There are cheaper thermostats that work just as well, but once you put the Nest, you won’t want to use anything else. One of the first things I bought when I moved into my first house last month was a used third-generation Nest Learning Thermostat. Since I’ve lived in an apartment in New York City for a long time, I mostly watched the device from a distance and wondered how a thermostat, of all things, became so important to Google’s hardware play. Of course, I could have picked a better time, since the fourth-generation device just came out. Another person…
Author: David
The rise in AI is increasing the need for data centers, which in turn increases the amount of water used. (In data centers, water is used to cool down the computers.) FT says that between 2019 and 2023, water use will have increased by almost two-thirds in Virginia, which has the most data centers in the world, going from 1.13 billion gallons to 1.85 billion gallons. Many people say the trend, which is happening all over the world, can’t last. The big data center company Microsoft says that 42% of the water it used in 2023 came from “areas with…
PostEx is a Pakistani company that helps online stores with shipping and money matters. Parhlo World has learned that the company is about to expand into new markets, starting with Saudi Arabia this year. On the phone, Muhammad Omer Khan, founder and CEO of PostEx, said, “We want to go into other markets to really disrupt them because we see the gap.” There is about 1.5% of Pakistan’s total retail market that is made up of online shopping. This number has grown by 50% in the last year. Most likely, PostEx is a part of that growth. Since 95% of…
What’s the point of chatting with a human-like bot if it’s an unreliable narrator — and has a colorless personality? That’s the question I’ve been turning over in my head since I began testing Gemini Live, Google’s take on OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode, last week. Gemini Live is an attempt at a more engaging chatbot experience — one with realistic voices and the freedom to interrupt the bot at any point. Gemini Live is “custom-tuned to be intuitive and have a back-and-forth, actual conversation,” Sissie Hsiao, GM for Gemini experiences at Google, told TechCrunch in May. “[It] can provide information…
The man who got the most attention at the first White House Creator Economy Conference wasn’t a TikTok or YouTube star. President Joe Biden was the one who emphasised how social media users can change people’s minds. President Biden said of content makers, “Until about three or four months ago, I didn’t pay very much attention, following you guys.” He said that his niece told him to read more about how social media gives more people the chance to reach a huge audience. “She called me and said, ‘Pop, you need to start listening to these guys.'” That’s you guys.…
The biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, Binance, has started doing business again for users in India after being shut down for seven months for “illegally” doing business in the country. The exchange said on Thursday that it has registered with India’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), a government body whose job it is to look into financial transactions. At the FIU’s suggestion, India shut down about a dozen foreign cryptocurrency trading services at the end of last year. These included Binance, Kraken, Kucoin, and Mexc. The FIU said that offshore exchanges had to register in the country to follow the…
Elon Musk’s Grok added a new AI tool for making pictures on Tuesday night. It’s not very safe, just like the AI chatbot. In other words, you could make fake pictures of Donald Trump smoking pot on the Joe Rogan show and share them right to the X platform. But it’s not really Elon Musk’s AI company that’s making things crazy. Instead, the feature in question was created by a new company called Black Forest Labs. xAI stated that it is working with Black Forest Labs to power Grok’s image generator with its FLUX.1 model, which made the partnership public.…
In order to boost the economy of Puerto Rico, tax breaks were put in place in 2012. These breaks allowed people from the center of the United States to live and do business on the island without having to pay any capital gains taxes. Recent data shows that the large number of tech (mostly crypto) entrepreneurs who came to hide their wealth didn’t do much to improve its fortunes. Some people have instead left a mess of unfinished business behind them, according to a new report from the New York Times. The report focuses on Brock Pierce, a 43-year-old former…
The joint X Spaces event between Elon Musk and Donald Trump seems to have failed on Monday afternoon. The owner of X was supposed to talk to the former President at 5 p.m. PT, but when people tried to join at that time, they got an error message. When X tried to join the Space, it showed a message that said, “This Space is not.” This much-anticipated talk, which Trump and Musk have been promoting, was meant to mark the former president’s return to X. Musk called the Spaces event a “conversation,” and it began at 5:42 p.m. PT. The…
On Monday, the FBI said it had taken the computers of Radar (also known as Dispossessor), a ransomware and extortion gang. At the time this was written, Radar’s website had a message from the police that said, “This website has been seized.” It’s a rare win for the FBI, which has been working hard with law enforcement around the world to stop the spread of ransomware. The FBI said in a statement that they took the gang’s domains and computers in the UK and Germany. The statement came from the FBI’s Cleveland, Ohio location. The government says that Radar/Dispossessor has…
