Author: GT

Elon Musk’s xAI is the subject of scrutiny in Memphis, where natural gas turbines powering its Colossus data center have raised alarm among residents concerned about air pollution. On Tuesday, the city of Memphis released the results of initial air quality testing performed by a third party, saying that levels of the 10 pollutants tested were not dangerous. But the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), which is threatening to sue xAI on behalf of the NAACP, said that the tests omitted a key pollutant, ozone, also known as smog. “It’s unclear why the city would not test for this harmful…

U.S. President Donald Trump walks as workers react at U.S. Steel Corporation–Irvin Works in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, U.S., May 30, 2025. Leah Millis | ReutersPresident Donald Trump now personally holds sweeping veto power over U.S. Steel’s decisions in key areas, according to an amended corporate charter filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.U.S. Steel says Trump holds what the White House calls a “golden share” in the Pittsburgh-based company. The amended charter, however, does not reference future presidents. Instead, it says the veto power passes to the Treasury and Commerce Departments as representatives of the U.S. government after Trump leaves…

Kalshi just raised a $185 million round, led by crypto-focused VC firm Paradigm, bringing the company’s valuation to $2 billion post-money, representatives from Paradigm and Kalshi confirmed to TechCrunch. “Prediction markets remind me of crypto 15 years ago: a new asset class on a path to trillions,” Matt Huang, co-founder and managing partner at Paradigm, told TechCrunch in an emailed statement. “There’s no better team than Kalshi to scale prediction markets and reshape how people think about everything from elections and economic markets to weather and sports.” The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the round.  This news…

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is sending out the latest round of refunds to consumers it says were “tricked” into purchases they didn’t want from Fortnite maker Epic Games — and eligible players who haven’t been compensated yet still have time to apply.In an announcement this week, the FTC said it was distributing more than 969,000 refunds totaling over $126 million to consumers on Wednesday and Thursday. That follows the regulator’s first round of payments amounting to more than $72 million, which went out in December 2024.The refunds are part of a $520 million settlement that Epic…

From the moment OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stepped onstage, it was clear this was not going to be a normal interview. Altman and his chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, stood awkwardly toward the back of the stage at a jam-packed San Francisco venue that typically hosts jazz concerts. Hundreds of people filled steep theater-style seating on Tuesday night to watch Kevin Roose, a columnist with The New York Times, and Platformer’s Casey Newton record a live episode of their popular technology podcast, Hard Fork. Altman and Lightcap were the main event, but they’d walked out too early. Roose explained that…

Leading AI chatbots are reproducing Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda and censorship when questioned on sensitive topics.According to the American Security Project (ASP), the CCP’s extensive censorship and disinformation efforts have contaminated the global AI data market. This infiltration of training data means that AI models – including prominent ones from Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI – sometimes generate responses that align with the political narratives of the Chinese state.Investigators from the ASP analysed the five most popular large language model (LLM) powered chatbots: OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini, DeepSeek’s R1, and xAI’s Grok.  They prompted each model in both…

Brad Feld has spent decades operating by a simple principle: Give without expecting anything in return. This philosophy goes beyond traditional pay-it-forward thinking, he says. It’s about helping others, knowing only that meaningful connections and opportunities will emerge organically over time if you do. The entrepreneur and VC, who began angel investing in the 1990s, rose to prominence through his candid blog “Feld Thoughts,” which pulled back the curtain on the then-secretive venture industry and sparked countless discussions across Silicon Valley. After decades as an investor and co-founding both Techstars and the venture firm Foundry Group — which backed hundreds…

Power plants and industrial facilities that emit carbon dioxide, the primary driver of global warming, are hopeful that Congress will keep tax credits for capturing the gas and storing it deep underground.The process, called carbon capture and sequestration, is seen by many as an important way to reduce pollution during a transition to renewable energy. But it faces criticism from some conservatives, who say it is expensive and unnecessary, and from environmentalists, who say it has consistently failed to capture as much pollution as promised and is simply a way for producers of fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal…

A federal judge sided with Meta on Wednesday in a lawsuit brought against the company by 13 book authors, including Sarah Silverman, that alleged the company had illegally trained its AI models on their copyrighted works. Federal Judge Vince Chhabria issued a summary judgment — meaning the judge was able to decide on the case without sending it to a jury — in favor of Meta, finding that the company’s training of AI models on copyrighted books in this case fell under the “fair use” doctrine of copyright law and thus was legal. The decision comes just a few days…

Critics fear the revised NO FAKES Act has morphed from targeted AI deepfakes protection into sweeping censorship powers.What began as a seemingly reasonable attempt to tackle AI-generated deepfakes has snowballed into something far more troubling, according to digital rights advocates. The much-discussed Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe (NO FAKES) Act – originally aimed at preventing unauthorised digital replicas of people – now threatens to fundamentally alter how the internet functions.The bill’s expansion has set alarm bells ringing throughout the tech community. It’s gone well beyond simply protecting celebrities from fake videos to potentially creating a sweeping censorship…