When Edward Warchocki speaks with you, he sounds like a regular guy. “Not super intelligent, but very emotional, very easy to make friends with,” says Bartosz Idzik, the person who created him. But when he doesn’t talk, it’s harder to forget what Warchocki really is: a 4-foot-tall humanoid robot that’s wandering the city streets of…
Since the end of last month, several water utilities in the United States have been hit by cyberattacks, causing alarm in the country. For years, water utilities and other critical infrastructure facilities in the power sector, for example, have been targeted by hackers, whether government-backed or individuals. What makes these recent attacks — allegedly carried…
In Thrive Capital’s first-ever investor letter, founder Joshua Kushner has some unexpected things to say about his venture capital rivals on the West Coast. “It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of the opportunity,” Kushner wrote about AI in the letter, leaked to Bloomberg. “It would also be a grave error in our minds to…
Meta released Glimmer this week, an open-weight AI model anyone can download and run on their own hardware — a contrast to Muse Spark, the company’s more powerful model that stays locked behind its own APIs. The release landed alongside a letter from Mark Zuckerberg arguing AI should be “for everyone” rather than controlled by a handful of labs, but as Equity’s…
Google announced on Friday that it will now allow users to remove a visible watermark from its AI generations, including images, videos, and songs. The company specified that this won’t affect the invisible SynthID watermark and C2PA standard-related metadata. Josh Woodward, the company’s VP for Gemini, said in a post on X that this toggle…
Marco Arment, the indie developer who created popular apps like Overcast and Instapaper, and who previously served as Tumblr’s chief technology officer, is out today with his latest creation — an alternative to Apple’s Reminders designed for procrastinators, called Unforgetful. The new iOS and Mac app works with your current Reminders database, but it’s designed…
Tim O’Reilly’s yardstick for measuring the worth of a company, person, or society has long been create more value than you capture. It’s no surprise that O’Reilly—publisher, internet pioneer, VC, conference organizer, and dispenser of tech wisdom—is applying that metric to the way people design and use AI. Specifically, he’s pushing for a future where…
After years of snapping up wind and photo voltaic developments, hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are betting that pure fuel will energy the information facilities behind their lofty AI ambitions. However a brand new analysis report suggests they might remorse their newfound affinity for the fossil gas. Pure fuel costs may triple in…
The FBI has been using hacking techniques and tools, such as spyware, since at least 1998, but to date there is no public data counting how often the feds were deploying them. That’s about to change — at least for the use of spyware for tapping into someone’s real-time communications. Starting in 2029, U.S. judiciary…
As a licensed officiant at Las Vegas Immersive Weddings, a chapel that offers novelty-themed marriage packages, Kevin Breen has officiated just about every kind of service imaginable: couples dressed as their favorite Game of Thrones characters, partners really into the extraterrestrial lore of Area 51. But when he received a call last year from a…
