The plant-based meat industry is in a bad place. Sales in the US fell last year as the pandemic-era enthusiasm for vegan burgers and sausages continued to wane. Beyond Meat, once the darling of the plant-based boom and the first one of its cohort to go public, in 2019, has become a cautionary tale about…
As asylum centers are boarding up ahead of another predicted day of violent protests across the UK on Wednesday, X owner Elon Musk has stoked tensions by labeling UK prime minister Keir Starmer “#TwoTierKier” and spreading a far-right conspiracy theory that claims white rioters are being dealt with more severely than minorities by police. For…
In the suburbs of northeast Paris, there is a giant terra-cotta-colored warehouse with a labyrinth of windowless corridors inside. A deafening whir emanates from behind rows and rows of anonymous gray doors, and under white striplights, disposable earbuds are available to protect passersby from the noise. These are the uncanny innards of one of France’s…
X today filed a lawsuit against a group of major advertisers for allegedly conspiring to withhold advertising dollars from the social media platform, which, since Elon Musk’s takeover, has been seen as more amenable to hosting controversial content. The suit, filed in federal court in Texas, says dozens of advertisers followed the recommendation of a…
Starting Monday, Zoom users will have the option to open a document tool from within their video calling app and create sharable files based on their meetings—but they’ll also be prompted to use generative AI to help them write and edit them. This new feature, essentially Zoom’s version of Google Docs, is the latest effort…
Google is now 0 for 2 in antitrust trials. US District judge Amit Mehta ruled on Monday that Google has unlawfully maintained its dominance in search by using anticompetitive deals to keep rivals from gaining traction. The ruling follows a weekslong trial in Mehta’s Washington, DC, courtroom last year in which the US Department of…
When Meta released its large language model Llama 3 for free this April, it took outside developers just a couple days to create a version without the safety restrictions that prevent it from spouting hateful jokes, offering instructions for cooking meth, or misbehaving in other ways. A new training technique developed by researchers at the…
In March 2019, TikTok agreed to a US federal court order barring the social media giant from collecting personal information from its youngest users without their parents’ consent. According to a new lawsuit filed by US authorities, TikTok immediately breached that order and now faces penalties of $51,744 per violation per day. TikTok “knowingly allowed…
One thing that US politicians seem to agree on, despite a great many other differences, is that the country needs to lead technologically to maintain a position of economic and geopolitical preeminence. How to ensure such leadership will be a critical question for the next US president and his or her staff. The past two…
A few weeks ago, a Google search for “deepfake nudes jennifer aniston” brought up at least seven high-up results that purported to have explicit, AI-generated images of the actress. Now they have vanished. Google product manager Emma Higham says that new adjustments to how the company ranks results, which have been rolled out this year,…