Innholdsfortegnelse for #692 i Techlife News

Amazon is suing a Washington state agency to prevent the release of some company materials to The Washington Post, the newspaper which is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. In a lawsuit filed this week in King County Superior Court, the Seattle-based company asked the court to step in and block the release of documents that include “trade secrets” about Project Kuiper, an Amazon initiative to provide internet through satellites in space. The files were collected by the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries during four on-site investigations of a Project Kuiper facility between August and October of last year, according to Amazon’s lawsuit. In November, The Washington Post requested copies of the agency’s documents through a public records request, according to the lawsuit, which does not say what…

Meta has agreed to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump against the company after it suspended his accounts following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, according to three people familiar with the matter. It’s the latest instance of a large corporation settling litigation with the president, who has threatened retribution on his critics and rivals, and comes as Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, have joined other large technology companies in trying to ingratiate themselves with the new Trump administration. The people familiar with the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity Wednesday to discuss the agreement. Two of the people said terms of the agreement include $22 million going to the nonprofit that will become Trump’s future presidential library. The balance…

Tesla continues to cement its position as a trailblazer in the electric vehicle market with the launch of its redesigned Model Y crossover. The new release is designed to rejuvenate its best-selling model, boost sales volumes, and captivate a broader audience of eco-conscious drivers as more consumers switch to EVs than ever before. MODEL Y Since its initial launch in 2020, the Model Y has enjoyed a meteoric rise, becoming the world’s best-selling car in 2023. Last year saw a slight dip in sales momentum, marking Tesla’s first annual delivery drop. This decline was attributed to increased competition from rivals in China and Europe, signaling the need for innovation and reinvigoration. The newly redesigned Model Y addresses these challenges head-on, promising enhanced features and improved performance to reclaim its market…

Advanced artificial intelligence systems have the potential to create extreme new risks, such as fueling widespread job losses, enabling terrorism or running amok, experts said in a first-of-its-kind international report this week cataloging the range of dangers posed by the technology. The International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI is being released ahead of a major AI summit in Paris next month. The paper is backed by 30 countries including the U.S. and China, marking rare cooperation between the two countries as they battle over AI supremacy, highlighted by Chinese startup DeepSeek stunning the world this week with its budget chatbot in spite of U.S. export controls on advanced chips to the country. The report by a group of independent experts is a “synthesis” of existing research intended…

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman has been immersed in Silicon Valley since his August 1967 birth in Palo Alto, California, in the shadow of Stanford University, where he and fellow technology luminary Peter Thiel became friends as college students during the 1980s. They went on to start PayPal during the late 1990s while working alongside a coterie of other bright-eyed entrepreneurs who went on to even bigger things, just as Hoffman did. That group — dubbed the “PayPal Mafia” — included Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, and YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Now worth an estimated $2.6 billion, Hoffman has been at the forefront of the artificial intelligence craze while investing in trailblazing startups such as ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Inflection. Unlike other prominent technologists who…

The fires in California have been devastating for many small business owners and others who saw their homes, businesses or livelihoods go up in smoke. Raquel “Rockey” Smeir startedMy Friends Café in Sierra Madre, California, in 2021. While the fires spared her building, she dealt with power outages, the mandatory evacuation in the area of staff, customers and the entire community. When she got back to the building, she had to deal with lost revenue, spoiled food and a devastated community. “Many people may not realize the significant financial strain that a small business like ours faces when dealing with unexpected events,” she said. “With payroll, rent, and taxes due, the loss of inventory and revenue from being closed for nearly a week can be financially devastating.” While private fundraising…

Google pledged to crack down on fake online reviews with tougher punishments for rogue reviewers and businesses that try to profit from them, British regulators said following an investigation. The Competition and Markets Authority said that Google has committed to “rigorous steps” to detect and remove sham reviews, so it can quickly identify and investigate businesses and reviewers trying to benefit from the phony posts. Google will delete all reviews written by people who repeatedly write fake or misleading reviews — either positive or negative — for U.K. businesses, the watchdog said. These reviewers will also be banned from posting new reviews, whether or not they’re in the U.K. Businesses that try to artificially boost their star ratings will also face consequences. Warning alerts will be slapped on their Google…

Tesla’s fourth-quarter adjusted profits rose slightly amid a big push to sell its electric vehicles with offers of zero financing and other incentives, but the results still fell short of Wall Street forecasts. The electric vehicle, battery and robotics company run by Elon Musk said Wednesday that quarterly net income adjusted for one-time items rose 3% to $2.6 billion, or 73 cents a share — less than analysts’ estimate of 77 cents. Tesla stock initially fell after trading closed Wednesday, then reversed course to rise more than 4% after Musk told analysts on a conference call that the company was on track to offer unsupervised “full self-driving” technology to its customers as a paid service starting in Austin in June. “It went from a theoretical, ‘We hope to launch something…

A frenzy over an artificial intelligence chatbot made by Chinese tech startup DeepSeek was upending stock markets Monday and fueling debates over the economic and geopolitical competition between the U.S. and China in developing AI technology. DeepSeek’s AI assistant became the No. 1 downloaded free app on Apple’s iPhone store Monday, propelled by curiosity about the ChatGPT competitor. Part of what’s worrying some U.S. tech industry observers is the idea that the Chinese startup has caught up with the American companies at the forefront of generative AI at a fraction of the cost. That, if true, calls into question the huge amounts of money U.S. tech companies say they plan to spend on the data centers and computer chips needed to power further AI advancements. But hype and misconceptions about…