Muhammad Yunus, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has been picked to lead Bangladesh’s temporary government. This comes after the country’s former prime minister, Sheik Hasina, quit and left the country after weeks of violence. The day Ms. Hasina left was called Bangladesh’s “second liberation day” by Mr. Yunus, who was a loud critic of her. What do we know about the Nobel Prize winner who is 84 years old? Banker For Poor People The Muslim traders who raised Mr. Yunus had nine children. He was born in the city of Chittagong on the coast of Bangladesh. He went to…
Soon, Reddit users will see descriptions made by AI at the top of search results. On Reddit’s earnings call on Tuesday, co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman told investors that the company is going to test search result pages that use AI to “summarize and recommend content.” He said that this would help people “dive deeper” into material and find new Reddit groups. Huffman said that Reddit will use both its own technology and technology from other companies to power the feature. Later this year, the company will start the test. Most people who have been keeping up with the company’s…
What will happen to Google Assistant has been unknown for over a year. Google used to think of its software as its crown jewel. It was an important part of both the company’s mobile and smart home plans. Google gave away Home Mini speakers five years ago as a way to expand its community. But on Tuesday, before next week’s Made by Google 2024 event, the company said that Assistant will be back, at least on the Home/Nest side of things. Because everyone had to stay home more because of the plague, Assistant and Alexa got a nice boost. For…
Monday, a U.S. District Court judge said that Google broke the law by keeping a monopoly on online search. Google will now appeal that decision. Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia’s decision is a big loss for Google. If the decision stands, it could change how the company does business and even how the internet is built. Google paid companies like Apple to make its search engine the default on their products and web browsers, according to Mehta. This was an abuse of its monopoly power in the search business. It was…
Anthropic has hired John Schulman, one of the co-founders of OpenAI, to work for them instead. The company also revealed that OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman is taking a long leave that will last until the end of the year to “relax and recharge.” Brockman has worked for the company for nine years. I’m taking a break until the end of the year. This is my first break since helping to start OpenAI nine years ago. We still need to build a safe AGI before the task is over. A product manager named Peter Deng left OpenAI not long…
The president’s office said in a statement that Bangladesh’s parliament was disbanded on Tuesday. This came one day after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina quit and left the country because of violent protests that called for her removal. It was made public hours after leaders of striking students set a deadline to dissolve parliament and said a “strict program” would begin if their deadline wasn’t met. Monday, Army Chief General Waker-Uz-Zaman said that Hasina had quit after weeks of deadly protests and that the military would set up a temporary government. Hasina, who is 76 years old, had been in charge…
A filing with the SEC shows that Warren Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, cut its position in Apple by about half, to $84.2 billion. Even though the company still has a lot of Apple stock, Buffett cut his holdings in it by 13% earlier this year, indicating that he wasn’t against selling “a little Apple” for tax reasons. The Financial Times calculated that Berkshire Hathaway made a lot of money on the sale. Before starting to buy Apple stock in 2016, Buffett had mostly avoided tech investments. This could mean that Buffett no longer believes in Apple, or he could just…
Elon Musk has been talking about Dojo for years. It is the AI machine that will be the core of Tesla’s AI plans. It’s so important to Musk that he just recently said that the AI team at the company will “double down” on Dojo as Tesla gets ready to show off its robotaxi in October. But what does Dojo really mean? Why is it so important to Tesla’s long-term plan? In short, Dojo is Tesla’s own machine that it uses to train its “Full Self-Driving” neural networks. Tesla wants to make Dojo even better so that it can fully…
Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina quit and left the country on Monday, according to news sources. More than 300 people were killed in some of the worst violence the country has seen since it was founded more than 50 years ago. A source told AFP, “She and her sister have left Ganabhaban, which is the official home of the Prime Minister, for a safer place.” It was her wish to record a speech. “But she couldn’t find a chance to do that,” the person said. Waker-Uz-Zaman, the army chief of Bangladesh, told the people of the country that a political…
The Turkish government didn’t say why the ban was in place or how long it would last. However, reports say the ban was a reaction to the Meta-owned platform taking down posts about the death of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. The Information and Communication Technologies Authority of Turkey said Friday morning that Instagram was blocked for 85 million people in the country. A post on the authority’s website said, “Instagram.com has been blocked by a decision on the date of 02/08/2024.” This was reported by local media. Turkish news outlets say that more than 50 million people in the country…
