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Twenty-six days after it was banished from US app stores, TikTok has returned to the iOS App Store and Google Play store. Apple and Google brought back the Chinese-owned video app after receiving a letter from US attorney general Pam Bondi assuring the companies they would not be fined for hosting it, Bloomberg first reported…

When news first broke about Elon Musk’s tech takeover of the United States government, a number of people who had spent years trying to transform federal IT practices were surprisingly hopeful. Maybe, they dreamed, Elon Musk and his team at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) would provide a long-needed jolt to an intransigent and…

“I’ve defended you guys so much over the years, and you make great products, but even I can’t stick up for you anymore,” she stated. Róbertsdóttir, now a software developer for Icelandic air traffic control company Isavia, started her tech career as founder of Iowa-based Celadon Applications. This 2009 startup developed software for electric vehicles. A long-time…

At a press conference in the Oval Office this week, Elon Musk promised the actions of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project would be “maximally transparent,” thanks to information posted to its website. At the time of his comment, the DOGE website was empty. However, when the site finally came online Thursday morning,…

A new lawsuit filed by more than 100 federal workers today in the US Southern District Court of New York alleges that the Trump administration’s decision to give Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to their sensitive personal data is illegal. The plaintiffs are asking the court for an injunction to cut…

But do you expect to find it difficult to bring about a new era at Binance when the founder—who is synonymous with the company—remains the largest shareholder? We are very clear in terms of what we are trying to build: a best-in-class, sustainable, and global platform. Again, I work very closely with the senior management…

Days after the rule went into effect in January, the bureau was sued by NetChoice and TechNet, two trade groups representing Big Tech. In addition to challenging the rule, the groups accused the CFPB of unlawfully exceeding its mandate, alleging that the rule is a “breathtaking assertion of its own jurisdiction.” The CFPB’s indefinite pause…

Thomson Reuters has won the first major AI copyright case in the United States. In 2020, the media and technology conglomerate filed an unprecedented AI copyright lawsuit against the legal AI startup Ross Intelligence. In the complaint, Thomson Reuters claimed the AI firm reproduced materials from its legal research firm Westlaw. Today, a judge ruled…

Unlike the Fleshlight, which is flamboyantly anatomical in design—some versions are even molded to resemble the crotches of individual porn stars—the eggs are downright discreet. “It looks like a fun tech product, even though it’s not that techy. And it seems almost asexual,” Lieberman says. She thinks the eggs look like what Apple might release…

Gambaryan says he wanted to hear Ogunjobi explain himself. On the phone, Gambaryan remembers, the EFCC official began crying, apologizing repeatedly, thanking God that Gambaryan had been released. For Gambaryan it was too much to process. He listened quietly without accepting the apology. In the midst of Ogunjobi’s outpouring, he noticed that an American friend…

“If you break it down, there are a lot of moving components in the backend that people are not necessarily cognizant of,” says Anurag Arjun, cofounder of crypto infrastructure startup Avail and Polygon, a crypto network built to rapidly process large numbers of transactions. Until late 2023, when the first inklings of the memecoin frenzy were…

Zoë Schiffer: Booktok got me fully immersed in the romantasy world. Now I’m incapable of reading normal literature. Thank you. Lauren Goode: I’m going to assume that romantasy is romance and fantasy? Zoë Schiffer: Oh, yes it is. Dragons. There’s fairies, there’s dragons. I’m not proud of this, but I guess I’m not not proud…

Lorianna Calhoun, a Shein shopper, tells WIRED that of the roughly 170 items that were once on her Shein wish list, 40 now appear to be unavailable. She noticed they disappeared on Thursday afternoon. It’s not clear how Shein and Temu may be selecting what items to remove, but Calhoun says that, at least in…

THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Many of us have witnessed unusual and even antisocial behavior at an airport or on a flight. These may range from benign acts such as sleeping on the floor or doing yoga in front of the flight information display system to serious incidents…

What a great idea I had for the first Plaintext of 2025. After following the frantic competition between OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic to churn out brainier and deeper “frontier” foundation models, I settled on a thesis about what’s ahead: In the new year, those mighty trailblazers will consume billions of dollars, countless gigawatts, and…

Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), owns stocks valued between $1 to $5 million in a company that controls Shein, a controversial ecommerce and fashion giant founded in China, according to lobbying and corporate records from three countries reviewed by WIRED. They show that…

For the past few weeks, Musk’s team has been working to swiftly cut costs across the US government, which has seen its annual deficit increase for the last three years. The Office of Personnel Management, which acts as the HR department for the government and is stacked with Musk loyalists, has encouraged federal employees to…

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has gutted the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), taking a team of over 10,000 down to just under 300, according to an internal email viewed by WIRED and several current USAID employees. The move leaves only 12 people in the agency’s Africa bureau and eight people…

Adhering to the new rules is also proving to be a major lift for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the US Postal Service. The latter briefly stopped accepting packages from China and Hong Kong altogether on Tuesday, as it scrambled to manage the deluge of packages from China that were suddenly subjected to…

LinkedIn is testing a new job-hunting tool that uses a custom large language model to comb through huge quantities of data to help people find prospective roles. The company believes that artificial intelligence will help users unearth new roles they might have missed in the typical search process. “The reality is, you don’t find your…

The United States Postal Services has abruptly stopped accepting all packages from Hong Kong and China until further notice, according to an international service disruption notice posted on the USPS website. The move comes after China imposed retaliatory tariffs on US imports, including coal and liquified natural gas, in response to President Trump’s executive order…

Google announced Tuesday that it is overhauling the principles governing how it uses artificial intelligence and other advanced technology. The company removed language promising not to pursue “technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” “weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people,”…

USAID staff who still have access to their email accounts received a notice on Monday evening from Ken Jackson, the agency’s assistant to the administrator for management and resources, saying that the agency “would likely undergo a reorganization” and be integrated into the State Department. “As we evaluate USAID and ensure it is in alignment…

The most challenging part of FMVSS 127 is the night-time Pedestrian Automatic Emergency Braking (PAEB) test, which, unlike the EU’s new AEB regulation, needs to work in complete darkness. More than 70 percent of pedestrians hit and killed by motorists are struck at night, according to NHTSA. Protecting pedestrians at night is “likely to require…

Investigators are scrambling to figure out why a military helicopter and a passenger airplane collided and plunged into the Potomac River in Washington, DC, late Wednesday, the first major US air crash in 16 years. From the little that’s known, human error likely played a role, raising questions about a chronic shortage of air traffic…

