Technology

In Race to Build A.I., Tech Plans a Big Plumbing Upgrade
Technology

In Race to Build A.I., Tech Plans a Big Plumbing Upgrade

Connected media - Related media If 2023 was the tech industry’s year of the A.I. chatbot, 2024 is turning out to be the year of A.I. plumbing. It may not sound as exciting, but tens of billions of dollars are quickly being spent on behind-the-scenes technology for the industry’s A.I. boom. Companies from Amazon to Meta are revamping their data centers to support artificial intelligence. They are investing in huge new facilities, while even places like Saudi Arabia are racing to build supercomputers to handle A.I. Nearly everyone with a foot in tech or giant piles of money, it seems, is jumping into a spending frenzy that some believe could last for years. Microsoft, Meta, and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, disclosed this week that they had spent more than $32 billion combined on...
OpenAI Seeks to DismissParts of The New York Times’s Lawsuit
Technology

OpenAI Seeks to DismissParts of The New York Times’s Lawsuit

Associated media - Related media Representatives for OpenAI and the Times Company did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The motion asked the court to dismiss four claims from The Times’s complaint to narrow the focus of the lawsuit. OpenAI’s lawyers argued that The Times should not be allowed to sue for acts of reproduction that occurred more than three years ago and that the paper’s claim that OpenAI violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, an amendment to U.S. copyright law passed in 1998 after the rise of the internet, was not legally sound. The Times was the first major American media company to sue OpenAI over copyright issues related to its written works. Novelists, computer programmers and other groups have also filed copyright suits against the start-up a...
Apple’s Vision Pro Headset Costs Closer to ,600 With Necessary Add-Ons
Technology

Apple’s Vision Pro Headset Costs Closer to $4,600 With Necessary Add-Ons

Connected media - Related media The $1,000 base model of the Surface Laptop 5 comes with only eight gigabytes of memory, but most people are likely to need double that to smoothly run the latest Windows operating system and new apps and games. The model that includes 16 gigabytes costs an extra $500. Samsung Phone Samsung’s new high-end smartphone, the Galaxy S24 Ultra, has a starting price of $1,300. But it’s more realistically a $1,540 phone. In the last five years, many smartphone makers, including Apple, Google and Samsung, stopped shipping phones with basic accessories like earphones and charging bricks, a shift that increased their profit margins. And in an echo of the way computer makers upsell memory, the base model of a smartphone typically includes a modest amount of data s...
How Regulations Fractured Apple’s App Store
Technology

How Regulations Fractured Apple’s App Store

Since introducing the App Store in 2008, Apple has run it largely the same way across 175 countries, right down to the 30 percent commission it has collected on every app sold.The company calls the result an economic miracle. The store has generated more than $1 trillion in sales, helped create more than seven million jobs and delivered Apple billions of dollars in annual profits.But as the App Store approaches its 16th anniversary, a patchwork of local rules are upending Apple’s authority over it.On Thursday, European Union regulators will begin enforcing the Digital Markets Act, a 2022 law that requires Apple to open iPhones in the bloc to competing app marketplaces and alternative payment systems for in-app sales.The changes follow similar demands in South Korea and the United States, w...
The Paradox at the Heart of Elon Musk’s OpenAI Lawsuit
Technology

The Paradox at the Heart of Elon Musk’s OpenAI Lawsuit

It would be easy to dismiss Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI as a case of sour grapes.Mr. Musk sued OpenAI this week, accusing the company of breaching the terms of its founding agreement and violating its founding principles. In his telling, OpenAI was established as a nonprofit that would build powerful A.I. systems for the good of humanity and give its research away freely to the public. But Mr. Musk argues that OpenAI broke that promise by starting a for-profit subsidiary that took on billions of dollars in investments from Microsoft.An OpenAI spokeswoman declined to comment on the suit. In a memo sent to employees on Friday, Jason Kwon, the company’s chief strategy officer, denied Mr. Musk’s claims and said, “We believe the claims in this suit may stem from Elon’s regrets about not ...
S.E.C. Is Investigating OpenAI Over Its Board’s Actions
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S.E.C. Is Investigating OpenAI Over Its Board’s Actions

