When I first tested the developer beta of Apple’s Siri AI by taking it as my tour guide around San Francisco, I was convinced the overhauled smartphone assistant would be an “everything tool” on the iPhone. The answers felt reliable enough and more helpful than previous versions of Siri. Also, the chatbot-style app for Siri…
Some authors hoping to receive their share of Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright settlement said they received surprising emails this week — emails informing them that someone else was making a claim on their payments. Anthropic settled a copyright class action suit last year, after a judge ruled that training AI models on copyrighted material is…
Meta says its latest AI model can compete with the industry’s strongest coding systems while using fewer tokens and tool calls. Independent testing suggests the efficiency story is more complicated. The company released Muse Spark 1.3 to developers Wednesday through Muse Code and the Meta Model API, keeping pricing at $1.25 per million input tokens…
OpenAI and Microsoft face another lawsuit from news organizations the Seattle Times and Newsday, which accuse the tech giants of using their sites to train AI without permission. The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges that the companies scraped paywalled content and added it to training datasets used for ChatGPT, Microsoft…
While there are plenty of ways to limit notifications on our digital devices and avoid distraction overload, there’s nothing inherently wrong with these alerts. They just need to be well managed and kept in their place. Keeping notifications useful and timely can help you get more done in the day, not less, and Windows 11…
Earlier this summer, Travis Kalanick’s Atoms announced a $1.7 billion funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. But even after raising that mega round, the Uber founder remained a bit cagey about what he was actually aiming to do. Now a story in the Financial Times offers more details about Atoms’ goals. The startup is reportedly…
Your phone may already have a feature designed to help others assist you in an emergency — but it is only useful if you set it up first. iPhones and many Android phones can display selected emergency contacts and medical information from the lock screen, allowing someone to access potentially important details without knowing your…
Massachusetts law enforcement can’t withhold information about the locations of automatic license plate reader (ALPR) technology from the public, a superior court judge has ruled. It’s the latest speed bump to a swelling nationwide surveillance network spurred by controversial Flock cameras. The decision ends a three-year court battle between the ACLU of Massachusetts and the state…
Though I’ve been working from home for the past 15 years, both freelance and full-time, this often means needing to be available 24/7, so I typically carry my laptop everywhere I go—including sports practices, day trips, and vacations. I have used many laptop backpacks in this time, and the dividing line between a work backpack…
Tesla’s private Cybercab event has come and gone, and it was very different from the large, loud, livestreamed events the company usually puts on — an odd choice for the launch of a product CEO Elon Musk has spent years building toward. In fact, it doesn’t even appear that Musk spoke at the event,…
