Technology

Apple Vision Pro Review: First Headset Lacks Polish and Purpose
Technology

Apple Vision Pro Review: First Headset Lacks Polish and Purpose

Connected media - Associated media About 17 years ago, Steve Jobs took the stage at a San Francisco convention center and said he was introducing three products: an iPod, a phone and an internet browser. “These are not three separate devices,” he said. “This is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.” At $500, the first iPhone was relatively expensive, but I was eager to dump my mediocre Motorola flip phone and splurge. There were flaws — including sluggish cellular internet speeds. But the iPhone delivered on its promises. Over the last week, I’ve had a very different experience with a new first-generation product from Apple: the Vision Pro, a virtual reality headset that resembles a pair of ski goggles. The $3,500 wearable computer, which was released Friday, uses cameras so you ...
OpenAI Seeks to DismissParts of The New York Times’s Lawsuit
Technology

OpenAI Seeks to DismissParts of The New York Times’s Lawsuit

Related media - Connected 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 an...
Apple’s Vision Pro Headset Costs Closer to $4,600 With Necessary Add-Ons
Technology

Apple’s Vision Pro Headset Costs Closer to $4,600 With Necessary Add-Ons

Connected media - Connected 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...
Vision Pro Goggles Are Not Safe While Driving a Tesla, U.S. Says
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Vision Pro Goggles Are Not Safe While Driving a Tesla, U.S. Says

Linked media - Related 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 United...
Elon Musk Has a Giant Charity. Its Money Stays Close to Home.
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Elon Musk Has a Giant Charity. Its Money Stays Close to Home.

“The really striking thing about Musk is the disjuncture between his outsized public persona, and his very, very minimal philanthropic presence,” said Benjamin Soskis, who studies philanthropy at the Urban Institute. Where other billionaires have aimed for a broad impact on society, Mr. Soskis said Mr. Musk’s foundation lacks “any direction or any real focus, outside his business ventures.”Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.A school for his childrenMr. Musk and his younger brother, Kimbal, started the Musk Foundation in 2001, a year before the sale of PayPal, the online payments company he co-founded, to eBay for $1.5 billion. He made more than $175 million in the sale, and would seed his namesake foundation with about $2 million worth of eBay shares.The Musk Foundation’s web...
Key OpenAI Executive Played a Pivotal Role in Sam Altman’s Ouster
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Key OpenAI Executive Played a Pivotal Role in Sam Altman’s Ouster

More than three months after OpenAI’s board of directors briefly ousted Sam Altman, the chief executive of the high-profile artificial intelligence company, questions remain about exactly what led the board to make such a dramatic move.A report from an outside law firm, which is expected in the coming days, could shed more light on the board’s decision as well as the chaotic five days before Mr. Altman returned to the company.But as anticipation for the report grows, previously unreported details are emerging about the role that Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, played in the ouster of Mr. Altman.Ms. Murati wrote a private memo to Mr. Altman raising questions about his management and also shared her concerns with the board. That move helped to propel the board’s decision to f...
Chinese National Accused of Stealing AI Secrets From Google
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Chinese National Accused of Stealing AI Secrets From Google

A Chinese citizen who recently quit his job as a software engineer for Google in California has been charged with trying to transfer artificial intelligence technology to a Beijing-based company that paid him secretly, according to a federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday.Prosecutors accused Linwei Ding, who was part of the team that designs and maintains Google’s vast A.I. supercomputer data system, of stealing information about the “architecture and functionality” of the system, and of pilfering software used to “orchestrate” supercomputers “at the cutting edge of machine learning and A.I. technology.”From May 2022 to May 2023, Mr. Ding, also known as Leon, uploaded 500 files, many containing trade secrets, from his Google-issued laptop to the cloud by using a multistep scheme that all...
Microsoft Seeks to Dismiss Parts of Suit Filed by The New York Times
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Microsoft Seeks to Dismiss Parts of Suit Filed by The New York Times

Microsoft filed a motion in federal court on Monday that seeks to dismiss parts of a lawsuit brought by The New York Times Company.The Times sued Microsoft and its partner OpenAI on Dec. 27, accusing the two companies of infringing on its copyrights by using its articles to train A.I. technologies like the online chatbot ChatGPT. Chatbots compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information, the lawsuit said.In its motion, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Microsoft argued that large language models, or L.L.M.s — the technologies that drive chatbots — did not supplant the market for news articles and other materials they were trained on.The tech giant compared L.L.M.s to videocassette recorders, arguing that both are allowed under the law. “Des...
The Paradox at the Heart of Elon Musk’s OpenAI Lawsuit
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The Paradox at the Heart of Elon Musk’s OpenAI Lawsuit

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 ...
Elon Musk Sues OpenAI and Sam Altman for Violating the Company’s Principles
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Elon Musk Sues OpenAI and Sam Altman for Violating the Company’s Principles

OpenAI, the influential artificial intelligence company that ousted and then reinstated its high-profile chief executive three months ago, faces a new drama: a lawsuit from Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world and a co-founder of the A.I. lab.Mr. Musk sued OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, accusing them of breaching a contract by putting profits and commercial interests in developing artificial intelligence ahead of the public good. A multibillion-dollar partnership that OpenAI developed with Microsoft, Mr. Musk said, represented an abandonment of a founding pledge to carefully develop A.I. and make the technology publicly available.“OpenAI has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company, Microsoft,” said the lawsuit filed...