The crypto wallets that invested the largest sums in TRUMP largely purchased the coin on January 18, the day it launched, according to Nansen analysis. The wallets that achieved the greatest return on their TRUMP investments, meanwhile, had largely sold off their holdings by January 20, by which time the price had already tumbled from…

It’s been just over a week since DeepSeek upended the AI world. The introduction of its open-weight model—apparently trained on a fraction of the specialized computing chips that power industry leaders—set off shock waves inside OpenAI. Not only did employees claim to see hints that DeepSeek had “inappropriately distilled” OpenAI’s models to create its own,…

“Jailbreaks persist simply because eliminating them entirely is nearly impossible—just like buffer overflow vulnerabilities in software (which have existed for over 40 years) or SQL injection flaws in web applications (which have plagued security teams for more than two decades),” Alex Polyakov, the CEO of security firm Adversa AI, told WIRED in an email. Cisco’s…

OpenAI is making a smaller, more efficient version of its cleverest artificial intelligence model available for free as it seeks to answer the hype and enthusiasm swirling around a new open source offering from Chinese AI startup DeepSeek. WIRED previously reported that OpenAI was prepping the new model, called o3-mini, for release on January 31….

Less than two weeks after DeepSeek launched its open-source AI model, the Chinese startup is still dominating the public conversation about the future of artificial intelligence. While the firm seems to have an edge on US rivals in terms of math and reasoning, it also aggressively censors its own replies. Ask DeepSeek R1 about Taiwan…

Marc Andreessen [archival audio]: So, I decided to read my way out in both directions, both all the way out to the left, all the way to Lenin and Marx and communism on the one hand, and then all the way out to the right on the other hand, and see if I could at…

Meta employees typically vote on which questions executives should address at companywide meetings. Ahead of such a gathering scheduled for Thursday, several of the most-endorsed questions were related to DEI. But Meta leadership have told employees that the popularity of a certain question no longer guarantees that it will be answered by company leadership, according…

“It’s pretty shocking to build an AI model and leave the backdoor wide open from a security perspective,” says independent security researcher Jeremiah Fowler, who was not involved in the Wiz research but specializes in discovering exposed databases. “This type of operational data and the ability for anyone with an internet connection to access it…

Altogether, around 10 attempts to change the gulf’s name have been reverted over the past week on OpenStreetMap. Several contributors have contended that OSM should wait for common usage in society to change before making an edit to the main name of the gulf. “OSM’s primary goal is to reflect what people on the ground…

Elon Musk is only one week into his role in President Donald Trump’s new administration, but the US federal government is already rolling out the Twitter playbook to manage its spending and personnel. Just like Musk did when he took over the social media platform, Trump’s team is attempting to drastically reduce the number of…

The true price of developing DeepSeek’s new models remains unknown, however, since one figure quoted in a single research paper may not capture the full picture of its costs. “I don’t believe it’s $6 million, but even if it’s $60 million, it’s a game changer,” says Umesh Padval, managing director of Thomvest Ventures, a company…

The final category of information DeepSeek reserves the right to collect is data from other sources. If you create a DeepSeek account using Google or Apple sign-on, for instance, it will receive some information from those companies. Advertisers also share information with DeepSeek, its policies say, and this can include “mobile identifiers for advertising, hashed…

An AI assistant created by Chinese startup DeepSeek became the number one most-downloaded app in Apple’s US App Store over the weekend, sending shock waves through Silicon Valley and causing the price of major tech stocks to plummet. Nvidia saw more than $460 billion erased from its market capitalization on Monday, a drop Bloomberg characterized…

On top of that, he claims that Pearl is significantly less likely to provide misinformation than many other AI search engines—which he believes are likely to deal with “a tidal wave” of lawsuits based on bad answers they give. “Those other players are building amazing technologies. I call them Ferraris or Lamborghinis,” Kurtzig says. “We’re…

Today, DeepSeek is one of the only leading AI firms in China that doesn’t rely on funding from tech giants like Baidu, Alibaba, or ByteDance. A Young Group of Geniuses Eager to Prove Themselves According to Liang, when he put together DeepSeek’s research team, he was not looking for experienced engineers to build a consumer-facing…

It’s hard to quantify the Swiftie demographic’s impact on these bets, but preseason, WIRED reached out to several sportsbooks including BetRivers, DraftKings, FanDuel and Rivalry, which said the Taylor Swift effect was real, and expected it would continue to affect their industry this season. Tim Whitehead, sportsbook head at BetRivers, put it succinctly. “So long…

THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. The rapid spread of artificial intelligence has people wondering: Who’s most likely to embrace AI in their daily lives? Many assume it’s the tech-savvy—those who understand how AI works—who are most eager to adopt it. Surprisingly, our new research, published in the Journal…

The one exception to that is the UMG v. Anthropic case, because at least early on, earlier versions of Anthropic would generate the song lyrics for songs in the output. That’s a problem. The current status of that case is they’ve put safeguards in place to try to prevent that from happening, and the parties…

This week, we take a look at Meta’s new era of content moderation.

The wheels are already beginning to turn on Donald Trump’s plan to make the US into the “crypto capital of the planet” following his return to the White House. In an executive order signed Thursday, Trump established a “working group on digital asset markets,” which will be responsible for weighing the possibility of the US…

OpenAI is letting some users try a new ChatGPT feature that uses its artificial intelligence to operate a web browser to book trips, buy groceries, hunt for bargains, and do many other online chores. The new tool, called Operator, is an AI agent: It relies on an AI model trained on both text and images…

Addressing a single executive order from Donald Trump’s voluminous first-day edicts is like singling out one bullet in a burst from an AK-47. But one of them hit me in the gut. That is “Establishing and Implementing the President’s Department of Government Efficiency.’’ The acronym for that name is DOGE (named after a memecoin), and…

Panic over the US TikTok ban increased usage and downloads of a slew of alternative social media apps, including Texas-based Clapper, Chinese-owned RedNote, and Likee, a little-known platform out of Singapore with an AI-powered video feed similar to TikTok’s, according to new market research. People in the US could not access TikTok for about 14…

Those allegations of murders-for-hire, in fact, dissuaded the first Trump administration from granting clemency to Ulbricht. The White House in 2020 considered freeing Ulbricht but ultimately rejected the idea because of the alleged role of violence in the case, according to one former government official involved in the process who spoke to WIRED on condition…

