I might have inadvertently insulted Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor when I interviewed them about their new AI startup last week. Their new company, Sierra, is developing AI-powered agents to “elevate the customer experience” for big companies. Among its original customers are WeightWatchers, Sonos, SiriusXM, and OluKai (a “Hawaiian-inspired” clothing …
Read More »
We already know that OpenAI’s chatbots can pass the bar exam without going to law school. Now, just in time for the Oscars, a new OpenAI app called Sora hopes to master cinema without going to film school. For now a research product, Sora is going out to a few …
Read More »
In her new memoir, Burn Book, Kara Swisher cites a 2014 profile that dubbed her “Silicon Valley’s Most Feared and Well-Liked Journalist.” She might prefer to downplay the first and emphasize the second. Some people would switch that around. But there is no dispute about Swisher’s impact: When it comes …
Read More »
A month ago, the consulting company Accenture presented a potential client an unusual and attention-grabbing pitch for a new project. Instead of the usual slide deck, the client saw deepfakes of several real employees standing on a virtual stage, offering perfectly delivered descriptions of the project they hoped to work …
Read More »
Alphabet’s Gemini AI model has been public for only two months, but the company is already releasing an upgrade. Gemini Pro 1.5, launching with limited availability today, is more powerful than its predecessor and can handle huge amounts of text, video, or audio input at a time. Demis Hassabis, CEO …
Read More »
The problem with testing AI chatbot subscriptions like Google’s Gemini Advanced and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus is their generality. The same tool is used for disparate applications; the same software service that developers in San Francisco are using to build their latest app might also be used by parents in Kansas …
Read More »
The cross-examination of Craig Wright, a computer scientist defending his claims to be the inventor of Bitcoin in court, proceeded fitfully over the course of seven days. In the UK High Court, opposing counsel Jonathan Hough bombarded Wright with examples of what he argued were anomalies that showed Wright had …
Read More »
Marina Hadjipateras, the dashing American venture capitalist, has only one word of derision. She speaks it softly and rarely. Conservative. A family can be conservative. An investment, a choice. The way she uses the word, it’s never political. It’s also never a good thing. The first time I hear Marina …
Read More »
In September 2023, Upside Foods announced its plans to open a large cultivated-meat plant in Glenview, Illinois. The 187,000-square-foot plant was slated to have an initial capacity of millions of pounds of bioreactor-brewed meat per year, which would make it one of the largest planned factories in the nascent cultivated-meat …
Read More »
Watching pirated movies on your iPhone just got a little harder. After climbing the charts of Apple’s App Store, the trendy Kimi app, with its collection of bootlegged movies, has just disappeared. Pretending to be a spot-the-difference vision-testing game, the widely downloaded app ranked above Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime …
Read More »