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Autonomous vehicle testing in California dropped 50%. Here’s why.

Tech companies developing self-driving vehicle technology have tapped the brakes on testing on California’s public roads, according to new data from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles. The agency reported Friday a total of 4.5 million autonomous vehicle test miles were logged in 2024, a 50% drop from the previous year. That figure covers two […]

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OpenAI used this subreddit to test AI persuasion

OpenAI used the subreddit, r/ChangeMyView, to create a test for measuring the persuasive abilities of its AI reasoning models. The company revealed this in a system card — a document outlining how an AI system works — that was released along with its new “reasoning” model, o3-mini, on Friday. Millions of Reddit users are members […]

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Sam Altman: OpenAI has been on the ‘wrong side of history’ concerning open source

To cap off a day of product releases, OpenAI researchers, engineers, and executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, answered questions in a wide-ranging Reddit AMA on Friday. OpenAI the company finds itself in a bit of a precarious position. It’s battling the perception that it’s ceding ground in the AI race to Chinese companies like […]

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MLCommons and Hugging Face team up to release massive speech dataset for AI research

MLCommons, a nonprofit AI safety working group, has teamed up with AI dev platform Hugging Face to release one of the world’s largest collections of public domain voice recordings for AI research. The dataset, called Unsupervised People’s Speech, contains more than a million hours of audio spanning at least 89 languages. MLCommons says it was […]

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Elon Musk is reportedly taking control of the inner workings of US government agencies

People working for, or with, Elon Musk are reportedly taking over the inner workings of multiple government agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, the Treasury Department, and the General Services Administration. The Washington Post reported Friday that the highest-ranking career official at Treasury is leaving the department after “a clash” with people working for […]

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Guo’s Conviction Partners adds Mike Vernal as GP, raises $230M fund

When in mid-2022 Sarah Guo left Greylock to launch her own AI-focused fund, Conviction Partners, she indicated that she was tagging the word “Partners” to the firm’s name because she would eventually bring on other GPs. Now, more than two years later, Guo is being joined by Mike Vernal, who was a partner at Sequoia […]

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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is trying to duck a deposition in an OpenAI copyright lawsuit

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is trying to avoid being deposed in a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, according to new court filings. In response, lawyers for the plaintiff — the Authors Guild — have filed a motion to compel testimony from Amodei and his Anthropic co-founder, Benjamin Mann. Authors Guild’s lawyers claim that Amodei and Mann, […]

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CFPB fines fintech Wise, alleging it charged deceptive fees

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has hit U.K.-based remittance company Wise with about a $2 million fine for what it described as “a series of illegal actions.” Those actions include advertising inaccurate fees and failing to properly disclose exchange rates and other costs, the CFPB alleges. Specifically, the agency claims that the fintech company […]

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Apple will pay $20M to settle Watch battery swelling suit, ‘denies wrongdoing’

Apple has agreed to pay $20 million to resolve a class-action lawsuit over battery swelling on the Apple Watch. Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in 2019, the suit alleges that the problem affected the first four Apple Watch models. Battery swelling is pretty much what it sounds like: […]

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Stablecoins are finding product-market fit in emerging markets

Five years ago, SpaceX launched Starlink, which has since grown into its biggest revenue driver, expanding to more than 100 countries. But as Starlink scaled, it faced a major hurdle: accepting payments in developing markets, where traditional banking infrastructure is unreliable, slow, and prone to blocking transactions. Many local banks across Africa, Latin America, and […]

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This investor wants you to sign an NDA to build Legos together

Investor, former GitHub CEO, and all-around Tech Guy™ Nat Friedman has posted a strangely enticing offer on X. His post reads, “Need volunteers to come to my office in Palo Alto today to construct a 5000 piece Lego set. Will provide pizza. Have to sign NDA. Please DM.” Thanks to the investigative reporting of my […]

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Sam Altman’s ousting from OpenAI has entered the cultural zeitgeist

The lights dimmed as five actors took their places around a table on a makeshift stage in a New York City art gallery turned theater for the night. Wine and water flowed through the intimate space as the house — packed with media — sat to witness the premiere of “Doomers,” Matthew Gasda’s latest play […]

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Swiss tax authority forced to buy Bahamas domain name after URL typo

What do you do if a web address you printed on a physical flyer contains a typo, and you send that flyer to more than 100,000 households? Well, if you’re the Swiss canton (“state”) of Basel-Stadt, you buy the domain that contains the typo, and create a redirect to the correct URL. As Swiss news […]

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Microsoft is forming a new unit to study AI’s impacts

Microsoft says that it’s creating a new unit, the Advanced Planning Unit (APU), within its Microsoft AI business division that will help the company understand the societal, health, and work implications of AI the company hopes to build. Microsoft AI, which encompasses Microsoft’s Copilot, Bing, and Edge products, is becoming core to Microsoft’s growth strategy […]

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Custom feed builder Graze is building a business on Bluesky, and investors are paying attention

A startup called Graze, which lets you build your own feeds for the Bluesky social network, has caught investors’ attention. In addition to offering tools to easily build, customize, publish, and manage Bluesky feeds, Graze will soon allow feed creators to monetize their efforts with advertising, sponsored posts, and subscriptions. In other words, Graze has […]

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WeDoSolar pivots to B2B after stake acquired by Chinese solar giant

Last year wind and solar energy overtook fossil fuels to provide 30% of the EU’s electricity. With that in the background, startups in the solar space have been riding a generational change in how we get our power. In 2022 we covered how a small B2C European startup planned to bring solar to homes via […]

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