Jonathan Lachman, the previous head of special projects at OpenAI, recently left to join a new artificial intelligence research lab founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati, according to two people familiar with the discussions. It’s the most high-profile hire Murati has made since leaving OpenAI in September last year to start the much-hyped venture,…

In this sense, claims Jacob Silverman, coauthor of Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, the TRUMP coin setup seems to bear some of the hallmarks of a “classic memecoin pump-and-dump”—a manoeuvre whereby an issuer keeps hold of large amounts of their coin, promotes the project, then cashes in their holdings,…

As TikTok’s future hangs in the balance, Xiaohonghshu, better known as RedNote in English, is trying to capitalize on its newfound popularity by partnering with US influencers who can help promote the company and bring more Americans onto its platform. The Chinese lifestyle and travel app, which has over 300 million mostly monthly active users,…

For the first time in internet history, the United States government has officially banned a major global social media platform, joining the ranks of authoritarian regimes like Russia and China. On Saturday, TikTok officially went dark. Users who attempt to access the app are now greeted with a message that says “TikTok isn’t available right…

Less than 24 hours after going dark, TikTok says it has come back online after President-elect Donald Trump gave the company’s service providers—presumably Apple, Google, and Oracle—reassurance that his administration wouldn’t enforce a law banning the app in the first place. “In agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service,”…

TikTok is no longer available in the United States—at least for now. But it’s not the only ByteDance-owned app that’s currently blocked for US-based users. Shortly before the federally mandated January 19 deadline, TikTok cut off access to anyone attempting to access the app from the US. “A law banning TikTok has been enacted in…

A crypto investor has brought a class action lawsuit against Pump.Fun, a platform for launching and investing in meme-inspired cryptocurrencies, after suffering trading losses. Representing the plaintiffs are Wolf Popper and Burwick Law, the two firms handling a separate class action brought by investors in December over a memecoin launched by web personality Haliey Welch,…

Polestar makes the Polestar 3 in a South Carolina factory, and last year warned that any sales ban “shuts down the operations of a lawfully organized US company with substantial US investments.” “The US is an important market for us,” Kim Palmer, Polestar head of PR, tells WIRED. Suggesting the speccing of non-Chinese software and…

There was a time when Mark Zuckerberg didn’t regard mainstream media as the enemy. He even allowed me, a card-carrying legacy media person, into his home. In April 2018, I ventured there to hear his plans to do the right thing. It was part of my years-long embed into Facebook to write a book. For…

The Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu—better known internationally as RedNote—is scrambling to boost its ability to moderate English-language content after hundreds of thousands of American users suddenly joined the platform in anticipation of TikTok potentially being banned in the United States on Sunday. WIRED identified a handful of job listings posted to recruitment platforms by…

Gemini [archival audio]: Key body-weight exercises, squats, stand with feet shoulder-width apart, lower your hips as if sitting in a chair, keeping your back straight and chest up. Go as low as you can comfortably. Michael Calore: Lunges for each leg, three sets of 10, plank, three sets holding for 30 to 60 seconds, which…

Whether shifting teams to Texas will be anything more than symbolic is unclear. Common sense suggests if a person in California exhibits some sort of political preference, moving them to Texas isn’t likely to reshape their viewpoints immediately. In the same town hall call, company leadership described the Texas relocation as an attempt to address…

The Biden administration this week introduced new export restrictions designed to control AI’s progress globally and ultimately prevent the most advanced AI from falling into China’s hands. The rule is just the latest in a string of measures put in place by Donald Trump and Joe Biden to keep Chinese AI in check. With prominent…

With the clock running out on the Biden administration, the US Securities and Exchange Commission has sued Elon Musk in federal court. The statute at hand is relatively straightforward. The timing of the complaint is more complicated. The SEC’s complaint centers on Musk’s acquisition of Twitter stock in early 2022. According to the complaint, Musk…

For a while in the mid-2000s, a refrigerator-sized box in Abu Dhabi was considered the greatest chess player in the world. Its name was Hydra, and it was a small super-computer—a cabinet full of industrial-grade processors and specially designed chips, strung together with fiber-optic cables and jacked into the internet. At a time when chess…

A British judge ruled against a man who wants to excavate a landfill where he says a hard drive with access to thousands of bitcoins was mistakenly dumped over 11 years ago. Since 2013, James Howells has been hoping to recover a laptop hard drive that he says contains the private key for cryptocurrency which…

The Biden administration announced a bold and controversial new export control scheme today, designed to prevent the advanced chips and artificial intelligence models themselves from ending up in the hands of adversaries such as China. The administration’s new “AI Diffusion rule” divides the world into nations that are allowed relatively unfettered access to America’s most…

Facebook has already contributed to the demise of journalism and this will be the final nail in the coffin,” Nina Jankowicz, the former Biden administration disinformation czar who is now CEO of the American Sunlight Project, said in an emailed statement. “Newsrooms get grants from Facebook to provide fact-checks. That money allows them to do…

Since Donald Trump won back the presidency on November 5, a parade of Silicon Valley luminaries have been engaging in an unseemly grovel-fest, making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, shoveling million-dollar contributions to his inaugural fund, and meddling in the editorial departments of the publications they own in an apparent attempt to gain the new leader’s favor….

The law says it will be “unlawful” for entities to “distribute, maintain or update” the app including its source code, or by “providing services” that allow it to keep running as it is now. This distribution, maintenance, or updates could be, the law says, by means of mobile app stores that can be accessed in…

This 180-degree change is a response to Donald Trump’s imminent second presidential term and to the methods of the competition, such as X’s Community Notes. Meta decided not to invest any more money in its program. Now, it hopes that Facebook and Instagram users themselves will be the ones to decide what content is disinformation…

The privacy experts who spoke with WIRED described Rumble, Quora, and WeChat as unusual suspects but declined to speculate on the rationale behind their inclusion in the investigation. Josh Golin, executive director of the nonprofit Fairplay, which advocates for digital safety for kids, says concerns aren’t always obvious. Few advocacy groups worried about Pinterest, for…

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed a new measure on Friday that could protect your Robux from scammers and hackers. The proposed rule would interpret terms in the Electronic Fund Transfer Act, or EFTA, which has traditionally been used to protect consumers from unauthorized debit transactions, to include some virtual currencies supplied by gaming and…

