business

The promise and peril of the internet has always been a memory greater than our own, a permanent recall of information and events that our brains can’t store. More recently, tech companies have promised that virtual assistants and chatbots could handle some of the mnemonic load by both remembering and …

A battle for control is taking place inside iPhones across Europe. While Apple introduced new rules that ostensibly loosen its control over the App Store, local developers are seething at the new system, which they say entrenches the power Apple already wields over their businesses. They’re now breaking into a …

A few months ago, I was called in at the last minute to participate in an onstage fireside chat at an Authors’ Guild event. (I’m on the nonprofit’s council, but of course I speak here only for myself.) Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger and I spent much of the session exploring …

As ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence systems have gotten more powerful, calls for improved safety features by companies, researchers, and world leaders have gotten louder. Yet the guardrails chatbots throw up when they detect a potentially rule-breaking query can sometimes seem a bit pious and silly—even as genuine threats …

After a year of carefully limiting sign-ups to those with invites, the Twitter-style social app Bluesky this week threw open the doors for anyone to join. It’s a make-or-break moment. Remember when the live-audio app Clubhouse went from the most hyped-up social startup when it was hard to snag an …

Many people—like, say, journalists—are understandably antsy about what generative artificial intelligence might mean for the future of their profession. It doesn’t help that expert prognostications on the matter offer a confusing cocktail of wide-eyed excitement, trenchant skepticism, and dystopian despair. Some workers are already living in one potential version of …

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai still loves the web. He wakes up every morning and reads Techmeme, a news aggregator resplendent with links, accessible only via the web. The web is dynamic and resilient, he says, and can still—with help from a search engine—provide whatever information a person is looking for. …

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 …

Google just upgraded its AI chatbot. Access to the new Gemini Advanced chatbot is available right now through a monthly subscription to Google One, the company's cloud backup service. With today's release, there's a new tier of Google One service called the AI Premium plan, which costs $20 per month; …

When OpenAI’s ChatGPT opened a new era in tech, the industry’s former AI champ, Google, responded by reorganizing its labs and launching a profusion of sometimes overlapping AI services. This included the Bard chatbot, workplace helper Duet AI, and a chatbot-style version of search. Now Google is consolidating many of …