Over the two years lawmakers have been negotiating the rules agreed today, AI technology and the leading concerns about it have dramatically changed. When the AI Act was conceived in April 2021, policymakers were worried about opaque algorithms deciding who would get a job, be granted refugee status or receive social benefits. By 2022, there…
Since 2016, the social behemoth now known as Meta has been working to deploy end-to-end encryption in its communication apps. CEO Mark Zuckerberg even promised in 2019 that the data privacy protection would roll out by default across all of the company’s chat apps. In practice, though, it was a wildly ambitious goal fraught with…
Hoffman and others said that there’s no need to pause development of AI. He called that drastic measure, for which some AI researchers have petitioned, foolish and destructive. Hoffman identified himself as a rational “accelerationist”—someone who knows to slow down when driving around a corner but that, presumably, is happy to speed up when the…
Unlike OpenAI, Mozilla’s nonprofit cannot fire executives in charge of for-profit work. Each for-profit unit has its own board, with members annually selected by the nonprofit foundation’s board. “It’s different jobs, it’s a different mix of skills,” Surman says. “If you have different functions, it makes sense to have a separation of powers.” The different…
Just days after people gleefully posted their Spotify Wrapped, bad news came for the music streaming giant. Spotify announced today that it would cut 17 percent of its workforce, a chunk that equates to an estimated 1,500 people. It’s the third time the world’s largest music streamer has cut jobs this year. The news came…
Rain at one point has claimed to investors that it has held advanced talks to sell systems to Google, Oracle, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon. Microsoft declined to comment, and the other companies did not respond to requests for comment. Security Fears The funding round led by Prosperity7 announced last year brought Rain’s total funding to…
“Our Mars Jacket has a 3D-printed vomit pocket with a bright orange sick bag,” company cofounder Steve Tidball stated earlier this year. “You might call it provocative, but for us, it isn’t—it’s experimental.” Vollebak is a niche brand, however, and marketing a postapocalyptic future as somehow desirable is far from mainstream. Where Are the Copycats?…
Tesla is suing Sweden as the carmaker hits back at an attempt by local unions to disrupt its business in an ongoing battle over workers’ rights. In the lawsuit, filed Monday, Tesla says it is suing “the Swedish state through the Swedish Transport Agency” because local union members were refusing to deliver new license plates…
We’ve already discussed how the Israel-Hamas war is the latest conflict where people are poring over social media and news channels looking for updates on what, exactly, is happening. After all, whether it’s news about our neighborhoods or communities on the other side of the world, the web is where we go to find updates….
This part of the elderly population can live limited lives, moving between just three physical locations: the place they go to buy groceries, where they drop their children off from school, and their own community complex. Huang’s mother didn’t move far. Originally from Jiangxi, she moved to Zhejiang, a six-hour drive away, and the living…