No corporation, big or small, can avoid the challenges of adapting to A.I., according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Larger corporations will be forced to integrate the technology to ward off newcomers, while smaller players must contend with barriers to achieving scale. “It’s going to be a very competitively intense world,” said Nadella during an…
In 2020, Alex Mashrabov joined Snapchat as director of generative A.I. after the messaging app’s parent company, Snap, acquired his startup. Mashrabov was the brain behind Snapchat’s popular face filters, a signature feature that helped Snap stay competitive during the COVID years, when TikTok was spending billions annually to cement its foothold in the U.S….
Each week, more than 230 million people globally ask ChatGPT questions about health and wellness, according to OpenAI. Seeing a vast, untapped demand, OpenAI earlier this month launched ChatGPT Health and made a swift $60 million acquisition of the health care tech startup Torch to turbocharge the effort. Anthropic soon followed suit, announcing Claude for…
For the past decade, it seems that while technology has become increasingly advanced, the online shopping experience has remained largely the same: endless scrolling, reviews we don’t fully trust and price comparisons that often create more confusion than clarity. Despite improvements in logistics and payments, the core workflow—search, scroll, compare, repeat—has barely evolved. With the…
Modern Know Your Customer (KYC) systems were sold as a trust upgrade for financial services. In practice, however, they have become one of the industry’s most fragile trust assumptions. The greatest risk no longer comes from anonymous hackers probing the perimeter, but from insiders and vendors who now sit squarely inside the system. As KYC…
One might think running OpenAI would be enough to keep Sam Altman occupied. But the CEO is also behind a diverse array of other startups, including Tools for Humanity, the company running the biometric data effort Worldcoin, and the nuclear fusion project Helion. Now, Altman is adding Merge Labs to that list. Co-founded by Altman,…
Over the past several years, contact centers turned to artificial intelligence with a fairly straightforward goal: make the work less draining. A.I. was expected to absorb repetitive tasks, surface relevant information faster and free human agents to focus on what machines still struggle with: listening carefully, exercising judgment and navigating situations that don’t follow a…
Traffic to Wikipedia, the world’s largest online encyclopedia, naturally ebbs and flows with the rhythms of daily life—rising and falling with the school calendar, the news cycle or even the day of the week—making routine fluctuations unremarkable for a site that draws roughly 15 billion page views a month. But sustained declines tell a different…
Civilian travel to the Moon remains years away, but a California startup is already making plans to host overnight guests there. GRU Space, founded by 22-year-old entrepreneur Skyler Chan, is taking deposits ranging from $250,000 to $1 million for a lunar hotel that has yet to be built. “If we solve off-world surface habitation, it’s…
Grok, the A.I. chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, is facing mounting backlash after users exploited the tool to generate sexually explicit images of real women and children. Government regulators and A.I. safety advocates are now calling for investigations and, in some cases, outright bans, as nonconsensual deepfake pornography proliferates online. Indonesia and Malaysia moved…
