“Speed is a feature,” Google cofounder Larry Page once told me. “Speed can drive usage as much as having bells and whistles on your product. People really underappreciate it.” I thought of Page’s remark when I tried out a chatbot from the startup Groq last week. (The name comes from …
Read More »Elon Musk Sues OpenAI and Sam Altman for ‘Flagrant Breaches’ of Contract
Elon Musk is suing OpenAI and Sam Altman for allegedly abandoning OpenAI’s original mission to develop artificial intelligence to benefit humanity. “OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” Musk’s lawyers wrote in the lawsuit, which was filed …
Read More »Waymo Will Bring Autonomous Taxis to Los Angeles—Its Biggest Challenge Yet
Paid autonomous vehicle service is coming to Los Angeles, thanks to a decision by California regulators today to allow Alphabet subsidiary Waymo to operate in the city. Under the new ruling, Waymo is also permitted to launch service in a large section of the San Francisco Peninsula. The decision by …
Read More »The Wild Claim at the Heart of Elon Musk’s OpenAI Lawsuit
Elon Musk started the week by posting testily on X about his struggles to set up a new laptop running Windows. He ended it by filing a lawsuit accusing OpenAI of recklessly developing human-level AI and handing it over to Microsoft. Musk’s lawsuit is filed against OpenAI and two of …
Read More »Elon Musk’s Lawsuit Against a Group That Found Hate Speech on X Isn’t Going Well
Soon after Elon Musk took control of Twitter, now called X, the platform faced a massive problem: Advertisers were fleeing. But that, the company alleges, was someone else’s fault. On Thursday that argument went before a federal judge, who seemed skeptical of the company's allegations that a nonprofit’s research tracking …
Read More »Google’s Deal With Stack Overflow Is the Latest Proof That AI Giants Will Pay for Data
Last year Stack Overflow became one of the first websites to announce it would charge AI giants for access to content used to train chatbots. Now the popular Q&A service for coders has signed up its first customer—Google—in what CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar says is the start of a “meaningful” new …
Read More »The AI Culture Wars Are Just Getting Started
Google was forced to turn off the image-generation capabilities of its latest AI model, Gemini, last week after complaints that it defaulted to depicting women and people of color when asked to create images of historical figures that were generally white and male, including vikings, popes, and German soldiers. The …
Read More »Amazon Just Got Banned From the EU Parliament
Amazon has become the second company ever to have its lobbyists banned from the European Parliament, amid accusations that the company does not take the institution seriously. The ban, which means the 14 Amazon employees who had access to the European Parliament can no longer enter the building without an …
Read More »How a Small Iowa Newspaper’s Website Became an AI-Generated Clickbait Factory
In his spare time, Tony Eastin likes to dabble in the stock market. One day last year, he Googled a pharmaceutical company that seemed like a promising investment. One of the first search results Google served up on its news tab was listed as coming from the Clayton County Register, …
Read More »The US Supreme Court Holds the Future of the Internet in Its Hands
The US Supreme Court seems torn over whether to trigger a radical transformation of the internet. The nation’s highest court heard arguments Monday over state laws in Florida and Texas that restrict how platforms like Facebook and YouTube moderate speech. If the court lets them take effect, social media feeds …
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