“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 …
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The US government has launched an investigation into the national security risks posed by foreign-made vehicles with internet connectivity—especially those made in China. At a briefing on Wednesday, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo even raised the specter of Beijing remotely triggering mayhem on US highways. “Imagine if there were thousands …
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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 …
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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 …
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Every six months, the automotive research company J. D. Power surveys some 5,000 US electric vehicle owners about their experiences driving their battery-powered cars. The latest edition of this survey, out this week, found that EV’s perennial bugbear is still bugbearing. In fact it has gotten worse: Drivers say they …
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After a decade of rumors, secretive developments, executive entrances and exits, and pivots, Apple reportedly told employees yesterday that its car project, internally called “Project Titan,” is no more. Those working on the technology of some four-odd hype cycles ago—electric, autonomous vehicles—will reportedly now focus on the vaunted advancement of …
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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 …
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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, …
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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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In September 2017, Singapore-based lawyer Pav Gill took a job at Wirecard, a high-flying German payments business worth tens of billions of euros. Not long after he started, he heard from a colleague that an executive at Wirecard Asia, the region Gill was responsible for, had allegedly been teaching staff …
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