“Meta has treated the so-called ‘public availability’ of shadow datasets as a get-out-of-jail-free card, notwithstanding that internal Meta records show every relevant decision-maker at Meta, up to and including its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, knew LibGen was ‘a dataset we know to be pirated,’” the plaintiffs allege in this motion. (Originally filed in late 2024, the…

Zoë Schiffer: It must have been a long walk. Lauren Goode: I mean, I heard a lot about jujitsu. 56 minutes of that show was taken up on jujitsu, and then it was also like, “Also, how to live forever.” I don’t know. Yeah. Michael Calore: I really want to hear that, because I was…

Meta caused a stir last week when it let slip that it intends to populate its platform with a significant number of entirely artificial users in the not too distant future. “We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” Connor Hayes, vice-president…

“Meta has perennially been a home for Russian, Chinese, and Iranian disinformation,” claims Gordon Crovitz, co-CEO of NewsGuard, a company that provides a tool to evaluate the trustworthiness of online information. “Now, Meta apparently has decided to open the floodgates completely.” Again, fact-checking isn’t perfect; Croviz says that NewsGuard has tracked several “false narratives” on…

Meta’s fact-checking partners claim they were “blindsided” by the company’s decision to abandon third-party fact-checking on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads in favor of a Community Notes model, and some say they are now scrambling to figure out if they can survive the hole this leaves in their funding. “We heard the news just like everyone…

Meta announced a series of major updates to its content moderation policies today, including that it’s “getting rid” of restrictions on speech about “topics like immigration, gender identity and gender” that the company describes as frequent subjects of political discourse and debate. “It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor…

Nvidia announced today it’s releasing a family of foundational AI models called Cosmos that can be used to train humanoids, industrial robots, and self-driving cars. While language models learn how to generate text by training on copious amounts of books, articles, and social media posts, Cosmos is designed to generate images and 3D models of…

For all the goofiness, memecoin fever has been embraced by some corners of the crypto industry. In search of outsize returns, a small number of hedge funds have invested in memecoins this year. Other investment firms, like Pantera Capital, consider memecoins to be a “Trojan horse” likely to introduce new people to crypto. The idea,…

Fable, a popular social media app that describes itself as a haven for “bookworms and bingewatchers,” created an AI-powered end-of-year summary feature recapping what books users read in 2024. It was meant to be playful and fun, but some of the recaps took on an oddly combative tone. Writer Danny Groves’ summary for example, asked…

Experts believe the operation is based in China and relies on a drop-shipping scheme. “It’s likely just a reshipper selling controversial or illegal products,” says Zach Edwards, a senior threat researcher at cybersecurity firm Silent Push who specializes in online data ecosystems. Typically, Edwards explains, drop-shippers wait for a customer to place an order, then…

Over the holiday weekend, all but one member of the editorial board of Elsevier’s Journal of Human Evolution (JHE) resigned “with heartfelt sadness and great regret,” according to Retraction Watch, which helpfully provided an online PDF of the editors’ full statement. It’s the 20th mass resignation from a science journal since 2023 over various points…

A significant proportion of people today live in towns and cities that grew up around trade, industry, and cars. Think of the docks of Liverpool, the factories of Osaka, the automobile obsession of New York’s Robert Moses, or the low-density sprawl of modern Riyadh. Few of these places were created with human health in mind….

At some point in the future, AIs may create works of art, music, and writing that rival human-created ones. For now, what’s most impressive about most generative AIs is their capacity to produce lots of mediocre work very quickly. This ability is transforming many industries: In the world of higher education, where I work, we…

Love it or hate it, you have to admit Temu had a banger year. Launched in late 2022, the Chinese-owned ecommerce site, known for selling a vast array of astonishingly affordable goods, took only two years to become a household name in the US. Over the past 12 months, it has topped download charts, surpassing…

“These greedy executives had every chance to show decency and respect for the people who make their obscene profits possible,” Teamsters general president Sean M. O’Brien said in a public statement. “Instead, they’ve pushed workers to the limit and now they’re paying the price. This strike is on them.” This has been a record-breaking year…

Buttu, who regularly travels to the city of Ramallah in the West Bank from her home in Haifa, Israel, for work and to visit friends, says Google Maps has led her astray many times in recent years. “I’ve been told to drive right into a wall that’s been up since 2003,” she says. Others have…

In 2025, it will be commonplace to talk with a personal AI agent that knows your schedule, your circle of friends, the places you go. This will be sold as a convenience equivalent to having a personal, unpaid assistant. These anthropomorphic agents are designed to support and charm us so that we fold them into…

Craig Wright, the computer scientist ruled to have lied “extensively and repeatedly” about being the inventor of Bitcoin, has been given a one-year prison sentence by a UK judge after being found in contempt of court. The sentence is suspended for two years, meaning that Wright will only face prison if he reoffends during that…

In its initial responses, ChatGPT didn’t provide any links to products. But it easily supplied them when I asked, and while I didn’t click on every single one, none appeared to be a hallucination. Claude, on the other hand, apologized and said that it “cannot actually link to websites or products directly.” Anthropic hasn’t released…

If Google’s generative AI Gemini Assistant chatbot is to surpass OpenAI’s ChatGPT in popularity in the coming years, it may have to do so without some of the promotional partnerships that helped thrust Google search front and center into Americans’ lives. In a US federal court filing on Friday, Google proposed a series of restrictions…

I asked Amko Leenart, director of design for Ford Europe, about why Ford used VW’s woeful controls in both the Explorer and the Capri, and he told me Ford worked with a partner to better the response on the sliders (but wouldn’t tell me how), then admitted that “we tried to improve it a bit—and…

OpenAI today announced an improved version of its most capable artificial intelligence model to date—one that takes even more time to deliberate over questions—just a day after Google announced its first model of this type. OpenAI’s new model, called o3, replaces o1, which the company introduced in September. Like o1, the new model spends time…

Generative AI took the world by storm in November 2022, with the release of OpenAI’s service ChatGPT. One hundred million people started using it, practically overnight. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, became a household name. And at least half a dozen companies raced OpenAI in an effort to build…

In May 2020, the media and technology conglomerate Thomson Reuters sued a small legal AI startup called Ross Intelligence, alleging that it had violated US copyright law by reproducing materials from Westlaw, Thomson Reuters’ legal research platform. As the pandemic raged, the lawsuit hardly registered outside the small world of nerds obsessed with copyright rules….

