Meta’s copyright battle with a group of authors, including Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, will turn on the question of whether the company’s AI tools produce works that can cannibalize the authors’ book sales. US District Court Judge Vince Chhabria spent several hours grilling lawyers from both sides after they …
Read More »Sam Altman's Eye-Scanning Orb Is Now Coming to the US
At a high-profile event in San Francisco, World announced it is launching a series of Apple-like stores, as well as a partnership with dating giant Match Group.
Read More »Apple May Face Criminal Charges for Allegedly Lying to a Federal Judge
Apple “willfully chose not to comply” with a court order to loosen its app store restrictions—and one of its executives lied under oath about the company’s plans, a federal judge wrote on Wednesday. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has referred the situation to the US Attorney’s Office in San Francisco “to …
Read More »These Startups Are Building Advanced AI Models Without Data Centers
Researchers have trained a new kind of large language model (LLM) using GPUs dotted across the world and fed private as well as public data—a move that suggests that the dominant way of building artificial intelligence could be disrupted. Flower AI and Vana, two startups pursuing unconventional approaches to building …
Read More »AI Is Using Your Likes to Get Inside Your Head
What is the future of the like button in the age of artificial intelligence? Max Levchin—the PayPal cofounder and Affirm CEO—sees a new and hugely valuable role for liking data to train AI to arrive at conclusions more in line with those a human decisionmaker would make. It’s a well-known …
Read More »The Agonizing Task of Turning Europe’s Power Back On
At 12:30 pm local time on Monday, the power went out. Across Spain and Portugal trains, planes, and traffic lights abruptly stopped working. Reports emerged of people being stuck in lifts, and Google Maps live data showed traffic jams in big cities, including Madrid and Barcelona, as they became gridlocked. …
Read More »Donald Trump Is Already Ruining Christmas
While children are told stories about elves and reindeer, the truth is that hundreds of thousands of people work year-round to make sure Christmas feels magical. From factory employees in China stringing lights on artificial trees to dock workers unloading containers of toys, this vast labor force ensures Americans can …
Read More »The Meta Trial Shows the Dangers of Selling Out
Meta has a lot at stake in the current FTC lawsuit against it. In theory a negative verdict could result in a company breakup. But CEO Mark Zuckerberg once faced an even bigger existential threat. Back in 2006, his investors and even his employees were pressuring him to sell his …
Read More »The Real Winners of the Trump Memecoin Feeding Frenzy
On Wednesday, the team behind the official Donald Trump memecoin sparked a trading frenzy after announcing that the investors who held the largest amount of the crypto coin in the coming weeks would be invited to a gala dinner attended by the US president. “At this intimate private dinner, hear …
Read More »‘Who Is Doge?’ Has Become a Metaphysical Question
The question of who DOGE is has taken on an almost metaphysical quality as the organization’s mandate has expanded. According to Trump’s January 20 executive order establishing DOGE, every federal agency is required to create a DOGE team of at least four employees. (Ehikan’s claim that there is no DOGE …
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