Technology

Connected media - Associated media If 2023 was the tech industry’s year of the A.I. chatbot, 2024 is turning out to be the year of A.I. plumbing. It may not sound as exciting, but tens of billions of dollars are quickly being spent on behind-the-scenes technology for the industry’s A.I. boom. Companies from Amazon to Meta are revamping their data centers to support artificial intelligence. They are investing in huge new facilities, while even places like Saudi Arabia are racing to build supercomputers to handle A.I. Nearly everyone with a foot in tech or giant piles of money, it seems, is jumping into a spending frenzy that some believe could last for years. Microsoft, Meta, and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, disclosed this week that they had spent more than $32 billion combined...

Connected media - Linked media Representatives for OpenAI and the Times Company did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The motion asked the court to dismiss four claims from The Times’s complaint to narrow the focus of the lawsuit. OpenAI’s lawyers argued that The Times should not be allowed to sue for acts of reproduction that occurred more than three years ago and that the paper’s claim that OpenAI violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, an amendment to U.S. copyright law passed in 1998 after the rise of the internet, was not legally sound. The Times was the first major American media company to sue OpenAI over copyright issues related to its written works. Novelists, computer programmers and other groups have also filed copyright suits against the start-up and...

Related media - Linked media The $1,000 base model of the Surface Laptop 5 comes with only eight gigabytes of memory, but most people are likely to need double that to smoothly run the latest Windows operating system and new apps and games. The model that includes 16 gigabytes costs an extra $500. Samsung Phone Samsung’s new high-end smartphone, the Galaxy S24 Ultra, has a starting price of $1,300. But it’s more realistically a $1,540 phone. In the last five years, many smartphone makers, including Apple, Google and Samsung, stopped shipping phones with basic accessories like earphones and charging bricks, a shift that increased their profit margins. And in an echo of the way computer makers upsell memory, the base model of a smartphone typically includes a modest amount of data stor...

Related media - Connected media President Biden will issue an executive order Wednesday seeking to restrict the sale of sensitive American data to China, Russia and four more countries, a first-of-its-kind attempt to keep personally identifying information from being obtained for blackmail, scams or other harm. The president will ask the Justice Department to write rules restricting the sale of information about Americans’ locations, health and genetics to China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela, as well as any entities linked to those countries. The restrictions would also cover financial information, biometric data and other types of information that could identify individuals and sensitive information related to the government. The White House said this kind of sensit...

Associated media - Linked media Is this the future? A world in which people can’t step away from the digital realm long enough to focus solely on everyday tasks such as socializing or exercising? Eric Decker, a YouTube and TikTok creator who goes by the name Airrack, posted a video poking fun at an “average day for an Apple Vision Pro owner,” showing him wearing the headset while lifting weights at the gym, getting his hair cut, going through airport security, walking down a street and even showering. (The Vision Pro is not waterproof.) “I truly feel most of these videos are skits,” Mr. Lentini said. “You can just tell.” Still, skit or not, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said on Tuesday that distracted driving is no joke. In 2021, more than 3,500 people in the Uni...

Four former Twitter executives sued Elon Musk on Monday, accusing the billionaire of withholding severance payments worth $128 million after he fired them from the company during his 2022 takeover.When Mr. Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, he fired Parag Agrawal, its chief executive; Ned Segal, its chief financial officer; Vijaya Gadde, its head of legal and policy; and Sean Edgett, its general counsel. Mr. Musk later renamed the company X.The executives had clauses in their contracts stipulating that they could receive severance if Twitter was no longer a public company — so when Mr. Musk took the company private in October 2022, they were entitled to the payments, the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, claims. The severance included one year...

It would be easy to dismiss Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI as a case of sour grapes.Mr. Musk sued OpenAI this week, accusing the company of breaching the terms of its founding agreement and violating its founding principles. In his telling, OpenAI was established as a nonprofit that would build powerful A.I. systems for the good of humanity and give its research away freely to the public. But Mr. Musk argues that OpenAI broke that promise by starting a for-profit subsidiary that took on billions of dollars in investments from Microsoft.An OpenAI spokeswoman declined to comment on the suit. In a memo sent to employees on Friday, Jason Kwon, the company’s chief strategy officer, denied Mr. Musk’s claims and said, “We believe the claims in this suit may stem from Elon’s regrets about not ...