Thierry Breton, the European commissioner charged with enforcing the E.U.’s new Digital Services Act (DSA), warned on Tuesday that X’s platform has become overrun with “disinformation” and “violent and terrorist” content since Hamas’s October 7 attacks. Breton gave Elon Musk 24 hours to respond with how his company plans to fix that—or else risk facing an investigation that, per the DSA’s rules, could lead to fines of up to 6% of
Yitzy Hammer was itching to get back to work. For the last two weeks, Hammer, a lawyer who works with emerging tech companies in Israel, had been home with his four kids who weren’t in school during the Jewish high holidays. This week was supposed to be their first back, and Hammer had a packed schedule planned for the days ahead.
But since Saturday—when Hammer and his wife awoke to the sound of bombs falling and spent part of the day huddled with their family in a she
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The generative AI bill is coming due, and it’s not cheap
As AI developers try to commercialize and monetize their models, their customers are coming to grips with the fact that the technology is expensiv
The 2023 Nobel Prize for chemistry isn’t the first Nobel awarded for research in nanotechnology. But it is perhaps the most colorful application of the technology to be associated with the accolade.
This year’s prize recognizes Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus, and Alexei Ekimov for the discovery and development of quantum dots. For many years, these precisely constructed nanometer-sized particles—just a few
In one of Duolingo’s recent posts on TikTok, Duo, the language-learning app’s green owl mascot, explains to a support group of Teletubbies that there’s a restraining order against him. Commenters expressed concern: “Duo . . . where did you find the Teletubbies?” one asked. Duo promptly responded that he keeps them in his basement.
This unhinged behavior is typical of the character on social media. Duo’s popularity has exploded on the interne
Seeing is believing. Except when it’s not.
Here’s a familiar example. Last year, my wife and I bought a new Mazda SUV. I had never noticed one on the road before, but now they seem to be everywhere.
What happened? Did half of my neighbors decide to buy the same car at the same time? Surely not. But once the CX-5 secured a place of prominence in my consciousness, my mind automatically began sending off notification chimes every ti
Pinterest has always upended expectations, and for a service devoted to enabling its users to curate whatever they cared about, the company has also ironically defied categorization. It sits between social media and search. It pioneered the concept of the infinite scroll, yet it resisted the idea of a feed. It leaned heavily on Facebook alums to drive many elements of its business, yet it often made more sense as a visually driven alternative to Google search advertising. Women helped define
Pinterest is making me hungry.
I’ve logged on to the site, as I often have since buying my house, in search of furniture. Pinterest’s recommendation systems have risen to the challenge, accurately clocking my recent saves of rugs and nightstands as signs I might be looking to furnish a bedroom.
Pinterest, though, wants to go beyond showing me more of the same. It wants to inspire, as CEO Bill Ready tells me in a recent conversation. The platform pushes me to
I can’t remember now which email it was that made me click on the ‘Report Spam’ and ‘Unsubscribe’ links for the messages I received through Mynewsdesk, a service that companies can use to contact journalists with press releases. But I know I was shocked when, after opting out of the email in question, I was routed to a page that showed I had been unknowingly signed up for 46 separate email distribution lists.
My job as a journalist wouldn’t
Investors are having second thoughts about the generative AI boom, citing concerns about the real applicability of the budding technology and the difficulty competing with huge tech companies such as Amazon, which are investing heavily.
Pitchbook says investments in generative AI startups are down, both by number and by deal size. The firm counts 142 investments in April, May, and June, and only 101 investments in July, August, and September. The cumulative deal value in the Q3 was