Reddit cofounders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian spent about eight straight years living together, initially as college roommates, playing World of Warcraft late into the night and later working together on the foundations of the discussion forums service now frequented by nearly 270 million people. But that history was missing …

To comply with looming rules that ban tech giants from favoring their own services, Google has been testing new look search results for flights, trains, hotels, restaurants, and products in Europe. The EU’s Digital Markets Act is supposed to help smaller companies get more traffic from Google, but reviews service …

A trio of Google engineers recently came up with a futuristic way to help anyone who stumbles through presentations on video calls. They propose that when algorithms detect a speaker’s pulse racing or “umms” lengthening, a generative AI bot that mimics their voice could simply take over. That cutting-edge idea …

Google got to where it is mostly by offering free services stuffed with ads, but it has increasingly experimented with a different business model: selling subscriptions for extra perks. Its first subscription offering, debuted in 2006, provided additional photo storage for users who didn’t want to have to hit the …

Pennies were pinched in Mountain View last year. For much of its existence as a public company, Google had made a headline-grabbing acquisition at least once a year as it used the profits from its surging ads business to bet on new frontiers. Billions of dollars went to scooping up …

When Google CEO Sundar Pichai emailed his workers the company priorities for 2024 this month, developing AI responsibly was top of the list. Some employees now wonder whether Google can live up to that goal. The small team that has served as its primary internal AI ethics watchdog has lost …

Wealthy tech entrepreneurs including Elon Musk launched OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab that they said would involve society and the public in the development of powerful AI, unlike Google and other giant tech companies working behind closed doors. In line with that spirit, OpenAI’s reports to US …

What can $83 million in legal defense fees buy? In Apple’s case, billions of dollars in annual App Store revenue that had been under threat until this week. While the iPhone maker’s costly legal battle started by developer Epic Games technically isn’t quite over, Apple looks mighty victorious after the …

Before Google’s disastrous social network Google+ came the less remembered Google Buzz. Launched in 2010, Buzz survived less than two years. But its mishandling of people’s personal data motivated the first in a series of legal settlements that, though imperfect, are to this day the closest the US has come …

Google violated California and federal antitrust laws through deals that stifled competition for its Play mobile app store, a jury in San Francisco unanimously found today. The verdict delivers the first significant US courtroom loss for big tech in the years-long campaign by rivals, regulators, and prosecutors to tame the …