The social network formerly known as Twitter has officially changed its name to X.com, redirecting users from twitter.com. Despite Elon Musk's rebranding efforts, the changeover has been inconsistent among browsers. The privacy and data protection settings remain unchanged. Musk intends to turn X into a WeChat-like "everything app," building on his long experience with the x.com domain.
Microsoft will showcase its bespoke Cobalt 100 chips at the Build conference next week, touting 40% faster performance than standard ARM chips. The 128-core CPUs used by Adobe and Snowflake will compete with AWS's Graviton. Microsoft will also offer AMD's MI300X accelerators and disclose lower pricing for large language models. A new real-time intelligence system and Snowflake collaboration will be announced.
A new social network called Maven aims to offer a healthier alternative, inspired by one scientist’s work in artificial intelligence. The platform eschews likes and follows in favor of letting pure chance play more of a role in what appears in users’ feeds. Maven is built around a concept called open-endedness, pioneered by computer scientist and AI researcher Kenneth Stanley.
Jewelers like David Morris, a Bond Street jeweler, are increasingly exploring the technology’s potential to create new worlds in online campaigns. With the help of J11, they created a series of A.I. videos that showed a real model walking through the property and also an Impressionist-style overlay; with each scene, the model wears a different gem, and her mood changes to reflect that color.
The day before Elon Musk fired virtually all of Tesla’s electric-vehicle charging division last month, they had high hopes as charging chief Rebecca Tinucci went to meet with Musk about the network’s future, four former charging-network staffers told Reuters. The meeting could not have gone worse. Musk, the employees said, was not pleased with Tinucci’s presentation and wanted more layoffs. When she balked, he responded by firing her and her entire 500-member team.
Hey, football fans! You're already watching the NFL on CBS, NBC, Fox, ABC, ESPN, ESPN Plus, Peacock, Amazon Prime Video, NFL Network, and YouTube TV, right? Well, get ready for one more: Netflix! The biggest streaming provider that wasn't showing NFL games is now jumping into the pile. The first Netflix Christmas games will be this season, on December 25, 2024. Netflix will get two Christmas games this year.
Google announced Theft Detection Lock at its I/O 2024 developer conference, an AI-powered feature that locks Android devices if theft-like motion is detected. Additionally, an Offline Device Lock will protect phones even if disconnected from the network. Google also introduced measures to prevent factory resets without account credentials, making stolen devices unsellable. Biometric authentication is required for sensitive changes from insecure locations.
EU regulators are investigating Meta for the potentially addictive effects of Instagram and Facebook on children. This follows concerns that these platforms exploit minors' vulnerabilities, risking their mental well-being. Meta, facing significant fines and product changes, asserts its commitment to safe, age-appropriate experiences. This is part of a huge effort to regulate social media's impact on youth.
OpenAI released a new AI model, GPT-4o, with some interesting capabilities. Likely the biggest impact of GPT-4o is not technical, but a business decision: soon everyone, whether they are paying or not, will get access to GPT-4o. And GPT-4o adds some new tricks to the older model, including an ability to work really well with non-English languages. GPT-4o is natively multimodal, which means it can “see” and “hear” and “speak” in an integrated way with almost no delays.
Google is starting to roll out “AI Overviews,” previously known as the Search Generative Experience, or SGE, to users in the US and soon around the world. It can take a bunch of the hard work out of searching, so you can focus on the parts you want to do to get things done, or on the parts of exploring that you find exciting.