First, there were talking digital assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant. Then there were online chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard. Now, the two are merging. On Thursday, Google introduced Gemini, a smartphone app that behaves like a talking digital assistant as well as a conversational chatbot. Responding to voice and text requests, it…
On Dec. 18, a $20 billion deal by Adobe, the software giant, to buy Figma, a San Francisco start-up darling, fell apart after more than a year of regulatory scrutiny. In a blog post that day, Dylan Field, Figma’s chief executive and co-founder, painted an optimistic picture of what would come next. “Figma’s best, most…
The U.S. government announced charges in two separate cases on Wednesday aimed at enforcing laws blocking the transfer of critical technologies, part of a broader campaign to hamper military efforts and weapons production in rival countries. One of the complaints was against a U.S. citizen born in China who has been arrested and accused of…
Last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta, called a nascent effort to detect artificially generated content “the most urgent task” facing the tech industry today. On Tuesday, Mr. Clegg proposed a solution. Meta said it would promote technological standards that companies across the industry…
Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who now has a show on the social network X, has been spotted in Moscow in recent days, leading to speculation in Russia and the United States that he is about to achieve his long-stated goal of interviewing President Vladimir V. Putin. If so, Mr. Carlson would be…
After a year of big layoffs, job cuts at the tech industry’s largest companies trickled into the first month of 2024. Google started the year with layoffs of several hundred employees and a promise of more cuts to come. Amazon followed by trimming hundreds of jobs in its Prime Video department. Meta quietly thinned out…
Images of Taylor Swift that had been generated by artificial intelligence and had spread widely across social media in late January probably originated as part of a recurring challenge on one of the internet’s most notorious message boards, according to a new report. Graphika, a research firm that studies disinformation, traced the images back to…
When Diane Hirsh Theriault’s co-worker returned from lunch to Google’s Cambridge, Mass., office one afternoon in October, his work badge couldn’t open a turnstile. He quickly realized it was a sign that he had been laid off. Ms. Hirsh Theriault soon learned that most of her fellow Google News engineers in Cambridge had also lost…
I was scrolling through Instagram recently when I found a new page slipped into my feed through a suggested post: @tinyhouseperfect. It seemed designed to poke at my frustrated longings for a space of my own. I want to own a house; I cannot currently buy a house. But what if the house were very…
On a sweltering July evening, the din from thousands of computers mining for Bitcoins pierced the night. Nearby, Matt Brown, a member of the Arkansas legislature, monitored the noise alongside a local magistrate. As the two men investigated complaints about the operation, Mr. Brown said, a security guard for the mine loaded rounds into an…
