Author: GT

After five years, Meta has emerged victorious from a U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) lawsuit over its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. In an opinion released Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg wrote that the FTC did not prove that Meta was violating antitrust law when it bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, and WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014. The FTC did manage to surface evidence showing that Meta — then called Facebook — was concerned about Instagram’s fast growth and the competition it could pose. “One way of looking at this is that what we’re really…

Intuit has signed a multi-year contract worth more than $100 million with OpenAI, enabling its tax and financial apps to operate within ChatGPT and expanding the company’s use of OpenAI’s models across its products. Intuit said its tools, such as TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp, will be accessible through ChatGPT, allowing users to ask questions and complete tasks such as estimating tax refunds, reviewing credit options, or managing business finances. With users’ permission, Intuit’s apps will be able to access their financial data to generate responses and complete tasks, like sending marketing messages or issuing invoice reminders. Customers will…

Ah, the inevitabilities of life: death, taxes, and eating crow on the internet. The infrastructure service Cloudflare faced massive outages on Tuesday morning, cutting off access to a number of popular platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Spotify, and others. The outage also impacted Elon Musk’s X, just one month after the CEO gloated at a widespread AWS outage, which included the encrypted messaging service Signal. “Messages on X chat are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange ‘AWS dependencies,’ so I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head,” Musk wrote on X. We cannot…

In 2023, Tayla Cannon moved from Australia to the U.S. for a job in a city she’d never seen before.   “No family, no friends, just a fresh start,” she told TechCrunch. A sufferer of chronic back pain, she first started working in physiotherapy, thinking it was helping make a difference in the lives of others. Yet the traditional physiotherapy model never quite lit a spark in her.   She moved to interventional cardiology but only became more disillusioned with the physical rehab model with “its localized, reactive, and volume-based nature,” she said.   Meanwhile, in her spare time, she became a content creator, sharing her perspective online about “proactive” and “holistic” ways people can get rid…

Zap Energy took the wraps off its latest fusion device Tuesday at a research meeting in Long Beach, California, the latest in a string of devices the company has built in its quest to bring fusion power to market. The startup is in a race with several other startups that are all attempting to build fusion power plants capable of putting electricity on the grid in the early 2030s. Zap’s Fuze-3 device has been firing pulses of plasma at the company’s headquarters near Seattle, and the results of those experiments will ultimately inform the design of the company’s future demonstration…

Zoox is starting to open its robotaxis to the public in San Francisco as the Amazon-owned company creeps toward a commercial service and direct competition with Waymo. Zoox robotaxis — custom-built vehicles that lack a steering wheel or pedals — have been rolling around San Francisco streets for nearly a year. But until now, only Zoox employees and their friends and family have been able to hail a ride. This is not a large-scale public launch, nor a commercial one. Instead, the company will invite some of the people who signed up for the waitlist to join its early rider…

Microsoft said Tuesday it is partnering with artificial intelligence company Anthropic and chipmaker Nvidia as part of an AI infrastructure deal that moves the software giant further away from its longtime alliance with OpenAI.Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude that competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, said it is committed to buying $30 billion in computing capacity from Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform. As part of the partnership, Nvidia will also invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic, and Microsoft will invest up to $5 billion in the San Francisco-based startup.The joint announcements by CEOs Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Satya Nadella of…

The cooling towers of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Middletown, Pennsylvania, Oct. 30, 2024.Danielle DeVries | CNBCThe Trump administration will provide Constellation Energy with a $1 billion loan to restart the Crane Clean Energy Center nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, Department of Energy officials said Tuesday.Previously known as Three Mile Island Unit 1, the plant is expected to start generating power again in 2027. Constellation unveiled plans to rename and restart the reactor in Sept. 2024 through a power purchase agreement with Microsoft to support the tech company’s data center demand in the region.Three Mile Island Unit 1…

A Waymo autonomous self-driving Jaguar taxi drives along a street on March 14, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.Mario Tama | Getty ImagesWaymo on Tuesday said it will bring its robotaxi service to new cities in Texas and Florida in 2026.The Alphabet-owned company said it plans to start operating its vehicles with no human driver assistants in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Miami and Orlando in the coming weeks before opening service in those markets to the public next year, the company said in a blog.”Waymo has entered a new phase of commercial scale, doubling the number of cities we operate without…

As part of Microsoft’s Ignite conference, Stack Overflow on Tuesday revealed a new set of products that aims to position it as a valuable part of the enterprise AI stack. This new version of the company, built around the Stack Internal enterprise product, looks to remake its classic problem-solving forum into a tool for translating human expertise into an AI-accessible format. At its simplest, Stack Internal is an enterprise version of the web forum, but with the additional security and admin controls you’d expect. The new tools are specifically designed to feed into internal AI agents using the model context…