Lauren Goode: I don’t remember that. Zoë Schiffer: I think she did. Michael Calore: I don’t know why everybody’s looking at me. Lauren Goode: Yeah. Mike, what’s your recommendation? Michael Calore: Mine is actually weirdly ties into this unboxing we just had, because I want to recommend condiments. So everybody has that thing that they…

It’s an interesting idea, and it is fun to see the idea of an AI agent explored within the relatively benign realm of artistic expression. That said, Botto still poses some ethical conundrums. Many working artists rightly worry about the impact AI is having on their profession, as models trained on millions of copyrighted works…

Truth Terminal “has birthed an entire sector that’s red-hot: the AI agent–memecoin sector,” says Travis Kling, founder of Ikigai Asset Management, a crypto wealth management firm, who has personally invested in GOAT. “Like most things in crypto, a lot of it is vaporware and grift. But it may end up being the marquee sector of…

The doomers have it wrong. AI is not going to end the world—but it is going to end the web as we’ve known it. AI is already upending the economic covenant of the internet that’s existed since the advent of search: A few companies (mostly Google) bring demand, and creators bring supply (and get some…

“Mariner is our exploration, very much a research prototype at the moment, of how one reimagines the user interface with AI,” Hassabis says. Google launched Gemini in December 2023 as part of an effort to catch up with OpenAI, the startup behind the wildly popular chatbot ChatGPT. Despite having invested heavily in AI and contributing…

One of the more persistent concerns in the age of AI is that the robots will take our jobs. The extent to which this fear is founded remains to be seen, but we’re already witnessing some level of replacement in certain fields. Even niche occupations are in jeopardy. For example, the world of OnlyFans chatters…

If that tool were to leak or be sold online—Rodriguez himself says he doesn’t plan to publish his—he says anyone could use it to jailbreak their own plate in a matter of minutes. “They just need to connect a cable and install the new firmware, just like if you were jailbreaking your iPhone,” Rodriguez says….

Ever since the invention of the org chart in the 1850s, company structures have changed very little—they are hierarchical and consist of multiple layers of managers and decisionmakers. That is because we have been bound by the limits of human intelligence and attention to manage and control the flow of work. AI can change that….

“The Cybertruck’s weight, stiff structure, and sharp design have raised valid concerns,” she tells WIRED. “Any loophole allowing these vehicles onto [UK] streets needs to be quickly closed.” “It would be hugely disappointing if a backdoor were to be opened which allowed vehicles bringing an increased risk of harm to UK streets and roads,” agrees…

People don’t know what they don’t have until you sell it to them, right? And I’m very convinced that when people see that there’s a version of TikTok 2.0, where they curate their algorithm, they’re in charge, and they own themselves and parse out their data and get value for it, people will clamor for…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman expects AGI, or artificial general intelligence—AI that outperforms humans at most tasks—around 2027 or 2028. Elon Musk’s prediction is either 2025 or 2026, and he has claimed that he was “losing sleep over the threat of AI danger.” Such predictions are wrong. As the limitations of current AI become increasingly clear,…

A former ByteDance intern who was allegedly dismissed for professional misconduct, including sabotaging colleagues’ work, was announced as a winner of one of the most prestigious annual awards for AI research this week. Keyu Tian, whose LinkedIn and Google Scholar pages list him as a master’s student in computer science at Peking University, is the…

As I arrive, he’s laying out an impressive lunch spread of salads and carved ham and huge blocks of good cheese. There are already 385 mouths to feed in London alone, and almost 450 staff in total now, including at the new US headquarters and testing base Wayve has just opened in Sunnyvale, California: Its…

Michael Calore: Yep. Lauren Goode: Yeah. Michael Calore: What about you, Zoë? Zoë Schiffer: My total screen time. I actually looked it up before and I think it’s like three hours and 40 minutes on my phone, which honestly seems impressive to me. You’re raising your eyebrows, Mike, why are you doing that? Only a…

In addition to the trove of books, the Institutional Data Initiative is also working with the Boston Public Library to scan millions of articles from different newspapers now in the public domain, and it says it’s open to forming similar collaborations down the line. The exact way the books dataset will be released is not…

“When we were talking with workers, they just wanted to get back to the cockroaches, how the studio owner charges them for toilet paper or makes them work when they’re on their period. I couldn’t get people to talk to me about platforms, and that’s completely valid because of course you are mad at the…

In recent earnings calls, shareholders in some publicly traded meat companies have asked whether the Trump administration’s deportation plans—among other issues—may pose a challenge to their industry. “We’ve been there before. It did not impact our business,” said Tim Klein, CEO of National Beef, which is owned by the Brazilian food company Marfrig, in response…

Alex Mashinsky, former CEO of bankrupt crypto lender Celsius, has pleaded guilty to two counts of fraud, which together carry a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison. In the wake of the company’s collapse, the US Department of Justice charged Mashinsky with seven counts of fraud, conspiracy, and market manipulation. Having originally pleaded not…

So the race is on to engineer an efficient surrounding for fusion. One of Fuse’s ideas is to get a bunch of big capacitors to discharge at once, thus kick-starting a reaction. That’s why, at our show, there were all those big caps behind the audience. (You also see constructions of big caps at other…

In the year or so since large language models hit the big time, researchers have demonstrated numerous ways of tricking them into producing problematic outputs including hateful jokes, malicious code and phishing emails, or the personal information of users. It turns out that misbehavior can take place in the physical world, too: LLM-powered robots can…

The glow of the tech bros’ halo is dimming and, in 2025, the computing industry’s sheen of glamor will continue to fade, too. While other STEM fields are making strides in broadening participation in their workforces, year after year, computing, a supposedly innovative field, fails to recruit, retain, and respect women and nonbinary workers. For…

Transforming a car manufacturing plant entering its seventh decade into a futureproof facility, ready for AI-powered autonomous driving, comes with natural challenges. Among them: 1960s architecture drawings—and the imperial system. “We had to survey everything and go out with the tape measure,” explains Dan Ford, site director at Jaguar Land Rover’s (JLR) site in Halewood,…

“We do see variation across different vehicles and models,” continues Argue. There are other factors as well. “So far, we haven’t seen a significant impact from high mileage on degradation rates, so you shouldn’t be afraid to use your EV.” This finding is in line with P3’s research. “But we have seen a correlation with…

The appeals court ruled today that the PAFACA does not violate TikTok’s free speech rights. “The Government does not suppress content or require a certain mix of content. Indeed, content on the platform could in principle remain unchanged after divestiture, and people in the United States would remain free to read and share as much…

