Author: GT

Generative AI and robotics are moving us ever closer to the day when we can ask for an object and have it created within a few minutes. In fact, MIT researchers have developed a speech-to-reality system, an AI-driven workflow that allows them to provide input to a robotic arm and “speak objects into existence,” creating things like furniture in as little as five minutes.  With the speech-to-reality system, a robotic arm mounted on a table is able to receive spoken input from a human, such as “I want a simple stool,” and then construct the objects out of modular components. To date,…

Oil prices fell for a second day on Wednesday as investors waited to see if peace talks in the Russia-Ukraine war could open up more supply. Sharply_done | E+ | Getty ImagesOil prices were steady on Friday, supported by stalled Ukraine peace talks, though gains were offset by expectations of a supply glut.Brent crude rose 41 cents, or 0.65%, to $63.67 per barrel by 10:07 a.m ET. U.S. West Texas Intermediate rose 36 cents, or 0.6%, to $60.03 a barrel.”It is quite flat today and this week had a narrow trading range,” said Tamas Vargas, an oil market analyst at…

Meta may be planning to make serious cuts to its Metaverse division, Bloomberg reported, citing anonymous sources. Company executives are mulling slashing the virtual reality platform’s budget by up to 30%, the report said, adding that any reductions would also include layoffs. If Meta does go ahead with such a plan, the move would reflect the overall lack of interest in products like Meta’s social virtual reality platform Horizon Worlds, as well as its virtual reality hardware — both in the industry at large, as well as among consumers. Since Meta’s rebrand in 2021, investors have been skeptical of the…

According to AWS at this week’s re:Invent 2025, the chatbot hype cycle is effectively dead, with frontier AI agents taking their place.That is the blunt message radiating from Las Vegas this week. The industry’s obsession with chat interfaces has been replaced by a far more demanding mandate: “frontier agents” that don’t just talk, but work autonomously for days at a time.We are moving from the novelty phase of generative AI into a grinding era of infrastructure economics and operational plumbing. The “wow” factor of a poem-writing bot has faded; now, the cheque comes due for the infrastructure needed to run…

Antonio Neri, President and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise.Anjali Sundaram | CNBCHewlett Packard Enterprise shares fell 5% Friday after the company reported fourth-quarter revenue that missed analyst expectations.The company reported earnings after the bell on Thursday, posting revenue of $9.68 billion, which was up 14% over the year prior but fell short of the $9.94 billion in revenue expected by analysts polled by LSEG.Revenue for HPE’s server segment came in at $4.46 billion, down 5% from the $4.68 billion a year ago. The fourth-quarter number missed StreetAccount analyst expectations of $4.58 billion.CFO Marie Myers addressed the shortfall on the analyst…

TikTok is introducing a new “Nearby Feed” to allow users to explore what’s happening around them. The company says the new feed is designed to help users do things like discover a new restaurant close to home or find a new place to explore during a trip. The nearby feed is rolling out to the U.K., France, Italy, and Germany. TikTok was first spotted testing a Nearby feed back in 2022, when it had rolled it out to select users in Southeast Asia. “Posts in the Nearby Feed are shown to people based on location, the topic of the content,…

MADRID (AP) — Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare on Friday said it had restored services following an outage that took place in the morning and brought down several global websites including LinkedIn, Zoom and others, the second such crash to affect the company in less than three weeks. Cloudflare said the issue had been resolved and was not due to an attack. A change to how its firewall handles requests “caused Cloudflare’s network to be unavailable for several minutes this morning,” the company said.It said it was “investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs,” or application programming interface that allow…

The convergence of mobile and desktop operating systems is a goal that has remained elusive for big tech firms since the early days of the smartphone. Microsoft’s attempt in the form of Windows Mobile was reaching the end of its road by 2010, and despite Apple’s iOS/iPadOS and macOS moving very slowly towards one another for the last few years, Cupertino has not yet reached the fabled goal of the-one-OS-to-rule-them-all.But Google’s big play to merge ChromeOS and Android into a unified PC platform (with the anglicised codename Aluminium OS) is gradually taking shape. Android-powered laptops are planned for released in…

Amazon is considering ending its long-standing contract with the United States Postal Service and building out its own competing nationwide delivery network, according to The Washington Post. The current agreement between the e-commerce giant and the USPS expires in October 2026. The two sides have spent months negotiating what the next version of the contract would look like, but those negotiations have been complicated by President Trump’s push to privatize the USPS, the Post reports. Under the current agreement, Amazon pays the USPS billions of dollars annually to distribute packages, accounting for roughly 7.5% of the agency’s revenue in 2025.…

LONDON (AP) — European Union regulators on Friday fined Elon Musk’s social media platform X 120 million euros ($140 million) for breaches of the bloc’s digital regulations that they said could leave users exposed to scams and manipulation.The European Commission issued its decision following an investigation it opened two years ago into X under the 27-nation bloc’s Digital Services Act, also known as the DSA. It’s the first time that the EU has issued a so-called non-compliance decision since rolling out the DSA. The sweeping rulebook requires platforms to take more responsibility for protecting European users and cleaning up harmful…