Today, X released the company’s first transparency report since Elon Musk bought the company, formerly Twitter, in 2022. Before Musk’s takeover, Twitter would release transparency reports every six months.These largely covered the same ground as the new X report, giving specific numbers for takedowns, government requests for information, and content …
Read More »Meta Releases Llama 3.2—and Gives Its AI a Voice
Mark Zuckerberg announced today that Meta, his social-media-turned-metaverse-turned-artificial intelligence conglomerate, will upgrade its AI assistants to give them a range of celebrity voices, including those of Dame Judi Dench and John Cena. The more important upgrade for Meta’s long-term ambitions, though, is the new ability of its models to see …
Read More »Nike's New CEO Has One Hell of a Challenge Ahead
After a tumultuous few years marked by declining sales, lackluster innovation, and decimated retail relationships, John Donahoe has stepped down as CEO of Nike. His departure comes on the heels of mounting criticism over Nike’s digital transformation strategy, which hit a critical juncture on June 28 when the company’s market …
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 »The AI Boom Is Raising Hopes of a Nuclear Comeback
For five years, reactor one at Three Mile Island nuclear power station in Pennsylvania has lain dormant. Now, thanks to a deal with Microsoft, the reactor will start running again in 2028—this time to exclusively supply the tech firm with oodles of low-carbon electricity. It’s all part of an ongoing …
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 »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 »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 »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 »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 …
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