In late November, the board of OpenAI, creator of the popular ChatGPT and DALL-E artificial intelligence tools, fired Sam Altman, its chief executive officer. Chaos ensued as investors and employees rebelled. By the time the mayhem had subsided five days later, Altman had returned triumphantly to the OpenAI fold amid staff euphoria, and three of the board members who had sought his ouster had resigned. The structure of the board—a nonprofit board of directors overseeing a for-profit...
Like most parkas, a new design by Stella McCarney is made from polyester. But unlike any other parka, the polyester in this one didn’t come straight from petroleum. Instead, it was made out of rigid packaging waste and textile strappings used to secure freight containers. Unveiled at COP28 in Dubai on Friday, it’s the first garment produced with biological recycling, a process in which enzymes break down plastic waste. The parka was made in partnership with Protein Evolution, a biological...
The Tesla Cybertruck is finally hitting the road after years of delays. At an event on Thursday in Austin, Tesla delivered its long-awaited electric pickup truck to at least 13 customers. Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit and husband of tennis champ Serena Williams, was among the first customers to drive away in the futuristic-looking truck—albeit in the passenger seat. “Finally, the future will look like the future,” Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, told the crowd shortly after driving on...
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been behind some of the most eye-watering fines and censures of big tech companies in the last few years. But now arguably the biggest big tech company of them all is seeking to get its own back—by petitioning a court to declare the FTC is unconstitutional. In May 2023, the FTC sought to strengthen a privacy order Meta signed with the regulator in 2020 that would block the tech company from making money off its younger users. As part of the order, Meta...
Seven months after Google warned people it would be mass-deleting inactive accounts, the company will begin pulling the trigger this Friday, December 1. That’s going to mean Gmail, Google Chat, Google Drive and other services that haven’t been accessed in quite some time (24 months or longer, to be precise) are going to disappear—and the data they contain will be lost forever. For the most part, that’s not going to be an issue. Ghost accounts are often abandoned or were made for just a few...
Today marks the one-year anniversary of ChatGPT’s public debut. The chatbot, which was released to the public as a sort of research sandbox, helped catalyze an massive AI arms race in Silicon Valley and a corresponding push for AI integration across products and sectors. To mark ChatGPT’s anniversary, we asked 41 AI experts, business leaders, and other stakeholders a simple question: How will generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney be applied over the next year to best help businesses...
In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police, hundreds of thousands of Americans risked arrest, taking to city streets crowded with combative police forces and drones. Law enforcement agencies treated these protests against police brutality and systemic racism not only like crime scenes, but also like foreign terrorism investigations. Over the span of 20 days, the FBI searched information collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to...
It pays to pay people. And promote them. That’s one of the main takeaways from the 2023 American Opportunity Index, a comprehensive report focused on how large companies’ investments in internal talent affect business performance. The index—published on November 30 as a joint effort of the Burning Glass Institute, Harvard Business School, and the Schultz Family Foundation—is now in its second year. It ranks the top 100 companies across five categories, and puts them into one of four...
ChatGPT was launched on November 30, 2022, ushering in what many have called artificial intelligence’s breakout year. Within days of its release, ChatGPT went viral. Screenshots of conversations snowballed across social media, and the use of ChatGPT skyrocketed to an extent that seems to have surprised even its maker, OpenAI. By January, ChatGPT was seeing 13 million unique visitors each day, setting a record for the fastest-growing user base of a consumer application. Throughout this...
While supply chains for things like solar panels and electrical vehicle batteries have been in the spotlight, there are grave human rights abuses that remain hidden in an area much closer to home—our food. The tragic death of a 16-year-old boy at a Mississippi poultry plant is a flashpoint for the severity of this problem, but the issues within our food supply chains are vast, global, and pervasive. Case-in-point: the cheeseburger. With an estimated 20 billion burgers consumed annually in...
Back in October, Rite Aid announced it would be closing at least 150 stores due to its bankruptcy. You can see those stores here. But now Rite Aid has revealed it will be closing an additional 31 stores. The news comes via the company’s bankruptcy filings. These store closures impact the states of California, Connecticut, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington. !function(){"use...
Elon Musk has told fleeing X advertisers to “go fuck yourself” in a wide-ranging interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times DealBook Summit yesterday. Even by Musk standards, the X owner and Tesla CEO said some truly wild and cringeworthy things. “Go fuck yourself” If there was one takeaway phrase from the entire interview, it was this. Sorkin addressed Musk’s recent endorsement of antisemitic comments and the subsequent fleeing of advertisers from the platform. Musk then...