How Electric Car Batteries Might Aid the Grid (and Win Over Drivers)

Electric cars are more expensive than gasoline models largely because batteries cost so much. But new technology could turn those pricey devices into an asset, giving owners benefits like reduced utility bills, lower lease payments or free parking. Ford Motor, General Motors, BMW and other automakers are exploring how electric-car batteries could be used to…

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How the Humane AI Pin Flopped

Days before gadget reviewers weighed in on the Humane Ai Pin, a futuristic wearable device powered by artificial intelligence, the founders of the company gathered their employees and encouraged them to brace themselves. The reviews might be disappointing, they warned. Humane’s founders, Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, were right. In April, reviewers brutally panned the…

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Google’s updated AI-powered NotebookLM expands to India, UK and over 200 other countries

Google on Thursday said it is rolling out NotebookLM, its AI-powered note-taking assistant, to over 200 new countries, nearly six months after opening its access in the U.S. The platform, powered by Google’s multimodal LLM Gemini 1.5 Pro, has also been upgraded with new features and languages to help more people use AI to generate…

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Auriea Harvey’s Digital Worlds Are Love Stories, Without Neat Ends

Installed on vintage hardware at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, laid out chronologically, the first career survey of the innovative Net artist Auriea Harvey tells a story about mortality, and survival. In Harvey’s jewel-box worlds, there aren’t heroes or villains, just people, losing and loving, enmeshed in the slipstream of tech….

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Study finds that AI models hold opposing views on controversial topics

Not all generative AI models are created equal, particularly when it comes to how they treat polarizing subject matter. In a recent study presented at the 2024 ACM Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FAccT) conference, researchers at Carnegie Mellon, the University of Amsterdam and AI startup Hugging Face tested several open text-analyzing models, including Meta’s Llama…

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That Much-Despised Apple Ad Could Be More Disturbing Than It Looks

If you haven’t yet seen the new and already-infamous Apple ad — the one in which a giant mechanical compactor violently crushes a bunch of musical instruments, books, sculptures, art supplies and toys, turning them into an iPad Pro — then Apple’s executives are probably happy. They’ve seen the headlines: “Apple iPad Ad Is Bad”;…

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Israel Secretly Targets U.S. Lawmakers With Influence Campaign on Gaza War

Israel organized and paid for an influence campaign last year targeting U.S. lawmakers and the American public with pro-Israel messaging, as it aimed to foster support for its actions in the war in Gaza, according to officials involved in the effort and documents related to the operation. The covert campaign was commissioned by Israel’s Ministry…

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Sirion, now valued around $1B, acquires Eigen as consolidation comes to enterprise AI tooling

There’s a lot of buzz about generative AI and what impact it might have on businesses. But look beyond the hype and high-profile deals like the one between OpenAI and PwC last week, and you’ll see that the world is already years into using customer-facing, no-code AI tools for extracting information and working faster. Now,…

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