Technology
Shortly after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced AWS’s groundbreaking $50 billion investment deal with OpenAI, Amazon invited me on a private tour of the chip development lab at the heart of the deal, at (mostly*) its own expense. Industry experts are watching Amazon’s Trainium chip, created at that facility, for its implications for lower-cost AI…
This week, a topic that has been boomeranging around Silicon Valley bounced into the spotlight: AI tokens as compensation. The idea is straightforward enough — rather than giving engineers only salary, equity, and bonuses, companies would also hand them a budget of AI tokens, the computational units that power tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini….
Hachette Book Group said it will not be publishing a novel called “Shy Girl” over concerns that artificial intelligence was used to generate the text. The novel was scheduled to be published in the United States this spring. Hachette said it will also discontinue the book in the United Kingdom, where it’s already available. Although…
On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey posted a simple message: “just setting up my twittr”. That was, of course, the very first post on the site that is still best known as Twitter, even after being renamed X by its new owner Elon Musk (the deal is still being fought over in court). X then…
For decades, humans have sought to harness the power of the stars to generate electricity here on Earth. And for nearly as long, achieving that goal always seemed just a decade away. Now, a slew of startups are closer than ever before and rushing to build fusion reactors capable of putting power on the grid….
Microsoft announced on Friday a series of changes focused on improving the quality of its Windows 11 operating system, which notably includes dialing back the number of entry points to its AI assistant, Copilot. The company said it will reduce Copilot AI integrations in some apps, starting with Photos, Widgets, Notepad, and its Snipping Tool….
Anthropic submitted two sworn declarations to a California federal court late Friday afternoon, pushing back on the Pentagon’s assertion that the AI company poses an “unacceptable risk to national security” and arguing that the government’s case relies on technical misunderstandings and claims that were never actually raised during the months of negotiations that preceded the…
A civil jury in California on Friday ruled that Elon Musk intentionally misled Twitter investors when he tried to back out of his $44 billion acquisition of the platform in 2022. At the time, Musk had tweeted that Twitter had too many bots, which is why he later tried to renege on the acquisition. (Twitter…
A newly published survey of more than 500 science conference presentations across a two-year period set out to determine whether scientists are funny, which is itself funny, if not the most productive use of time. The results were about what you’d expect: two-thirds of attempts at humor garnered either polite chuckles or straight-up dead silence,…
Venture capitalists have placed increasingly bigger bets on AI startups, investing over half a trillion dollars into the sector over the last five years. But these days, the smartest AI investment might be in energy, according to a report by Sightline Climate. Researchers found that up to 50% of data center projects that have been…
