Palantir co-founder and CEO Alexander Karp opens his new book with a provocative declaration: “Silicon Valley has lost its way.” Over the past decade or so, as the data analytics company rose to prominence with its work for U.S. military and intelligence, Karp has largely stayed out of the limelight. Last year, in a rare […]
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As school districts struggle to support the mental health of their students, a startup called Sonar Mental Health has built a “wellbeing companion” called Sonny to help. As described in the Wall Street Journal, Sonny is a chatbot that relies on a combination of human staff and AI. When students text their questions to Sonny, […]
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When billionaire Elon Musk introduced Grok 3, his AI company xAI’s latest flagship model, in a live stream last Monday, he described it as a “maximally truth-seeking AI.” Yet it appears that Grok 3 was briefly censoring unflattering facts about President Donald Trump — and Musk himself. Over the weekend, users on social media reported […]
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Debates over AI benchmarks — and how they’re reported by AI labs — are spilling out into public view. This week, an OpenAI employee accused Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, of publishing misleading benchmark results for its latest AI model, Grok 3. One of the co-founders of xAI, Igor Babushkin, insisted that the company was […]
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The National Institute of Standards and Technology could fire as many as 500 staffers, according to multiple reports — cuts that further threaten a fledgling AI safety organization. Axios reported this week that the US AI Safety Institute (AISI) and Chips for America, both part of NIST, would be “gutted” by layoffs targeting probationary employees […]
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The beauty of podcasting is that anyone can do it. It’s a rare medium that’s nearly as easy to make as it is to consume. And as such, no two people do it exactly the same way. There are a wealth of hardware and software solutions open to potential podcasters, so setups run the gamut […]
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We’ve all been there. A favorite item is suddenly unavailable for purchase. Couldn’t the manufacturer have given you advance warning? Whether owing to low sales, changing habits, production costs, or even because something is a little wrong with your favorite product (shh), discontinued items are part of life. In a weekend piece, the New York […]
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Welcome back to Week in Review. This week we’re looking at the internal chaos surrounding HP’s $116 million acquisition of AI Pin maker Humane; Mira Murati’s new AI venture coming out of stealth; Duolingo killing its iconic owl mascot with a Cybertruck; and more! Let’s get into it. Humane’s AI pin is dead. The hardware […]
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The General Services Administration, the agency that manages buildings owned by the federal government, is planning to shut down its entire network of electric vehicle chargers, according to a report in The Verge. The GSA reportedly operates a network of hundreds of EV chargers with a total of 8,000 plugs that can be used to […]
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Apple has been steadily working to expand the world of the Apple TV+ series “Severance,” through online materials, e-books, podcasts, and other content – and so have its fans. Taking advantage of its platform power, the Cupertino tech giant has been able to easily distribute supplemental material that adds to the show’s storytelling abilities, offering […]
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Social media giants Meta and X approved ads targeting users in Germany with violent anti-Muslim and anti-Jew hate speech in the run-up to the country’s federal elections, according to new research from Eko, a corporate responsibility nonprofit campaign group. The group’s researchers tested whether the two platforms’ ad review systems would approve or reject submissions […]
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For years, Meta employees have internally discussed using copyrighted works obtained through legally questionable means to train the company’s AI models, according to court documents unsealed on Thursday. The documents were submitted by plaintiffs in the case Kadrey v. Meta, one of many AI copyright disputes slowly winding through the U.S. court system. The defendant, […]
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Coinbase on Friday said the SEC has agreed to drop the lawsuit against the company with prejudice, meaning it cannot be filed again. The move, which is still subject to the approval of the SEC’s Commissioners, is yet another signal that the Trump administration plans to be more friendly to crypto than the SEC was […]
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Apple on Friday released its first developer beta for iOS 18.4, which adds a new “Priority Notifications” feature, powered by Apple Intelligence. The addition aims to help users manage their notifications by prioritizing important alerts and minimizing distractions from less important ones. These priority notifications are displayed in a separate section on the phone’s Lock […]
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Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said the market got it wrong when it comes to DeepSeek’s technological advancements and its potential to negatively impact the chipmaker’s business. Instead, Huang called DeepSeek’s R1 open source reasoning model “incredibly exciting” while speaking with Alex Bouzari, CEO of DataDirect Networks, in a pre-recorded interview that was released […]
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OpenAI is forecasting a major shift in the next five years around who it gets most of its computing power from, The Information reported on Friday. By 2030, OpenAI expects to get three-quarters of its data center capacity from Stargate, a project that’s expected to be heavily financed by SoftBank, one of OpenAI’s newest financial […]
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Norwegian robotics firm 1X unveiled its latest home robot, Neo Gamma, on Friday. The humanoid system will succeed Neo Beta, which debuted in August. Like its predecessors, the Neo Gamma is a prototype designed for testing in the home environment. Images of the robot show it performing a number of household tasks like making coffee, […]
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This week, Sakana AI, an Nvidia-backed startup that’s raised hundreds of millions of dollars from VC firms, made a remarkable claim. The company said it had created an AI system, the AI CUDA Engineer, that could effectively speed up the training of certain AI models by a factor of up to 100x. The only problem […]
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Meta is expanding in India, despite recent layoffs of what the tech giant controversially deemed "low performers."
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The criminal trial against fintech startup founder Charlie Javice began on Friday, with lawyers laying out their opening arguments, Reuters reported. Lawyers reiterated their original claims and defenses from the lawsuit filed by JPMorgan Chase against Javice in December of 2022. The financial services giant alleges that Javice helped “fake millions of customers in order […]
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