Tech

CNBC reports that in a recent blog post, Perplexity AI revealed that it had received what it described as “an aggressive legal threat” from Amazon. The issue at hand revolves around Comet, Perplexity’s AI-powered browser, which allows users to ask the Comet Assistant to find items and make purchases on their behalf on Amazon. According…

The Motion Picture Association is asking Meta to stop referring to content shown to teen accounts on Instagram as “guided by PG-13 ratings,” saying it is misleading and could erode trust in its movie ratings system. A lawyer on behalf of the MPA sent Meta Platforms a cease-and-desist letter asking the tech giant to “immediately…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman became visibly irritated when questioned about the company’s massive spending despite relatively small revenues during a recent podcast interview. The question, clearly a softball from a friendly interviewer designed to set him up for a strong answer, resulted in an angry Altman telling the host to sell his shares in the…

An admin for the Serbian Wikipedia who holds “checkuser” privileges on that site, which grants him access to confidential user data, confirmed earlier this year that he has edited for pay, including on the English Wikipedia. Claiming he never misused his data access, the disclosure about his paid editing work has nonetheless sparked an ongoing…

The Team Trump social media accounts, led by X Strategies and its co-founder Alex Bruesewitz, garnered nearly a billion views in October alone across platforms and smoked the official Democrat accounts on TikTok and Instagram. The @TeamTrump account on TikTok pulled in 150 million views for the month, smashing the 88.7 million views accumulated by…

Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting on Thursday will include a shareholder vote on a controversial pay plan for CEO Elon Musk that has sparked intense debate and divided opinions. The proposed compensation package would grant Musk stock worth about $1 trillion if he manages to hit a series of lofty targets over the next 10 years….

The New York Times reports that professors Karle Flanagan and Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider, known as the Data Science Duo, recently confronted a group of students in their introductory data science course who had been accused of cheating and falsifying their attendance records. The professors grew suspicious when they received dozens of nearly identical apology emails from…

Trump’s Assistant Secretary of Commerce and administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Arielle Roth, outlined the Administration’s policies for reforming the wasteful Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program in a speech at the Hudson Institute this week. According to Roth, “For years, BEAD was weighed down by red tape and extralegal conditions that…

SFGate reports that during an onstage discussion with TechCrunch’s transportation editor Kirsten Korosec at the annual Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Tekedra Mawakana, Co-CEO of Waymo, addressed the hypothetical scenario of a fatal crash involving a self-driving car. Despite the company’s unwavering focus on safety, Mawakana acknowledged that achieving perfection in autonomous vehicle technology is…

In a recent memo, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has pushed back against what he calls a “doomsday outlook” on climate change, signaling a shift in his views on the risks posed by a warming planet. Despite the move, he remains an extremist on a variety of issues, including his belief that we need a new…