Silicon Valley let out a sigh of relief on Wednesday when it learned that President Donald Trump’s tariff bonanza included an exemption for semiconductors, which, at least for now, won’t be subject to higher import duties. But just three days later, some US tech companies may be finding that the loophole actually creates more problems […]
President Trump’s War on ‘Information Silos’ Is Bad News for Your Personal Data
Dizzied by an accumulated pileup of busted norms, you might have missed a presidential executive order issued on March 20. It’s called, “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos.” It basically gives the federal government the authority to consolidate all the unclassified materials from different government databases. Compared to eviscerating life-sustaining agencies in […]
Trump’s Tariffs Could Reshape the US Tech Industry
Sweeping tariffs unveiled by US president Donald Trump on Wednesday will have ripple effects across the tech industry, according to experts who study global trade. The measures, which include a minimum 10 percent tariff on most countries and steep new import duties on key US trading allies like Europe, China, Vietnam, India, and South Korea, […]
This Tool Probes Frontier AI Models for Lapses in Intelligence
Executives at artificial intelligence companies may like to tell us that AGI is almost here, but the latest models still need some additional tutoring to help them be as clever as they can. Scale AI, a company that’s played a key role in helping frontier AI firms build advanced models, has developed a platform that […]
The DOGE Axe Comes for Libraries and Museums
The Trump administration, working in coordination with Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, has gutted a small federal agency that provides funding to libraries and museums nationwide. In communities across the US, the cuts threaten student field trips, classes for seniors, and access to popular digital services, such as the ebook app Libby. On […]
Amazon’s AGI Lab Reveals Its First Work: Advanced AI Agents
Amazon is still seen as a bit of a laggard in the race to develop advanced artificial intelligence, but it has quietly created a lab that is now setting records when it comes to AI performance. Amazon’s AGI SF Lab, which is located in San Francisco and dedicated to building artificial general intelligence, or AI […]
If Anthropic Succeeds, a Nation of Benevolent AI Geniuses Could Be Born
When Dario Amodei gets excited about AI—which is nearly always—he moves. The cofounder and CEO springs from a seat in a conference room and darts over to a whiteboard. He scrawls charts with swooping hockey-stick curves that show how machine intelligence is bending toward the infinite. His hand rises to his curly mop of hair, […]
Elon Musk’s xAI Acquires X, Because of Course
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI has acquired his social media platform X in an all-stock transaction that values the company at $33 billion, including $12 billion worth of debt, the centibillionaire announced Friday. The sale comes just weeks after Musk reportedly raised an additional roughly $1 billion in debt financing for X that valued […]
Anthropic’s Claude Is Good at Poetry—and Bullshitting
The researchers of Anthropic’s interpretability group know that Claude, the company’s large language model, is not a human being, or even a conscious piece of software. Still, it’s very hard for them to talk about Claude, and advanced LLMs in general, without tumbling down an anthropomorphic sinkhole. Between cautions that a set of digital operations […]
Inside Maye Musk’s Cozy Relationship With China
In January, with a nationwide ban on TikTok looming, hundreds of thousands of people in the US began flocking to another Chinese social media app called RedNote—only to find that Maye Musk, Elon Musk’s mother, had already established a relatively large audience on the platform. Maye, who has become a celebrity in her own right […]