Technology

In the late hours of Wednesday, Google let go of hundreds of workers across a variety of departments, including engineering and services. As part of their reorganization, the knowledge and information product team—which includes voice-activated Google Assistant—and the Devices and Services PA (DSPA) team—which oversees Fitbit, Pixel, and Nest hardware—are …

I couldn’t wait to see the Rownd tabletop CNC lathe at this week’s CES in Las Vegas. I’ve been following its Kickstarter campaign for the last year, and it didn’t disappoint. At a time when personal manufacturing and DIY culture are on the rise, Rownd Lathe is a promising new …

Rite Aid was banned from using facial recognition software for five years by the FTC for its “reckless use of facial surveillance systems” that humiliated customers and put their “sensitive information at risk.” After Rite Aid filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October, the FTC ordered Rite Aid to delete …

Bird filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, ending a rough year for the electric scooter company. Bird announced today that it had begun a “financial restructuring process aimed at strengthening its balance sheet” but would continue to pursue “long-term, sustainable growth.” Bird, founded in 2017 by former Lyft and Uber executive …

Duet AI for Developers, the suite of AI-powered code completion and generation tools Google announced earlier this year, is now generally available and will start using Google’s more powerful Gemini model in the coming weeks. GitHub’s Copilot leads in developer mindshare for code completion and generation tools, but Google is …

Google is making Imagen 2, its AI model that can create and edit images with a text prompt, more widely available to Google Cloud customers using Vertex AI who have been approved. The company isn’t disclosing which data it used to train the new model or offering creators who accidentally …

Last week, Google announced its family of Gemini models and added them to its Bard chatbot. Today, it’s launching a variety of new and updated services for developers. One of these services is AI Studio, formerly MakerSuite. AI Studio is a web-based tool for developers that opens up the Gemini …

Instagram is considering a new feature called “flipside” that lets users create a private side of their profile to post more candid and personal photos for a select group of friends. The feature productizes “finstas”—alternative Instagram accounts where people post their real-life photos instead of their polished public Instagrams. The …

On Tuesday, Taiwanese electric scooter maker Gogoro launched a battery-swapping network and three smart scooters in India, the world’s most populous country and largest two-wheeler market. According to Gogoro CEO Horace Luke, India sees India as a manufacturing hub and plans to export its smart scooters to Nepal. The company …

We talk a lot about AI’s drawbacks, but what about its benefits, like feeding authors’ or historical figures’ writing into a large language model? James Lowry is unknown, but his story is part of black American history. Chicago-born Lowry was the first Black McKinsey consultant in 1968 after serving in …