The burgeoning field of social-emotional AI is tackling the very jobs that people used to think were reserved for human beings—jobs that rely on emotional connections, such as therapists, teachers, and coaches. AI is now widely used in education and other human services. Vedantu, an Indian web-based tutoring platform valued at $1 billion, uses AI…

Google, Meta, and Microsoft, as well as startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, all had well-developed strategies for generative AI by the time Apple finally announced its own push this June. Conventional wisdom suggested this entrance was unfashionably late. Apple disagrees. Its leaders say the company is arriving just in time—and that it’s been stealthily preparing…

In July 2026, a new regime will take effect in California, where Biesk’s family lives, requiring residents to obtain a license to take part in “digital financial asset business activity,” including exchanging, transferring, storing or administering certain crypto assets. President-elect Donald Trump has also promised new crypto regulations. But for now, there are no crypto-specific…

Right from the start, we had this Venn diagram: On one side is creativity, and on the other side is productivity. And you might guess, right in the center is Canva. We really believe that people on the productivity side actually want to be more creative, and that people on the creative side want to…

Lauren Goode: I’m Lauren Goode. I’m a senior writer at WIRED. Zoë Schiffer: I’m Zoe Schiffer, WIRED’s director of business and industry. Michael Calore: OK. I want to start today by going back one year into the past, November 2023, to an event that we refer to as the blip. Lauren Goode: The blip. We…

OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT and one of the most prominent artificial intelligence companies in the world, said today that it has entered a partnership with Anduril, a defense startup that makes missiles, drones, and software for the United States military. It marks the latest in a series of similar announcements made recently by major tech…

Every time I visit the Apple Park campus, my mind flashes to a tour I took months before construction was finished, when there was dust on the terrazzo floors and mud where lush vegetation now flourishes. My guide was Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. With a proprietor’s pride, he ushered me through the $5 billion circular…

OpenAI announced today it has hired three senior computer vision and machine learning engineers from rival Google DeepMind, all of whom will work in a newly opened OpenAI office in Zurich, Switzerland. OpenAI executives told staff during an internal meeting on Tuesday that Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai will be joining the company…

Software engineer Vishnu Mohandas decided he would quit Google in more ways than one when he learned that the tech giant had briefly helped the US military develop AI to study drone footage. In 2020 he left his job working on Google Assistant and also stopped backing up all of his images to Google Photos….

One of the many criticisms leveled at Jaguar in the firestorm ignited by its rebrand last month was that while it revealed a new logotype and a short film of eight conspicuously diverse models clad in bright couture emerging from a yellow escalator into a lilac lunar landscape, it didn’t even hint at a car….

Ahead of the official reveal at Miami Art Week, snaps of the brand’s Design Vision Concept have surfaced in all their polarizing pink power.

A large portion of Nvidia’s growth this quarter was driven by data center revenue, totaling $30.8 billion for the quarter, which was up 112 percent from last year. The company’s gross profit margin was 74.5 percent, essentially flat from a year ago. But analysts expect that Nvidia’s margins could shrink as the company shifts to…

Engagement and profits on social platforms are built on fomenting dissatisfaction and disinformation—but there’s a better alternative.

There’s a growing trend of people and organizations rejecting the unsolicited imposition of AI in their lives. In December 2023, the The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. In March 2024, three authors filed a class action in California against Nvidia for allegedly training its AI platform NeMo on their copyrighted…

In 2025, entrepreneurs will unleash a flood of AI-powered apps. Finally, generative AI will deliver on the hype with a new crop of affordable consumer and business apps. This is not the consensus view today. OpenAI, Google, and xAI are locked in an arms race to train the most powerful large language model (LLM) in…

You more than likely know Xiaomi, so-called Apple of China, as a maker of smartphones that offer a decent alternative to Samsung. You might also know about its smartwatches, robotic vacuums, and electric scooters. Good, if often unoriginal design, sold at a competitive price. But did you know it also sells cars? Xiaomi Auto leapt…

The US government has been imposing similar export controls on China aimed at limiting its ability to mint advanced silicon for years, but the controls apparently didn’t stop Huawei from developing competitive chips for training large AI models. The Chinese tech giant, which was temporarily crippled by US sanctions half a decade ago, sent samples…

In July, at a bitcoin conference in Nashville, Tennessee, Trump pledged to fire Gensler if reelected, drawing perhaps the most raucous applause of the night. “I will appoint an SEC chair who will build the future, not block the future,” Trump said. Last week, Gensler announced that he would resign from his office on January…

AI-generated writing is now all over the internet. The introduction of automated prose can sometimes change a website’s character, like when once beloved publications get purchased and overhauled into AI content mills. Other times, however, it’s harder to argue that AI really changed anything. For example, look at LinkedIn. The Microsoft-owned social media site for…

Next year will be Big Tech’s finale. Critique of Big Tech is now common sense, voiced by a motley spectrum that unites opposing political parties, mainstream pundits, and even tech titans such as the VC powerhouse Y Combinator, which is singing in harmony with giants like a16z in proclaiming fealty to “little tech” against the…

LexisNexis spokesperson Paul Eckloff disputes that freezing was an overreach. The company deemed that step as necessary to honor the requests submitted by Atlas users to not disclose their data. “This company couldn’t be more dedicated to supporting law enforcement,” he says. “We would support common sense protections.” But he described Daniel’s Law as overly…

Aftermarket prices might soften further as Tesla is now starting to deliver a new $79,990 model to reservation holders. Not that there’s any longer much need to place reservations—North American Tesla stores now accept walk-in orders for Cybertrucks, with delivery two or three weeks later. “I am calling it: Original reservation list is basically finished,”…

To give competitors a leg up, the government wants Google to share its search index and the data it collects about users when determining which results to show. The argument is that potential rivals would then be able to match the information advantage Google has amassed over decades studying the behavior patterns of its billions…

James and Rose, the bizarre AI bots who were recently installed as news broadcasters at local Hawaii paper The Garden Island, have been terminated. Employee retention is always a bit of a problem at local newspapers, and The Garden Island newspaper on the Hawaiian island of Kauai is no exception. Many reporters—usually mainland transplants like…

“[BYD’s] disclosures show a serious lack of transparency on human rights diligence in its battery supply chains,” said Amnesty’s Callamard. “Other low-scoring firms, such as Hyundai and Mitsubishi, lack the necessary depth and information about implementation across key human rights due diligence areas.” “The commitments these companies report on are often vague and provide little…

