Madrid is home to many of the nation’s corporate HQs, from Iberia through Telefónica to Repsol. As a result, the city ecosystem is geared toward launching B2B startups to serve them. Fintech and security feature strongly, “But we’re also seeing more electric vehicle startups, housing, and health” adds Alex de …
Read More »EU Investigates Elon Musk’s X for Spreading Illegal Content
The relationship between Elon Musk and the European Union deteriorated further on Monday, with the bloc launching a formal investigation into the way X has been run since the billionaire took over last year. Senior officials from the European Commission said they were concerned about a range of new features …
Read More »OpenAI’s Ilya Sutskever Has a Plan for Keeping Super-Intelligent AI in Check
OpenAI was founded on a promise to build artificial intelligence that benefits all of humanity—even when that AI becomes considerably smarter than its creators. Since the debut of ChatGPT last year and during the company’s recent governance crisis, its commercial ambitions have been more prominent. Now, the company says a …
Read More »McDonald’s Ice Cream Machine Hackers Say They Found the ‘Smoking Gun’ That Killed Their Startup
A little over three years have passed since McDonald's sent out an email to thousands of its restaurant owners around the world that abruptly cut short the future of a three-person startup called Kytch—and with it, perhaps one of McDonald's best chances for fixing its famously out-of-order ice cream machines. …
Read More »My Surprisingly Unbiased Week With Elon Musk’s ‘Politically Biased’ Chatbot
Some Elon Musk enthusiasts have been alarmed to discover in recent days that Grok, his supposedly “truth-seeking” artificial intelligence was in actual fact a bit of a snowflake. Grok, built by Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence company, was made available to Premium+ X users last Friday. Musk has complained that OpenAI’s …
Read More »Pinterest Is Having a Moment
“Western Gothic,” jellyfish, and blue makeup—these are among the trends Pinterest predicts will be big in 2024. At its pop-up shop in New York City’s Meatpacking District, Pinterest put these delights on display in early December, creating an experiential shop stocked with metallic boots, colorful glassware, and jelly-inspired fashion. But …
Read More »Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Top-Secret Hawaii Compound
Off the two-lane highway that winds along the northeast side of the Hawaiian island of Kauai, on a quiet stretch of ranchland between the tourist hubs of Kapaa and Hanalei, an enormous, secret construction project is underway. A 6-foot wall blocks the view from a nearby road fronting the project, …
Read More »Massive Layoffs Hit Troubled Robotaxi Developer Cruise
Cruise, General Motors’ self-driving development subsidiary, will lay off almost a quarter of its workforce—about 900 employees—the company announced Thursday. The cuts are part of a broader restructuring to focus the robotaxi unit on a narrower path to commercialization. Instead of expanding its commercial robotaxi service to multiple US cities, …
Read More »Tesla Is Recalling Nearly All Vehicles Sold in US to Fix an Autopilot Fault
Tesla is recalling more than 2 million vehicles, nearly all of the vehicles it has sold in the US to date, to fix a flawed system designed to make sure drivers are paying attention when they use Autopilot. Rather than physically recalling vehicles, documents posted today by the US National …
Read More »US Regulators Want Cars to Include Drunk-Driver Detection Technology
The US government took the first step Tuesday toward requiring new cars to have technology that checks whether the driver is drunk. At an event in Washington, DC, officials with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the nation’s top road safety regulator, said the technology could help prevent thousands of …
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