By Gayle Harrington, CNN Microsoft announced it has agreed to partnerships with Nvidia and Nintendo as it tries to convince European Union officials to approve its $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard — the company behind the popular game franchise Call of Duty. Microsoft President Brad Smith had a closed-door meeting Tuesday with EU regulators
Continue Reading By Brian Fung and Tierney Sneed, CNN Supreme Court justices appeared broadly concerned Tuesday about the potential unintended consequences of allowing websites to be sued for their automatic recommendations of user content, highlighting the challenges facing attorneys who want to hold Google accountable for suggesting YouTube videos created by terrorist groups. For nearly three hours
Continue Reading By Brian Fung, CNN One day after Supreme Court justices debated whether Google and its subsidiary YouTube should be held liable for how its algorithm organizes ISIS content, the Court is set to take up questions of tech platforms’ legal exposure for user content in a Twitter case. On Wednesday, the Court will hear Twitter
Continue Reading By Brian Fung, CNN The Supreme Court is set to hear back-to-back oral arguments this week in two cases that could significantly reshape online speech and content moderation. The outcome of the oral arguments, scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday, could determine whether tech platforms and social media companies can be sued for recommending content to
Continue Reading By Brian Fung, CNN Congress, the White House and now the US Supreme Court are all focusing their attention on a federal law that’s long served as a legal shield for online platforms. This week, the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments on two pivotal cases dealing with online speech and content moderation.
Continue Reading By Brian Fung, CNN Amazon is ordering thousands of its workers back to the office for at least three days per week, according to a company memo by CEO Andy Jassy on Friday. The move, which takes effect May 1, marks an end to the remote- or hybrid-friendly policy that had been in place at
Continue Reading By Brian Fung, CNN Amazon closed its acquisition of health care provider One Medical and its parent in a $3.9 billion deal on Wednesday, hours after the Federal Trade Commission said it would not challenge the purchase but that regulators were still investigating potential competitive and consumer harms of the transaction. The landmark deal will
Continue Reading By Jennifer Korn Microsoft on Thursday said it’s looking at ways to rein in its Bing AI chatbot after a number of users highlighted examples of concerning responses from it this week, including confrontational remarks and troubling fantasies. In a blog post, Microsoft acknowledged that some extended chat sessions with its new Bing chat tool
Continue Reading By Jennifer Korn Next time you’re wondering how to respond to a colleague on Slack, you may be able to ask ChatGPT for help. Salesforce, the company behind Slack, announced Tuesday that it’s partnering with OpenAI to launch a ChatGPT app for the workplace messaging platform. The new tool will use the AI chatbot to
Continue Reading By Donie O’Sullivan, CNN In its annual “worldwide threat assessment,” top US intelligence officials have warned in recent years of the threat posed by so-called deepfakes — convincing fake videos made using artificial intelligence. “Adversaries and strategic competitors,” they warned in 2019, might use this technology “to create convincing—but false—image, audio, and video files to
Continue Reading By Donie O’Sullivan, CNN In its annual “worldwide threat assessment,” top US intelligence officials have warned in recent years of the threat posed by so-called deepfakes — convincing fake videos made using artificial intelligence. “Adversaries and strategic competitors,” they warned in 2019, might use this technology “to create convincing—but false—image, audio, and video files to
Continue Reading By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business After asking Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing chatbot for help in coming up with activities for my kids while juggling work, the tool started by offering something unexpected: empathy. The chatbot said it “must be hard” to balance work and family and sympathized for my daily struggles with it. It then
Continue Reading By Brian Fung, CNN YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said Thursday she is “stepping back” from her leadership role at the company after nearly a decade of running the video-sharing platform. In a blog post, Wojcicki said she plans to “start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I’m passionate about.” Wojcicki
Continue Reading By Pete Muntean and Gregory Wallace, CNN The first tool that mechanic trainees at Maryland’s Vehicles for Change program pick up is not a wrench, but a pair of virtual reality goggles. First, students watch an instructor virtually demonstrate a skill; then they follow prompts to complete a procedure themselves in VR. After that, students
Continue Reading By Michelle Toh, CNN ASML, the Dutch chip equipment maker, has accused a former employee in China of stealing data related to its proprietary technology, in a case that highlights its importance in the global semiconductor supply chain as tension grows between the United States and China. The breach may have violated certain export control
Continue Reading By Becky Anderson, CNN Elon Musk is aiming to “find someone else” to run Twitter by the end of this year. He first needs to “stabilize the organization” and make sure “it’s financially in a healthy place,” Musk said Wednesday, speaking via videolink at the World Government Summit in Dubai. “Probably towards the end of
Continue Reading By Eric Cheung and Juliana Liu, CNN Shares in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company fell as much as 4% on Wednesday, after Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway disclosed that it had sold most of its holdings in the chip giant. In a Tuesday filing with the United States’ Securities and Exchange Commission, Berkshire Hathaway said it had
Continue Reading By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business Microsoft’s public demo last week of an AI-powered revamp of Bing appears to have included several factual errors, highlighting the risk the company and its rivals face when incorporating this new technology into search engines. At the Bing demo at Microsoft headquarters, the company showed off how integrating artificial
Continue Reading By Kara Scannell, CNN A federal judge ordered Sam Bankman-Fried back to court this week after learning that the founder of crypto trading platform FTX accessed the internet in a way the government can’t track. Judge Lewis Kaplan set a hearing for Thursday after he was notified by prosecutors and attorneys for Bankman-Fried that the
Continue Reading By Brian Fung, CNN Senators from both parties blasted Big Tech on Tuesday and called for the passage of federal legislation to regulate tech platforms in the midst of a mental health crisis among young Americans. Opening a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen Dick Durbin, the panel’s chair, accused tech companies including Facebook
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