Like the conflicted cowboy in Brokeback Mountain, journalists, pundits and people who eschew MAGA merch have looked at the service formerly known as Twitter and lamented, “I don’t know how to quit you.” Even before Elon Musk took over, toxicity was running rampant, and Musk’s selectively implemented “free speech” principles made things worse. The ubiquitous…

US senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and congressman Jerry Nadler of New York have called on government bodies to investigate what they allege is the “predatory pricing” of .com web addresses, the internet’s prime real estate. In a letter delivered today to the Department of Justice and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a branch…

Lauren Goode: It sounds like you’re a little bit aligned with the successful tech entrepreneurs who were surveyed by the junior college in Palo Alto in terms of being a liberaltarian. Michael Calore: No, I go further left than that, I would say. Zoë Schiffer: He sounds like maybe he’s Yang Gang. Lauren Goode: Oh,…

Lawsuits are never exactly a lovefest, but the copyright fight between The New York Times and both OpenAI and Microsoft is getting especially contentious. This week, the Times alleged that OpenAI’s engineers inadvertently erased data the paper’s team spent more than 150 hours extracting as potential evidence. OpenAI was able to recover much of the…

No question about it: Nadella’s Microsoft is a triumph. Finally, in the 2020s, Microsoft has centered on the most innovative tech since the PC itself. And though revenues from AI products haven’t begun to offset Microsoft’s huge investments, it has the confidence—and the resources—to wait until the products improve and users find them useful. But…

WIRED’s Big Interview has long been the definitive source for in-depth conversations with the executives, scientists, political leaders, and creators shaping the rapidly shifting future. Now, for the first time, we’re bringing that series to the stage. You won’t want to miss it. Join us live December 3 in San Francisco for a full day…

A third-generation San Franciscan, Gabe says he grew up playing with Nancy Pelosi’s kids and went to high school with Gavin Newsom, and now he’s a driver the way they’re politicians—it’s in his blood. He’s been operating taxicabs, Ubers, or Lyfts since 1995, and even helped organize a taxi workers’ strike in the late ’90s….

At an upscale sushi bar in New York last week, a smattering of media and policy types chowed down on a menu of sushi rolls, Peking duck tapas, and mushroom salad. But what made this menu unusual was the one ingredient that ran through the dishes—foie gras made from quail cells brewed in a bioreactor….

The US Patent and Trademark Office banned the use of generative artificial intelligence for any purpose last year, citing security concerns with the technology as well as the propensity of some tools to exhibit “bias, unpredictability, and malicious behavior,” according to an April 2023 internal guidance memo obtained by WIRED through a public records request….

It’s the day after Donald Trump declared his election victory, and a tech scout for NATO is peering down at a miniature factory, the size of a shoebox, designed to manufacture semiconductors in space. Chris O’Connor, with his black bomber jacket and military haircut, has spent the past year scouring Europe for companies that will…

The more certain short-term impact is that US investors who are still interested in Chinese AI startups will have to do a whole lot more due diligence. The Treasury Department is not setting up a new government committee like CFIUS that will review every transaction investors submit, and is instead asking them to do their…

According to Salla, Big Tech rules should be left to the new administration entering the White House. “Big Tech should be regulated by their home continent … That needs to be done in the US first and foremost.” President-elect Donald Trump has been vague about how he would regulate Big Tech, suggesting “something” should be…

Substack does not have an official policy governing the use of AI. One of Substack’s cofounders, Hamish McKenzie, has described the generative AI boom as a sea change that writers will need to confront, regardless of their personal views on the tech: “Whether you’re for or against this development ultimately doesn’t matter. It’s happening,” he…

In 1845, somewhere between inventing a system for detonating explosives by electricity and the refillable fountain pen, Robert Thomson, a Scottish engineer and entrepreneur, patented the first pneumatic tire—a then wondrous, now everyday item that has been gradually evolving ever since. Now, in the era of electric vehicles, they are more in focus then ever…

The debacle led to a hearing in the US Senate on consolidation in the ticketing industry. In May, the US Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit seeking to break up Ticketmaster and Live Nation, which it accused of abusing their alleged ticketing monopoly to trample competitors. In a statement provided to WIRED at the…

People have never been better, here in the Year of Our Simulation 2024, at hating the very forces underlying that simulation—at hating, in other words, digital technology itself. And good for them. These everywhere-active tech critics don’t just rely, for their on-trend position-taking, on vague, nostalgist, technophobic feelings anymore. Now they have research papers to…

Lauren Goode: Zoë, you had vegan pizza the other night. You said it was pretty good. Zoë Schiffer: I did. I did, and I read a really, really scary article written by Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic about dairy farming, and it radicalized me for at least 24 hours. I was on oat milk. Thank…

At sentencing, the judge was also permitted to take under consideration the murder-for-hire allegations, despite them never having been charged at trial. “Until the Supreme Court rules otherwise, relevant but uncharged crimes of this sort can be and are regularly considered by judges,” says Richman. Ulbricht has never fully acknowledged the harm inflicted by the…

Minecraft remains remarkably popular a decade or so after it was first released, thanks to a unique mix of quirky gameplay and open world building possibilities. A knock-off called Oasis, released last month, captures much of the original game’s flavor with a remarkable and weird twist. The entire game is generated not by a game…

After more than 1,200 days of silence, Li Ziqi, arguably the most successful internet influencer from China on YouTube, is suddenly posting videos again. Earlier this week, the 34-year-old content creator, who is best-known for sharing soothing, meticulously edited clips of herself cooking traditional Chinese dishes, farming, and working on elaborate art projects, posted three…

Ask the search engine Ecosia about “Paris to Prague” and flight booking websites dominate the results. Ecosia’s CEO Christian Kroll would prefer to present more train options, which he considers better for the environment. But because its results are licensed from Google and Microsoft’s Bing, Ecosia has little control over what’s shown. Kroll is ready…

Is Mark Zuckerberg’s style transformation just a matter of a change in personal taste? Or is the infamous tech mogul trying to tell us something about Meta?