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on artificial intelligence that will revoke past government policies his order says “act as barriers to American AI innovation.” To maintain global leadership in AI technology, “we must develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas,” Trump’s order says. The new order doesn’t name which existing policies are hindering AI development but sets out to track down and review “all policies, directives, regulations, orders, and other actions taken” as a result of former President Joe Biden’s sweeping AI executive order of 2023, which Trump rescinded this week. Any of those Biden-era actions must be suspended if they don’t fit Trump’s new directive that AI should “promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security.” Last year, the Biden administration…

Looking for a quick fix for their fast-growing electricity diets, tech giants are increasingly looking to strike deals with power plant owners to plug in directly, avoiding a potentially longer and more expensive process of hooking into a fraying electric grid that serves everyone else. It’s raising questions over whether diverting power to higher-paying customers will leave enough for others and whether it’s fair to excuse big power users from paying for the grid. Federal regulators are trying to figure out what to do about it, and quickly. Front and center is the data center that Amazon’s cloud computing subsidiary, Amazon Web Services, is building next to the Susquehanna nuclear plant in eastern Pennsylvania. The arrangement between the plant’s owners and AWS — called a “behind the meter” connection —…

Artists can copyright works they made with the help of artificial intelligence, according to a new report by the U.S. Copyright Office that could help clear the way for the use of AI tools in Hollywood, the music industry and other creative fields. The nation’s copyright office, which sits in the Library of Congress and is not part of the executive branch, receives about half a million copyright applications per year covering millions of individual works. It has increasingly been asked to register works that are AI-generated. And while many of those decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, the report issued Wednesday clarifies the office’s approach as one based on what the top U.S. copyright official describes as the “centrality of human creativity” in authoring a work that warrants…

The Justice Department sued to block Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s $14 billion acquisition of rival Juniper Networks on Thursday, the first attempt to stop a merger by a new Trump administration that is expected to take a softer approach to mergers. The Justice complaint alleges that Hewlett Packer Enterprise, under increased competitive pressure from the fast-rising Juniper, was forced to discount products and services and invest more in its own innovation, eventually leading the company to simply buy its rival. The lawsuit said that the combination of businesses would eliminate competition, raise prices and reduce innovation. HPE and Juniper issued a joint statement Thursday, saying the companies strongly oppose the DOJ’s decision. “We will vigorously defend against the Department of Justice’s overreaching interpretation of antitrust laws and will demonstrate how this…

Chinese tech startup DeepSeek ’s new artificial intelligence chatbot has sparked discussions about the competition between China and the U.S. in AI development, with many users flocking to test the rival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. DeepSeek’s AI assistant was the No. 1 downloaded free app on Apple’s iPhone store on Tuesday afternoon and its launch made Wall Street tech superstars’ stocks tumble. Observers are eager to see whether the Chinese company has matched America’s leading AI companies at a fraction of the cost. The chatbot’s ultimate impact on the AI industry is still unclear, but it appears to censor answers on sensitive Chinese topics, a practice commonly seen on China’s internet. In 2023, China issued regulations requiring companies to conduct a security review and obtain approvals before their products can be…

The superstar run for Nvidia’s stock the last few years has been astonishing. So was its tumble Monday, which caused $595 billion in wealth to vanish. That’s about as much as PepsiCo, McDonalds, Starbucks and Target are worth, combined. Mostly known only in gaming and crypto circles a few years ago, Nvidia burst into the zeitgeist after seeing its sales surge because customers wanted its chips to train their chatbots and other artificial intelligence products. Nvidia became a household name as its stock more than tripled in 2023 and then more than doubled in 2024. Investors and analysts lauded CEO Jensen Huang as the “Godfather of AI.” Nvidia grew into a $3 trillion-plus behemoth and traded places with titans like Apple to become the most valuable company on Wall Street.…

A Vatican document released this week offers wide-ranging ethical guidelines for the application of artificial intelligence in sectors from warfare to healthcare, with an underlying call that the burgeoning technology must be used as a tool to complement, and not replace, human intelligence. Pope Francis has issued several warnings about the risks associated with AI technology, and this new document by the Vatican’s doctrine and cultural offices expands on what the pontiff has already said. It comes as a new AI chatbot by Chinese tech startup DeepSeek has raised the stakes in the AI technology race, catching up with American generative AI leaders at a fraction of the cost. The document underlines that human responsibility needs to grow in proportion to the new technology, and that the impact of AI’s…

X is teaming up with Visa to soon offer a system for real-time payments on the social media platform — signaling some progress in a yearslong vision from billionaire owner Elon Musk to create an “everything app.” Visa is the first partner for the platform’s “X Money Account” service, which is set to launch later this year, X CEO Linda Yaccarino said in a Tuesday post announcing the news. The offering, Yaccarino noted, will support an in-platform digital wallet and peer-to-peer payments connected to users’ debit cards, with an option to transfer funds to a bank account. According to Visa, which also posted about the partnership on X Tuesday, these services will be powered by Visa Direct — the payment giant’s instant money transferring service — and will be available…

President Donald Trump said this week that Microsoft is among the U.S. companies looking to take control of TikTok to help the popular app avert an effective ban that could kick-in in April. “I would say yes,” Trump told reporters when asked if Microsoft was one of the companies interested in helping to bring about a new ownership of TikTok, a requirement set by Congress to keep the app functioning in the U.S. Trump added that other companies were also interested in purchasing TikTok, but wouldn’t provide a list. “I like bidding wars because you make your best deals,” Trump said as he spoke to reporters aboard Air Force One while flying back to Washington from Miami, where Republican House members were holding a conference. Microsoft declined to comment. Representatives…