Years ago, when I started writing about Silicon Valley’s efforts to replace workers with artificial intelligence, most tech executives at least had the decency to lie about it. “We’re not automating workers, we’re augmenting them,” the executives would tell me. “Our A.I. tools won’t destroy jobs. They’ll be helpful assistants that will free workers from…
Google agreed to pay $1.4 billion to the State of Texas on Friday to settle two lawsuits accusing it of violating the privacy of state residents by tracking their locations and searches, as well as collecting their facial recognition information. The state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, who secured the settlement, brought the suits in 2022…
For the past three weeks, the Justice Department and Google have questioned more than two dozen witnesses to try to sway a federal judge’s decision over how to address the company’s illegal monopoly in internet search. On Friday, that hearing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is expected to conclude. To…
Artificial intelligence software has given editing tools a huge boost in power, far beyond the spell-checkers and grammar aids of yore. A.I. can proofread, rewrite, summarize and compose text, making it simple to craft clean, complex documents in a flash — even on a smartphone. If you haven’t dabbled yet, free offerings from Apple and…
The expansion of the loophole for tariff-free shipments of goods nearly a decade ago gave rise to Temu, Shein and other low-cost online retailers offering items straight from Chinese factories at unfathomable discounts. It also unleashed something else — a cascade of billions of dollars of digital advertising that provided a windfall for Meta, Alphabet…
Google plans to roll out its Gemini artificial intelligence chatbot next week for children under 13 who have parent-managed Google accounts, as tech companies vie to attract young users with A.I. products. “Gemini Apps will soon be available for your child,” the company said in an email this week to the parent of an 8-year-old….
The Justice Department laid out its road map on Friday to break up Google’s advertising technology empire, which would be the second request to force the sale of pieces of its business within a year. The government’s comments came during a hearing convened by Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the…
A federal judge issued a landmark ruling last year, saying that Google had become a monopolist in internet search. But in a hearing that began last week to figure out how to fix the problem, the emphasis has frequently landed on a different technology, artificial intelligence. In U.S. District Court in Washington last week, a…
Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, told a federal judge on Wednesday that a government proposal to break up the company would hobble the business, as he aimed to stave off drastic changes to fix an illegal monopoly in online search. Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled…
A dovish shift Stocks are on a three-day winning streak as investors cheer cooling trade-war tensions. Another boost has come from the Fed and from Google, whose shares are up nearly 5 percent in premarket trading on decent first-quarter results. But while Washington and Beijing seem to be easing off their brinkmanship, it may be…