A Google executive said the company will start assembling its Pixel smartphones in India, becoming the latest tech giant to target the South Asian market. Rick Osterloh, Senior VP of Devices and Services at Google, announced at the company’s annual India event Thursday that the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 …
Read More »Israel to launch SpaceX Starlink internet amid Hamas war
An Israeli official said Tuesday that Israel is in talks with SpaceX to provide Starlink internet services, especially to conflict zones. Starlink has never been offered in Israel, so this would be the first time. That official said it is considering halting cell and internet communications in Gaza to boost …
Read More »Tesla wants stricter fuel standards to maintain EV dominance
Tesla dominates the U.S. electric vehicle market. Now it wants stricter regulations to gain an edge. Tesla is urging the Biden administration to adopt stricter fuel economy standards than regulators have proposed, which will irritate legacy automakers like General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis. These three companies face $10.5 billion in …
Read More »X experiments with a $1-per-year new user fee
X, formerly Twitter, announced today that it will experiment with charging “new unverified” users $1 per year to interact with posts. The company said this test is live in New Zealand and the Philippines and won’t affect existing users. Users can post, like, repost, reply, bookmark, and quote for that …
Read More »Foxconn and Nvidia are accelerating self-driving cars with ‘AI factories’
Nvidia and Foxconn are building “AI factories,” supercomputing data centers to accelerate the development of self-driving cars, autonomous machines, and industrial robots. On Tuesday, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang and Foxconn chairman and CEO Young Liu announced the partnership at Hon Hai Tech Day in Taiwan. The AI factory …
Read More »ChatGPT gets web search from OpenAI as DALL-E 3 integration enters beta
Three weeks after relaunching its internet-browsing feature in beta after months, OpenAI launched it on ChatGPT. Until September 2021, ChatGPT, the generative AI chatbot that has taken the world by storm, was limited to data, making it useless as a real-time search engine. OpenAI began offering internet services to ChatGPT …
Read More »Reality Defender raises $15M for text, video, image detection deepfakes
Reality Defender, one of several startups developing tools to detect deepfakes and other AI-generated content, raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by DCVC, Comcast Ventures, Ex/ante, Parameter Ventures, and Nat Friedman’s AI Grant. Co-founder and CEO Ben Colman plans to double Reality Defender’s 23-person team next …
Read More »Microsoft-affiliated research finds GTP-4 flaws
Following instructions too closely can get you in trouble if you’re a large language model. A new Microsoft-affiliated scientific paper examined the “trustworthiness” and toxicity of large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and GPT-3.5. The co-authors suggest that GPT-4 may be more susceptible to “jailbreaking” prompts that bypass the …
Read More »LinkedIn will cut 668 more jobs this year, bringing the total to nearly 1,400
LinkedIn announced a rollout of AI-powered tools across the company this month. It’s laying off 668 workers today, a future-focused announcement. An informed source says 563 layoffs will be in R&D, affecting engineering, product, talent, and finance teams. The cuts, announced this morning, come five months after LinkedIn cut 716 …
Read More »After 50 Years, Mathematician Solved Möbius Mystery
One-sided Möbius strips are fun geometric shapes. A strip of paper has a front and back. Twist and glue the short edges. Suddenly, no front or back. You could draw a line across its surface without lifting the pencil. Mathematicians proposed the minimum strip size 46 years ago but couldn’t …
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