business

Threads, the text-based social network that Meta recently launched as part of Instagram, is finally on the web. Earlier this week, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg shared that Threads for the web would be “rolling out over the next few days.” That rollout has begun; some users already have access …

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 …

Who owns the data created by cars: their owners, or the companies that built them? In 2020, Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly approved a law that began to answer that question. It required automakers selling cars in the state to build an “open data platform” that would allow owners and independent repair …

When insurrectionists stormed the US capitol on January 6, 2021, in support of former president Donald Trump, Meta had to confront the reality that world leaders—even those in democratic nations—might use its platform to call for violence against their own citizens and political rivals. The company had long kept a …

Last winter, the unveiling of OpenAI’s alarmingly sophisticated chatbot sent educators into a tailspin. Generative AI, it was feared, would enable rampant cheating and plagiarism, and even make high school English obsolete. Universities debated updating plagiarism policies. Some school districts outright banned ChatGPT from their networks. Now, a new school …

wearing a black T-shirt tucked into a black kilt, Dontae “BYTEME” Meyers showed up early alongside hundreds of other hackers in Las Vegas late last week to be among the first to try to prove they could make text-spewing AI systems generate spectacularly harmful text. “You can basically get these …

Take a walk around San Francisco this summer and you’ll see something curious: Jaguar SUVs and Chevrolet hatchbacks driving around with no one inside. The ghostly vehicles are owned and operated by Google spinoff Waymo and General Motors subsidiary Cruise. Soon there will likely be a lot more of them, …

Geoffrey Hinton, perhaps the world’s most celebrated artificial intelligence researcher, made a big splash a few months ago when he publicly revealed that he’d left Google so he could speak frankly about the dangers of the technology he helped develop. His announcement did not come out of the blue. Late …

ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and other tools like them are making artificial intelligence available to the masses. We can now get all sorts of responses back on almost any topic imaginable. These chatbots can compose sonnets, write code, get philosophical, and automate tasks. However, while you can just type anything you …