The Securities and Exchange Commission began an inquiry into OpenAI soon after the company’s board of directors unexpectedly removed Sam Altman, its chief executive, at the end of last year, three people familiar with the inquiry said.The regulator has sent official requests to OpenAI, the developer of the ChatGPT online chatbot, seeking information about the situation. It is unclear whether the S.E.C. is investigating Mr. Altman’s behavior, the board’s decision to oust him or both.Even as OpenAI has tried to turn the page on the dismissal of Mr. Altman, who was soon reinstated, the controversy continues to hound the company. In addition to the S.E.C. inquiry, the San Francisco artificial intelligence company has hired a law firm to conduct its own investigation into Mr. Altman’s behavior ...
Biden Issues Executive Order to Restrict Personal Data Sales to China and Russia
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Biden Issues Executive Order to Restrict Personal Data Sales to China and Russia

President Biden will issue an executive order Wednesday seeking to restrict the sale of sensitive American data to China, Russia and four more countries, a first-of-its-kind attempt to keep personally identifying information from being obtained for blackmail, scams or other harm.The president will ask the Justice Department to write rules restricting the sale of information about Americans’ locations, health and genetics to China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela, as well as any entities linked to those countries. The restrictions would also cover financial information, biometric data and other types of information that could identify individuals and sensitive information related to the government.The White House said this kind of sensitive data could be used for blackmail, “e...
Odysseus Moon Lander Sends Photos Home Before Spacecraft Likely Dies
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Odysseus Moon Lander Sends Photos Home Before Spacecraft Likely Dies

Odysseus, the American robotic spacecraft that landed on the moon last week, is likely to die in the next day or so.Communications with the toppled lander remain limited and will end when sunlight is no longer shining on the solar panels, Intuitive Machines, the Houston-based company that built and operates Odysseus, said on Monday morning.The company also released images that the spacecraft took as it descended, but none yet from the surface.Odysseus is the first American spacecraft to land on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, and the first private one ever to successfully set down there in one piece. However, during the landing on Thursday evening, the lander, about 14 feet tall, appears to have been traveling faster than planned and ended up tipped over on its side.As a result, its ante...
A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men
Technology

A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men

The ominous messages began arriving in Elissa’s inbox early last year.“You sell pics of your underage daughter to pedophiles,” read one. “You’re such a naughty sick mom, you’re just as sick as us pedophiles,” read another. “I will make your life hell for you and your daughter.”Elissa has been running her daughter’s Instagram account since 2020, when the girl was 11 and too young to have her own. Photos show a bright, bubbly girl modeling evening dresses, high-end workout gear and dance leotards. She has more than 100,000 followers, some so enthusiastic about her posts that they pay $9.99 a month for more photos.Over the years, Elissa has fielded all kinds of criticism and knows full well that some people think she is exploiting her daughter. She has even gotten used to receiving creepy mes...
Google DeepMind C.E.O. Demis Hassabis on the Path From Chatbots to A.G.I.
Technology

Google DeepMind C.E.O. Demis Hassabis on the Path From Chatbots to A.G.I.

Listen and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YouTubeThis week’s episode is a conversation with Demis Hassabis, the head of Google’s artificial intelligence division. We talk about Google’s latest A.I. models, Gemini and Gemma; the existential risks of artificial intelligence; his timelines for artificial general intelligence; and what he thinks the world will look like post-A.G.I.Additional listening and reading:Credits“Hard Fork” is hosted by Kevin Roose and Casey Newton and produced by Davis Land and Rachel Cohn. The show is edited by Jen Poyant. Engineering by Chris Wood and original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Caitlin Love.Special thanks to Paula Szuchman, Pui-Wing Tam, Nell Gallogly, Kate LoPresti and Jeffrey Miranda. More in...