OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati resigned on Wednesday, saying she wants “the time and space to do my own exploration.” Murati had been among the three executives at the very top of the company behind ChatGPT, and she was briefly its leader last year while board members wrestled with …
Read More »FTX Insider Caroline Ellison Sentenced to Two Years in Prison
A US federal judge in the Southern District of New York has sentenced Caroline Ellison, a member of the ring of executives who presided over the fraud that led to the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, to two years in prison. In addition, she has been ordered to forfeit $11 …
Read More »Proposed Ban Would Be a ‘Death Sentence’ for Chinese EVs in the US
After officially hiking tariffs on Chinese electric vehicle imports earlier this month, the US government is getting even more serious about keeping China-made autos out of the country. On Monday, the US Commerce Department proposed a new rule that would ban some Chinese- and Russian-made automotive hardware and software from …
Read More »Attention, Spoiled Software Engineers: Take a Lesson from Google’s Programming Language
Many of today’s programmers—excuse me, software engineers—consider themselves “creatives.” Artists of a sort. They are given to ostentatious personal websites with cleverly hidden Easter eggs and parallax scrolling; they confer upon themselves multihyphenate job titles (“ex-Amazon-engineer-investor-author”) and crowd their laptops with identity-signaling vinyl stickers. Some regard themselves as literary sophisticates. …
Read More »TikTok’s Defense Strategy Involves Throwing Shein and Temu Under the Bus
TikTok went all out to defend itself in a court hearing last Monday, to block a law that could force TikTok to be sold or banned in the United States. That included using one surprising strategy: to bring other Chinese apps down with it. Earlier this year, the Protecting Americans …
Read More »A Mysterious School for the Network State Crowd Is Now in Session
Last month, venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan announced the Network School, a three-month learning retreat marketed to people interested in “network nations,” a kind of utopia for the anarchocapitalist set. The inaugural class is 150 people. It starts today. Details about the school have been shrouded in secrecy, even for the …
Read More »New Cloudflare Tools Let Sites Detect and Block AI Bots for Free
Internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare is launching a suite of tools that could help shift the power dynamic between AI companies and the websites they crawl for data. Today it’s giving all of its customers—including the estimated 33 million using its free services—the ability to monitor and selectively block AI data-scraping …
Read More »Welcome to the Era of ‘Deep Doubt’
Given the flood of photorealistic AI-generated images washing over social media networks like X and Facebook these days, we're seemingly entering a new age of media skepticism: the era of what I'm calling “deep doubt.” While questioning the authenticity of digital content stretches back decades—and analog media long before that—easy …
Read More »Xavier Niel, a Driving Force of French AI, Is Now Shaping TikTok
I wait to meet Xavier Niel in a room that feels fitting for one of France’s richest men. Gold-encrusted walls frame a boardroom table the size of a small swimming pool. And beyond the large windows, a lily pond. Niel is the original French internet mogul, of the generation before …
Read More »Big Tech’s New Adversaries in Europe
If the past five years of EU tech rules could take human form, they would embody Thierry Breton. The bombastic commissioner, with his swoop of white hair, became the public face of Brussels’ irritation with American tech giants, touring Silicon Valley last summer to personally remind the industry of looming …
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