On Meta’s Q2 2024 earnings call the day before, CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about how his newest social media experiment, Threads, had reached “almost” 200 million people. The platform has now reached that number. In a post on Threads, Instagram’s CEO Adam Mosseri revealed that the app’s 200 million active users mark. Meta got to that weight in just 13 months. Mosseri wrote, “I’m happy to say that we passed the 200M mark on @threads.” “I hope that Threads can give people ideas that bring them together and help this wonderful community grow.” Threads has grown a lot. The text-based…
Microsoft has a complicated past with OpenAI. As part of a long-term partnership, Microsoft is said to have invested $13 billion in the company that makes ChatGPT. As part of the deal, Microsoft is the only cloud provider for OpenAI and uses its models in both business and consumer goods. When the tech giant filed with the SEC on Tuesday, it was the first time it called the company a “competitor.” Along with Anthropic, Amazon, and Meta, OpenAI joined a long list of AI rivals in Microsoft’s annual 10K. Thanks to OpenAI’s new SearchGPT feature, which was announced last week,…
In a memo sent to workers on Thursday, Intel said it would be letting go of more than 15% of its staff, or 15,000 people. After a bad earnings report and forecasts for the second quarter, the huge hiring is part of a big plan to cut spending by $10 billion by 2025. “Our sales have not grown as we had hoped, and we have not yet fully benefited from strong trends like AI,” CEO Pat Gelsinger wrote in a memo to workers. “Our margins are too low and our costs are too high.” We need to take bigger steps…
We’ve all been there. You’re on a road trip and get off the highway to get gas or food. After a while, Google Maps barks at you to get back on the road. Even though the company has a lot of cash and AI chips, the app still won’t let you stop when you need to. Somewhere in my brain, I thought that Wednesday, when Google said it was adding two new features to Maps, this would finally be the day that this problem would be solved. Google did not announce either of the features that would allow you to…
Apple is finally putting out some of the Apple Intelligence tools that it talked about at its June Worldwide Developers Conference. However, the spread is only happening with developer beta versions of iOS 18.1 right now. If you don’t want to deal with buggy software in its early stages, you might want to wait for the stable version later this year or the public beta release of Apple Intelligence features. You can only use Apple Intelligence features if your language and area are set to U.S. English and you are on the developer beta. This doesn’t change where you can…
Meta’s AI goals have been boosted by the fact that 500 million people in India use WhatsApp. Susan Li, CFO of Meta, said on Wednesday that India is the biggest market for Meta AI use. This is a big deal because the product just came out in India a few months ago. Li said on Meta’s earnings call for the second quarter that since it launched, people have used Meta AI for billions of searches. “We’re seeing especially good signs on WhatsApp in terms of engagement and retention,” she said. “At the same time, India has become our biggest market…
He says, “This wasn’t the right time for me or North Carolina.” The governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, dropped out of the race to be Kamala Harris’ running mate in the next election. The New York Times said that the governor made this public by posting it on his X handle. But it wasn’t clear what the choice was until Cooper made his statement on Monday night. Cooper said in a statement, “I strongly support Vice President Harris’ campaign for president.” The thought of being nominated for this part made me feel good. I know she will win. “This…
Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the Palestinian group Hamas, was killed early Wednesday morning in Iran, the group said. This caused fears of a wider escalation in a region already shaken by Israel’s offensive in Gaza and a conflict getting worse in Lebanon. The Revolutionary Guards of Iran confirmed Haniyeh’s death and said they were looking into it. He had just been to an event swearing in the new president of the country. Another official news source in Iran, IRNA, confirmed that Haniyeh had been killed and said that one of his bodyguards had also been killed at their home…
Last week, Google had both good and bad news. The good news is that for the first time, the cloud business made $10 billion for the quarter. This includes Google Workplace software as a service and Google Cloud infrastructure services. With that, it must not have been as painful to miss out on its second possible $20 billion purchase in less than a month. The first deal that didn’t go through was the long-rumored one to buy HubSpot, a CRM and marketing software company based in Boston. We never got a price for that, but the market value of the…
OpenAI started rolling out ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode on Tuesday. This was the first time users could hear GPT-4o’s very realistic voice replies. A small group of ChatGPT Plus users will be able to use the test version today. According to OpenAI, the feature will slowly be added to all Plus users in the autumn of 2024. When OpenAI first showed off GPT-4o’s voice in May, it shocked people with how quickly it responded and how much it sounded like the voice of a certain person. Sky’s voice sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson’s, who played the voice of the…
