Today, the same day that Meta announced that it will soon use your AI chats to personalize the ads it shows you, Instagram head Adam Mosseri made a “myth busting” video attempting to set the record straight on a persistent rumor about Meta: “I swear, we do not listen to your microphone,” he says. Meta’s…
Samit Sarkar, Google’s head of Android ecosystems, recently confirmed that Android and ChromeOS will be merged into a single platform, reigniting a slew of questions about the future of the operating systems. Combining them makes sense. It made sense way back in 2013, and it was first supposed to happen back in 2015, but until…
During xAI’s launch of Grok 4 on Wednesday night, Elon Musk said — while live-streaming the event on his social media platform, X — that his AI company’s ultimate goal was to develop a “maximally truth-seeking AI.” But where exactly does Grok 4 seek out the truth when trying to answer controversial questions? The newest…
Brett Adcock, co-founder and CEO of the humanoid robotics startup Figure AI, made a rare public appearance at the Bloomberg Tech conference on Thursday. Figure has recently been the subject of a couple news articles that questioned its progress with marquee customer BMW. Figure objected so strenuously to at least one of these reports that…
Alright, we get it. Y’all are excited about Slate. We thought the little Slate Truck was cool, but based on the number of clicks and comments on our Slate Auto articles so far, you’d like to know more. Many of you wrote in with questions and more than a few people raised some doubts. So,…
President Donald Trump has fired Shira Perlmutter, who leads the U.S. Copyright Office. The firing was reported by CBS News and Politico, and seemingly confirmed by a statement from Representative Joe Morelle, the top Democrat on the Committee for House Administration. “Donald Trump’s termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power…
Every Sunday, NPR host Will Shortz, The New York Times’ crossword puzzle guru, gets to quiz thousands of listeners in a long-running segment called the Sunday Puzzle. While written to be solvable without too much foreknowledge, the brainteasers are usually challenging even for skilled contestants. That’s why some experts think they’re a promising way to…
A question about whether Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) would challenge the 2024 election results quickly devolved into a fight about censorship and Big Tech during the debate with Democratic candidate Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN). “You have said you would not have certified the last presidential election, and would have asked the…
Mathematician and scientist Stephen Wolfram grew up in a household where his mother was a philosophy professor at Oxford University. As such, his younger self didn’t want anything to do with the subject, but an older and perhaps wiser Wolfram sees value in thinking deeply about things. Now he wants to bring some of that…
Will the Tesla robotaxi have a steering wheel or not? Elon Musk won’t say. The Tesla CEO dodged several questions during an earnings call Tuesday about the status of the company’s long-promised autonomous vehicle, including whether it would have traditional controls like pedals and steering wheels. It’s an increasingly important question left hovering over Tesla’s…