Booking Holdings, the parent company of Booking.com, Priceline, Kayak and OpenTable, is pushing a “connected trip” strategy powered by generative A.I., letting customers book flights, hotels and ground transportation all at once. While the technology is new, the concept is familiar. “There used to be such a thing, it was called a human travel agent,”…
Any honest survey of power in A.I. confronts an awkward truth: influence often sits with those whose choices carry the greatest potential for harm. This reality is hardly unique to A.I. but, unlike traditional industries where effects might unfold over months or years, A.I.’s impact penetrates more sectors, into further pockets of humanity, in real…
Extinction is supposed to be permanent. But Colossal Biosciences, a Texas startup bent on reviving long-lost species through genetic engineering, has other ideas. The company says it has taken a pivotal step toward resurrecting the dodo, the flightless Mauritian bird that vanished in the 17th century—and it has fresh funding to fuel the effort. Colossal…
Control over data is becoming the defining power struggle of our time. The global data center market was valued at more than $347 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow to over $652 billion by 2030. Nations are no longer debating whether they need sovereign data centers, but are racing to build them. The…
Data annotation may not be the most glamorous job in Silicon Valley, but it’s indispensable for A.I. developers and has made companies like Scale AI multibillion-dollar ventures overnight. Training large language models requires armies of humans to label text, images and video so A.I. systems can learn from them. Now, Elon Musk’s xAI is reshaping…
For more than a decade, tech companies have promised the arrival of the digital sidekick. Amazon built Alexa to anticipate household needs. Apple gave us Siri, and Google launched Assistant to answer questions and organize daily life. More recently, OpenAI’s ChatGPT showed the raw potential of generative A.I. Yet despite the hype, today’s assistants remain…
When a semi-autonomous A.I. bot called Truth Terminal sprang up on X, chirping about everything from crypto token prices to religion and philosophy, it kickstarted a new meta not only in the crypto industry but also in the larger tech ecosystem. Truth Terminal signaled the start of the agentic shift, a new era of collaboration…
Half of all attempts to buy cryptocurrency fail. Not because of market volatility or technical glitches, but because we can’t get past the front door. Research from Cointelegraph and Onramper shows that fiat-to-crypto transactions fail 50 percent of the time globally, and in some regions, abandonment reaches 90 percent. We’ve spent a decade building shinier…
Sara Blakely waited a decade for someone to invent a more comfortable high heel. After no one stepped up to the task, the entrepreneur decided her feet couldn’t wait any longer. That same frustration with a stagnant industry is what inspired her to launch Spanx nearly 25 years ago. The Atlanta-based company, now a billion-dollar…
Cognition AI, the San Francisco-based startup known for its A.I. software engineer Devin used by Goldman Sachs, has more than doubled its valuation to $10.2 billion after raising more than $400 million in a round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. The deal, announced yesterday (Sept. 8), also drew participation from existing backers including angel…
