Austin is known for live music, Texas’ premier public university and being home to tech companies. It is also becoming a laboratory for autonomous vehicles. Driverless Waymo taxis, owned by Google’s parent company, regularly drop off diners at Austin’s famous barbecue joints. Box-shaped, four-wheeled robots operated by Avride, a start-up working with Uber Eats, deliver…
Disney and Universal sued a prominent artificial intelligence start-up for copyright infringement on Wednesday, bringing Hollywood belatedly into the increasingly intense legal battle over generative A.I. The movie companies sued Midjourney, an A.I. image generator that has millions of registered users. The 110-page lawsuit contends that Midjourney “helped itself to countless” copyrighted works to train…
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…
When Slate Auto, a start-up, unveiled a roughly $25,000 electric pickup truck last month, social media lit up with comments. Many people saw the no-frills vehicle, with an easy-to-repair body and nostalgic hand crank windows, as a refreshing antidote to today’s overstuffed and increasingly unaffordable cars. How unaffordable? Average monthly payments on new cars have…
Elizabeth Holmes is in prison for defrauding investors through her blood-testing company, Theranos. In the meantime, her partner is starting one of his own. Billy Evans, who has two children with Ms. Holmes, is trying to raise money for a company that describes itself as “the future of diagnostics” and “a radically new approach to…
On a frigid day in early January, as she worked in her office in the Boston suburb of Billerica, Mass., Siyu Huang received a two-word text message. “Spinning wheels,” it said. Attached was a short video clip showing a car on rollers in an indoor testing center. To the untrained eye there was nothing remarkable…
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up, xAI, is in talks to raise new financing that could value it at as much as $120 billion, up from $80 billion little more than a month ago, two people with knowledge of the discussions said. The talks are in the early stages, and xAI’s valuation could rise or fall…
Spend enough time in San Francisco, peering into the cyberpunk future, and you may find that weird things start seeming normal. Fleets of self-driving cars? Yawn. A start-up trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth? Sure, why not. Summoning a godlike artificial intelligence that could wipe out humanity? Ho-hum. You may even find yourself, as I…
The question of whether to be polite to artificial intelligence may seem a moot point — it is artificial, after all. But Sam Altman, the chief executive of the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, recently shed light on the cost of adding an extra “Please!” or “Thank you!” to chatbot prompts. Someone posted on X last…
The question of whether to be polite to artificial intelligence may seem a moot point — it is artificial, after all. But Sam Altman, the chief executive of the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, recently shed light on the cost of adding an extra “Please!” or “Thank you!” to chatbot prompts. Someone posted on X last…