Each time a driver in Seattle meets a red light, they wait about 20 seconds on average before it turns green again, according to vehicle and smartphone data collected by analytics company Inrix. The delays cause annoyance and expel in Seattle alone an estimated 1,000 metric tons or more of …

Wining and dining, wooing clients with creative offers, and cashing big bonuses provide the glamor to sales work. Drafting answers to hundreds of dull questions posed by a prospective customer’s request for proposals? That’s just drudgery. Mercifully for workers, after months of speculation about ChatGPT-style AI taking over white-collar work, …

After evidence surfaced in 2018 that leading face-analysis algorithms were less accurate for people with darker skin, companies including Google and Meta adopted measures of skin tone to test the effectiveness of their AI software. New research from Sony suggests that those tests are blind to a crucial aspect of …

Months out of law school, Yosef Weitzman already has a huge courtroom role in the biggest antitrust trial of the century. In a US federal trial that started last week, Google is accused of unlawfully monopolizing online search and search ads. The company’s self-defined mission is to make the world's …

Luiz André Barroso had never designed a data center before Google asked him to do it in the early 2000s. By the time he finished his first, he had overturned many conventions of the computing industry, laying the foundations for Silicon Valley’s development of cloud computing. Barroso, a 22-year veteran …

Every text-centric social platform has its own way of nudging people to write the content needed to keep other users engaged. “What is happening?!” yelps the compose box on Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter. Meta’s equivalent on Facebook wonders, “What’s on your mind?” No matter what the question, it’s always …

A family member’s hurried Google search for a last-second visa to visit New Zealand recently caused a headache—and provided a timely reminder of why Google faces a landmark US antitrust trial next week. Tapping on the first link took us off to a website that after a few swipes charged …

When fashion influencer Natalie Craig recently searched Pinterest for skorts and cargo pants, she noticed something different from her past explorations on the service: Women who looked like her were sprinkled among the results—and without adding qualifiers like “plus size” to her query. “I’m 5'2" and a size 20, so …

Around 11 am Eastern on weekdays, as Europe prepares to sign off, the US East Coast hits the midday slog, and Silicon Valley fires up, Tel Aviv-based startup Astria’s AI image generator is as busy as ever. The company doesn’t profit much from this burst of activity, however. Companies like …