Perplexity’s Election Information Hub might also blur the line between verified and free-wheeling AI-generated information. While some results come directly from trusted sources, searching for more information triggered open-ended AI-generated results from the wider web. Other AI companies appear to be taking a more cautious approach to the election. In WIRED’s testing, ChatGPT Search, a…

Group chats on Towns can be configured in such a way that only people who fulfill certain criteria—who have specific expertise, say—are allowed to post messages, while everyone else watches from the sidelines. In this scenario, Rubin hopes, large group conversations will no longer be polluted with ill-informed takes and scam posts. He believes the…

Topic, who also represents The Intercept in a similar DMCA case against OpenAI, as well as the nonprofit newsroom the Center for Investigative Reporting in a copyright infringement case against both OpenAI and Microsoft, says he is “confident that these kinds of DMCA claims are permitted under the Constitution.” Not all experts agree. “These claims…

Eight years ago, the November US election results profoundly shocked the small staff at Backchannel, the boutique tech publication I headed. The morning after, an editor posted on our Slack that working on a technology story seemed tone-deaf, if not futile. On a plane from New York to San Francisco, I wrote a column to…

The most raucous cheers of the night were prompted by Trump’s promise to fire Gary Gensler, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a regulatory agency that has brought a volley of lawsuits against crypto businesses under the Biden administration. Separately, Trump has promised to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the creator of darknet…

Lauren Goode: Oh, really? Zoë Schiffer: Yes. Lauren Goode: I did not have that experience on Caltrain. Zoë Schiffer: Well, you weren’t reading Infinite Jest on the Caltrain, were you now?. That was my catfishing technique. Lauren Goode: What was your worst commute, Mike? Michael Calore: There was a period of time in the early…

On the campaign trail, Trump went out of his way to court their favor. In July, speaking to thousands of bitcoiners at a conference in Nashville, Tennessee, Trump duly sang from the bitcoin hymn sheet, promising to cement the US as the foremost bitcoin mining powerhouse, establish a national “bitcoin stockpile,” and appoint a bitcoin…

Over the past year, Cisco publicly looked like one of the few tech companies that had avoided internal backlash over its response to the war in Gaza. Chuck Robbins, the CEO of the Silicon Valley giant known for its routers, cybersecurity services, and WebEx video calling, issued a statement last November acknowledging the suffering of…

TikTok is one of the tech companies that could be most impacted by the outcome of the US elections. But as the election result looms, employees there found themselves surprisingly disengaged from the high-level political drama that could decide the app’s fate. A San Jose-based product manager, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized…

On Saturday, an Associated Press investigation revealed that OpenAI’s Whisper transcription tool creates fabricated text in medical and business settings despite warnings against such use. The AP interviewed more than 12 software engineers, developers, and researchers who found the model regularly invents text that speakers never said, a phenomenon often called a “confabulation” or “hallucination”…

Mittelsteadt adds that Trump could punish companies in a variety of ways. He cites, for example, the way the Trump government canceled a major federal contract with Amazon Web Services, a decision likely influenced by the former president’s view of the Washington Post and its owner, Jeff Bezos. It would not be hard for policymakers…

Is Mark Zuckerberg’s style transformation just a matter of a change in personal taste? Or is the infamous tech mogul trying to tell us something about Meta?

Silicon Valley has been an epicenter of global innovation for decades. But the Valley, and its associated personalities, companies, and trends, has never been home to more undiluted power than it is today. Think about it: Elon Musk, among the world’s richest people, is essentially underwriting US presidential candidates while subsidiaries of his interstellar-centric company…

The messages, potentially misleading US citizens or stoking hate towards various groups, will have been seen by many times more people than actually made a purchase. Those running the network of Facebook pages in Nigeria may simply believe that US-focused clickbait is the best way to boost the number of people who see their scams….

Four years ago, one of Vice President Kamala Harris’ top donors—the billionaire cofounder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman—celebrated the IPO of Airbnb, a company he was heavily invested in, by fashioning Monopoly boards where the game’s “jail” space is replaced by “government regulation.” Since Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, many billionaire tech investors have come…

I appreciate that. We own this mistake. So your name is Nazir Ali, but when you say “we”— We are not going to give you any personal information that might be harmful for us. Everyone is writing about us, and they are telling us that we are scammers. Would you be comfortable telling me about…

Michal Kosinski is a Stanford research psychologist with a nose for timely subjects. He sees his work as not only advancing knowledge, but alerting the world to potential dangers ignited by the consequences of computer systems. His best-known projects involved analyzing the ways in which Facebook (now Meta) gained a shockingly deep understanding of its…

Despite stunning AI progress in recent years, robots remain stubbornly dumb and limited. The ones found in factories and warehouses typically go through precisely choreographed routines without much ability to perceive their surroundings or adapt on the fly. The few industrial robots that can see and grasp objects can only do a limited number of…

The European Union has launched a formal investigation into Chinese shopping platform Temu, citing concerns that the platform is selling illegal products and has been designed in a way that is addictive for consumers. “There is a real suspicion that not enough is done—not in an effective way—to really prevent the dissemination of illegal products,”…

Managing such a gargantuan array of chips to develop Llama 4 is likely to present unique engineering challenges and require vast amounts of energy. Meta executives on Wednesday sidestepped an analyst question about energy access constraints in parts of the US that have hampered companies’ efforts to develop more powerful AI. According to one estimate,…

For Europe, the outcome of next week’s US election will have profound consequences. NATO funding is at stake, as is a potential peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. Projections suggest a trade war with Donald Trump could hit GDP in the bloc’s biggest economy, Germany, by 1.5 percent. The future of big tech, by comparison,…

Analysts at the US Department of Homeland Security shared an internal report to local agencies in August, warning them about the economic risks of using Chinese utility storage batteries. It warns that the dependence on Chinese batteries could hurt developing a secure supply chain in the US. The document, first obtained by national security transparency…

In the week before the documentary was released, online betting markets had Len Sassaman, a cryptographer who moved in similar online circles as Satoshi, as the most likely candidate to be revealed as the Bitcoin creator. Sassaman took his own life in 2011 at the age of 31, shortly after Satoshi disappeared. The case for…

For eight months, the criminal investigator who pioneered cryptocurrency tracing as a law enforcement technique has, in a bizarre twist of fate, been jailed in Nigeria facing charges of money laundering and tax evasion. Now he is finally coming home. On Wednesday in Abuja, a court ruled that criminal charges against Tigran Gambaryan, a Binance…

Eric Lander is a Big Science heavyweight. A geneticist, molecular biologist, and mathematician, he led the International Human Genome Project and is founding director of the powerful Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His countless accolades include a MacArthur “genius” grant and 14 honorary doctorates. When Joe Biden became president, he tapped Lander to be…