Technology

The Download: Europe vs Chinese EVs, and making AI vision less biased

September 26, 2023
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Europe is working to slow down the global expansion of Chinese EVs Earlier this month, the European Commission announced it is launching an anti-subsidy investigation into electric vehicles coming from China.  The move…

What’s changed since the “pause AI” letter six months ago?

September 26, 2023
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Last Friday marked six months since the Future of Life Institute (FLI), a nonprofit focusing on existential risks surrounding artificial intelligence, shared an open letter signed by famous people such as Elon Musk,…

AI chip company Kneron raises $49M to scale up its commercial efforts

September 26, 2023
Kneron, which is developing AI chips to power self-driving cars, among other autonomous machines, today announced that it raised $49 million in an extension to its Series B round from investors including Foxconn, Alltek, Horizon Ventures, Liteon Technology Corp, Adata and Palpilot. Kneron’s CEO, Albert Liu, says that the new tranche, which brings Kneron’s total […]

Europe is working to slow down the global expansion of Chinese EVs

September 26, 2023
The boom has finally been lowered on Chinese electric-vehicle companies. On September 13, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen used her State of the Union speech to announce that the organization is launching an “anti-subsidy investigation into electric vehicles coming from China.”  The move—which could have serious ramifications for global automakers—has long been in…

Spotify launches Jam, a real-time collaborative playlist controlled by up to 32 people

September 26, 2023
Spotify is today introducing its latest social feature, Jam, which allows multiple people to blend their own musical tastes into a combined playlist. However, the new feature, which builds on technology previously used in multi-person playlists like Blend and Duo Mix, is designed for real-time listening among a group of people — like at a […]

Signal’s Meredith Whittaker: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

September 25, 2023
Why is it that so many companies that rely on monetizing the data of their users seem to be extremely hot on AI? If you ask Signal president Meredith Whittaker (and I did), she’ll tell you it’s simply because “AI is a surveillance technology.” On stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, Whittaker explained  her perspective that […]

These new tools could make AI vision systems less biased

September 25, 2023
Computer vision systems are everywhere. They help classify and tag images on social media feeds, detect objects and faces in pictures and videos, and highlight relevant elements of an image. However, they are riddled with biases, and they’re less accurate when the images show Black or brown people and women. And there’s another problem: the…

OpenAI gives ChatGPT a voice for verbal conversations

September 25, 2023
ChatGPT is evolving into much more than a text-based search engine, with OpenAI announcing today that it’s adding new voice and image-based smarts to the mix. The wildly popular generative AI assistant has been one of the biggest technology success stories of recent times since its debut some nine months ago, allowing anyone to generate […]

Getty Images promises its new AI contains no copyrighted art

September 25, 2023
Getty Images is so confident its new generative AI model is free of copyrighted content that it will cover any potential intellectual-property disputes for its customers.  The generative AI system, announced today, was built by Nvidia and is trained solely on images in Getty’s image library. It does not include logos or images that have…

The Download: ChatGPT gets even chattier, and recreating space on Earth

September 25, 2023
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. You can now have a voice conversation with ChatGPT  The news: OpenAI has launched two new ways to interact with its flagship large language model in a major update. You can have a…