a processor that isn’t as strong. It also wouldn’t have EyeSight, which lets you see what’s going on with your eyes when you’re not…
Top U.S. officials have called the possibility of mischief by hackers with ties to China a “epoch-defining threat.” It is one of the biggest cybersecurity threats the U.S. faces right now. U.S. intelligence officials say that hackers working for the Chinese government have been getting deep into the networks of U.S. key infrastructure like transportation, energy, and water providers in the past few months. The goal, according to officials, is to set the stage for hacking that could be very damaging if there is a future fight between China and the U.S., like if China invades Taiwan. “China’s hackers are…
SpaceX launched its huge Starship for the first time and then brought the booster back to the launch site and caught it with a pair of big “chopsticks.” The company’s Starbase site in southeast Texas was the site of this test flight, which was the fifth in the Starship progress program. The almost 400-foot-tall Starship is the center of SpaceX’s stated goal to bring life to other planets and, more quickly, NASA’s Artemis campaign to bring people back to the moon’s surface. SpaceX wants to quickly reuse the whole Starship vehicle, which is made up of an upper stage (also…
Since the beginning, Meta’s Threads has tried to use the network effects of its other social networks, like Facebook and Instagram, to its advantage by testing different ways to cross-post and promote Threads posts on a carousel. These days, the business is trying out a new tool that will let you share Instagram Reels straight to Threads. Alessandro Paluzzi, who tracks apps, found that Threads is working on a new feature that will let you choose Reels from your account and post them on Threads. The company told TechCrunch that it is testing the function after all. Paluzzi said that…
The U.S. Justice Department has made a broad proposal to force Google to sell off parts of its business. This could be the first big corporate breakup in 40 years and change the shape of one of the most valuable tech companies in the world. On Tuesday, the Department of Justice and a group of state attorneys general sent in a 32-page (PDF) document outlining possible ways to stop Google from having a monopoly on search and search ads. The suggested framework for remedies was sent to U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, who ruled against Google in a landmark antitrust…
Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are spreading the idea that people can use everyday language to ask AI to answer their questions, write their proposals, or draw pictures. Meanwhile, a London-based startup called Basecamp Research has raised $60 million to take on a new challenge: making an AI that can not only answer any question about biology and the biodiversity of the natural world, but also come up with new ideas that humans could not come up with on their own. The CEO of Basecamp Research, Glen Gower, said in an interview, “There is a huge data gap right now…
Some Harvard students made news on Wednesday when they added facial recognition to a pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses. The do-it-yourself project is the newest story to make people worry about their privacy when it comes to technology that is everywhere. As more and more people have cams, the problem has become more important. How we connect is also very important to this conversation. The need for a remote computer raises its own security and privacy issues. When Amazon, Ring’s parent company, and the police get involved, things get even worse. Plumerai has been around since 2017 and its main…
When Adam Selipsky quit as CEO of Amazon’s AWS cloud computing unit, it came as a big surprise. It may have been just as surprising that Matt Garman took over after him. Garman started working for Amazon as an intern in 2005. He started working full-time there in 2006 and worked on the first AWS products. The last job Garman had before becoming CEO was senior vice president for AWS sales, marketing, and global services. He knows the business better than almost anyone else. In a chat I had last week, Garman said that he hasn’t made any big changes…
Klarna, the buy-now-pay-later company based in Stockholm that is very close to going public, is still changing its board. The FT says that seven directors have just agreed to remove investor Mikael Walther from Klarna’s eight-person board, almost eight years after he started. Walther is close with Klarna co-founder Victor Jacobsson, who is still a big shareholder and is said to be a bother to co-founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski, who has been CEO of the company for almost 20 years since Jacobsson left in 2012. For Klarna, this is the second big change in their board this year. Once he joined…
Since Saturday, some YouTube videos with songs by Adele, Green Day, Bob Dylan, Nirvana, and R.E.M. have not been able to be played in the United States. Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” is one example. If you try to play it, whether it’s the album version or a live performance, you are told, “This video contains content from SESAC.” You can’t get it in your country. There are times when you can even watch an ad before the news. Not all videos of these acts are blocked, though. It’s not clear if the videos that can be played are not…
A new estimate from investor Fidelity says that Elon Musk’s X is now worth less than a fifth of the $44 billion that was paid for it. New information from Fidelity’s Blue Chip Growth Fund shows that the asset manager’s share in X is now worth about $4.19 million. This is because it helped Musk buy the social network that used to be called Twitter. The fund has lost 78.7% of the value of the shares it owns in X since the end of August. According to regulatory records, Fidelity had first put $19.66 million into X through the Blue…
California Governor Gavin Newsom looked at 38 AI-related bills in September. These included the very controversial SB 1047, which the state’s lawmakers sent to him to sign. On Sunday, he blocked SB 1047, which was California’s controversial AI bill that tried to stop AI disasters. However, this month he signed more than a dozen other AI bills into law. These bills try to deal with the most important problems in artificial intelligence, such as the risk of Al Gore, deepfake nudes made by AI image generators, and Hollywood companies making AI copies of dead actors. In a press release, Governor…
The famous British actress Dame Maggie Smith has died at the age of 89. She was best known for her parts in Downton Abbey and the Harry Potter films. Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin, her kids, said in a statement that she died early Friday morning, September 27, 2024. “It is with great sadness that we have to tell you that Dame Maggie Smith has died,” the statement said. “She died peacefully in the hospital, surrounded by family and friends.” Family members of Smith thanked the staff at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for their “care and unstinting kindness” during her…
There is a big fight going on in the world of WordPress, which is one of the most famous tools for building and hosting websites. There is a fight going on between Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, and WP Engine, which runs WordPress-built websites. The WordPress platform is free and open source, and it runs about 40% of all blogs on the internet. Websites can run their own WordPress instance or use a solution provider like Automattic or WP Engine to get a solution that is ready to use right away. In a blog post…
The week’s OpenAI news stories may be mostly about departures. But Anna Makanju, the company’s VP of global affairs, also said some interesting things about AI bias that caught our attention. At the UN’s Summit of the Future event on Tuesday, Makanju was on a panel that talked about how new “reasoning” models like OpenAI’s o1 could make AI much less biassed. How? By being more honest about their biases in their answers and following the rules more closely that tell them not to reply in “harmful” ways, she said. Makanju said that models like o1 “actually take longer and…