Very right-wing Late Monday night, Israeli nationalists broke into two military bases to protest the arrest and questioning of nine Israel Defence Forces reservists who are thought to have raped and abused a Palestinian prisoner so badly that he had to be taken to the hospital. On social media videos, guards at the Sde Teiman military camp and prison, which is near Beersheba in southern Israel, yell and push military police who came to question the reservists, which seems to be to protect the suspects. Israeli troops have been fighting Hamas in Gaza since their horrific terrorist attack on October…
As the failed electric vehicle (EV) startup Fisker goes through bankruptcy, one question that keeps coming up is: does Heights Capital Management, which is Fisker’s only secured backer, deserve to be at the front of the queue to get the money from the liquidation? Heights has kept saying “yes” without any doubt. But as the sides got ready for a hearing on Monday morning, new information came to light. Things were looking good until a last-minute change of plans threw everything off. Fisker and Heights agreed late Sunday night to work together for the next three weeks to come up…
Last year, Meta had a huge hit with Segment Anything, a machine learning model that could quickly and accurately find and outline anything in a picture. CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off the update on stage at SIGGRAPH on Monday. It uses video, which shows how quickly the field is changing. A vision model looks at a picture and pulls out the parts: “this is a dog, this is a tree behind the dog” (hopefully, not “this is a tree growing out of a dog”). This process is called segmentation. Even though this has been going on for a long time,…
Apple has put out a technical study that talks about the models it used to make Apple Intelligence possible. Apple Intelligence is a set of generative AI features that will be coming to iOS, macOS, and iPadOS in the coming months. In the paper, Apple responds to claims that it trained some of its models in an unethical way by saying again that it did not use private user data but instead used a mix of publicly available and licensed data for Apple Intelligence. In the paper, Apple says, “The pre-training data set is made up of……data we have licensed…
It was decided by a federal district court in New York that U.S. border officers need a warrant before they can search the electronic devices of Americans and foreigners crossing the U.S. border. The July 24 ruling is the latest court opinion to go against the U.S. government’s long-standing legal case that federal border agents should be able to access travellers’ devices at ports of entry, such as airports, seaports, and land borders, without a warrant from the court. Civil rights groups that pushed for the decision were happy with it. The decision makes it clear that border agents need…
When I saw Google’s newest ad for the first time, I thought, “Is it just me, or is this kind of bad?” It stopped making me wonder after the fourth or fifth time I saw it. It all starts with a dad telling his daughter how much he loves Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and that she “might even be the world’s number one Sydney fan.” She wants to write a love letter to the Olympic gold medallist, but she needs her dad’s help. That’s when things get weird. Yes, this is an ad for Google’s Gemini AI, so the dad tells Gemini,…
The U.K. will get Zapp’s first electric two-wheeler next month. One of Zapp Electric Vehicles’ goals is to make its electric two-wheeler name a worldwide EV business. Parhlo World has learnt exclusively that India will be one of the places where it is launched. The i300, an electric two-wheeler for city riding, will be the company’s first product. It will be released in the UK as early as next month, and then it will go to Thailand. In an interview with Parhlo World, Zapp founder and CEO Swin Chatsuwan said that the company is now expanding to India, which is…
After lowering import taxes in South Asia, Apple lowered the prices of its iPhone models by 3 to 4 percent in India. The price cuts start at 300 rupees ($3.6), which is about $3.6, and go up to 6,000 rupees ($71.7) for the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max lines. This is the first time Apple has dropped the prices of the Pro models from this generation in India. India cut the basic customs duty on cell phones from 20% to 15% in its yearly budget earlier this week, which led to this move. Statistics from the industry show that…
Google is making changes to the free version of Gemini, its AI-powered robot, so it can keep up with competitors like Anthropic and OpenAI. The updates are meant to make the platform work better and be open to more people. Google stated in May that Gemini 1.5 Flash would be a lightweight multimodal model that would be available on the web and on phones starting Thursday in 40 languages and about 230 countries. Google says that Gemini 1.5 Flash improves quality and latency, with gains that are especially clear in reasoning and understanding images. Besides being better for Google, running…
It’s possible that OpenAI wants to get into the search game and compete with big names like Google and Bing as well as newcomers like Perplexity. Thursday, the company showed off SearchGPT, a search tool that will use web sources to give “timely answers” to questions. SearchGPT looks a lot like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is a chatbot tool. You type in a question, and SearchGPT gives you web-based data and pictures with links to relevant sources. You can then use a sidebar to ask more questions or look into other connected searches. There are searches that look at where you…