Amazon said on Monday that it was abandoning plans to buy iRobot, the maker of the self-driving Roomba vacuum, after regulators raised concerns the deal would hurt competition. The announcement is a rare admission of defeat by Amazon, which has in recent years acquired an eclectic mix of companies such as Whole Foods and MGM…
In September, the Mayo Clinic in Arizona created a first-of-its-kind job at the hospital system: chief artificial intelligence officer. Doctors at the Arizona site, which has facilities in Phoenix and Scottsdale, had experimented with A.I. for years. But after ChatGPT’s release in 2022 and an ensuing frenzy over the technology, the hospital decided it needed…
In September, Amazon said it would invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, a San Francisco start-up working on artificial intelligence. Soon after, an Amazon executive sent a private message to an executive at another company. He said Anthropic had won the deal because it agreed to build its A.I. using specialized computer chips designed…
Ring, a home security camera company owned by Amazon, said that it would stop letting police departments request users’ footage in its app amid longstanding concerns from privacy advocates about the company’s relationship with law enforcement. Eric Kuhn, the general manager of subscriptions and software for the Ring app Neighbors, announced on Wednesday that the…
The genetic testing company 23andMe is being accused in a class-action lawsuit of failing to protect the privacy of customers whose personal information was exposed last year in a data breach that affected nearly seven million profiles. The lawsuit, which was filed on Friday in federal court in San Francisco, also accused the company of…
David L. Mills, an internet pioneer who developed and, for decades, implemented the timekeeping protocol used by financial markets, power grids, satellites and billions of computers to make sure they run simultaneously, earning him a reputation as the internet’s “Father Time,” died on Jan. 17 at his home in Newark, Del. He was 85. His…
When Apple blocked the Beeper Mini app last month from giving Android users access to the tech giant’s messaging service, Beeper encouraged customers to use their Mac computers instead to connect and continue sending messages. But in recent days, dozens of Beeper customers have reported that they no longer have access to Apple’s messaging service…
For more than a decade, the pioneers of the cryptocurrency industry envisioned digital coins as an alternate branch of finance, a renegade sector that would operate outside the reach of big banks and government regulators. But as digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ether became more mainstream, the crypto industry collided with a 1946 Supreme Court…
Fake, sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift likely generated by artificial intelligence spread rapidly across social media platforms this week, disturbing fans who saw them and reigniting calls from lawmakers to protect women and crack down on the platforms and technology that spread such images. One image shared by a user on X, formerly Twitter,…
Have your Sunday scaries ever given way to a “Nervous Ocean Monday Morning”? Does the weekend truly begin on Friday, or on a “Wild and Free Chaotic Thursday Afternoon”? How should one dress for a “Paranormal Dark Cabaret Evening”? Those odd strings of words are titles of “daylists,” a newish offering from the music-streaming giant…
