Author: GT

Amazon continues to infuse AI into its shopping tools to encourage customers to make more purchases. The company announced on Wednesday a new feature called “Interests,” aimed at creating a more personalized and conversational search experience.  With the new feature, customers can enter tailored prompts in the search bar, reflecting their interests, preferences, and even their budget. For example, users might ask for “model building kits and accessories for hobbyist engineers” or “brewing tools and gadgets for coffee lovers.”  Interests leverages large language models (LLMs) to convert everyday language into queries that traditional search engines can understand, resulting in more…

BOSTON (AP) — Ashley Wagner and Ben Agosto know what it’s like to step off the ice at the figure skating world championships and feel as though they’ve conquered the sport. And what it feels like when the notoriously fickle sport bites back.So when the International Skating Union put in motion its ambitious “Vision 2030” plan, which is designed to grow and expand the sport through improved fan engagement, it made sense that they would call Wagner, a three-time U.S. champion and former world silver medalist, and Agosto, who won an Olympic silver medal with ice dance partner Tanith Belbin.If…

Americans’ support for a TikTok ban is declining, according to a study from the Pew Research Center. This survey of more than 5,000 U.S. adults found that just 34% of respondents supported banning the short form video app. When Pew ran a similar study in 2023, 50% of adults supported the TikTok ban. Over the same time span, the study also shows more Americans growing opposed to the ban. While 22% of respondents opposed it in 2023, that population rose to 32% in the recent study. These trends were consistent across party lines, with support for the ban among Republican…

Fidelity Investments is in the final stages of testing its own U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin as part of its growing interest in blockchain-based financial products. The $5.9 trillion asset manager is expected to integrate the token into its tokenized U.S. Treasury money market fund on Ethereum. This move follows Fidelity’s recent SEC filing for an on-chain share class of its Treasury Digital Fund (FYHXX), an $80 million fund primarily holding U.S. Treasury bills. The on-chain share class, which is pending approval, is set to take effect on May 30. Other financial institutions are also entering the stablecoin market. Custodia and Vantage…

OpenAI has pulled its upgraded image generation feature, powered by the advanced GPT-4o reasoning model, from the free tier of ChatGPT. The decision comes just a day after the update was launched, following an unforeseen surge in users creating images in the distinctive style of renowned Japanese animation house, Studio Ghibli. The update, which promised to deliver enhanced realism in both AI-generated images and text, was intended to showcase the capabilities of GPT-4o.  This new model employs an “autoregressive approach” to image creation, building visuals from left to right and top to bottom, a method that contrasts with the simultaneous…

Audio startup Krisp on Wednesday said it is launching a new feature that uses AI to change a user’s accent during calls. The company is initially rolling out support for changing Indian English accents to U.S. English. The startup says the accent conversion process preserves the speaker’s voice and only switches phonemes to match American accents. The feature has apparently been tested in enterprise environments, and a beta version is now coming to the Krisp desktop app. Users can turn the feature on any time during or before calls. Arto Minasyan, the company’s co-founder, said the idea for the feature…

Risk assets such as bitcoin (BTC), xrp (XRP), solana (SOL) are back in focus as President Donald Trump warned of even more reciprocal tariffs if other countries collude to do “economic harm” to the U.S. “If the European Union works with Canada in order to do economic harm to the USA,” he wrote in a Truth Social post in early Asian hours Thursday, “large scale Tariffs, far larger than currently planned, will be placed on them both in order to protect the best friend that each of those two countries has ever had!” “Liberation day in America is coming, soon,”…

It’s getting easier to build new applications on ATProto, the protocol that powers Bluesky’s social network and a growing number of other apps. At ATmosphere, the ATProto community conference held over the weekend in Seattle, Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee offered attendees a glimpse of what’s ahead for the protocol’s development and how those will help developers build more applications to expand the ecosystem in the future. One of the key additions coming soon is support for the authentication standard OAuth, which some developers are already testing today, though not in a finalized state. With OAuth, developers will be able to…

There’s a long-standing rivalry between the king of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC), and the coin that many have considered to be the heir to the throne, Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH). But there aren’t actually too many similarities between these two, despite what their competition suggests. And there’s a much stronger case for buying a lot of one than there is for the other, so let’s dive in and analyze the situation. Bitcoin is both a store of value and to a lesser extent a medium of exchange, fulfilling two of the canonical properties of money. Its value is created by demand from…

Chinese AI innovation is reshaping the global technology landscape, challenging assumptions about Western dominance in advanced computing. Recent developments from companies like DeepSeek illustrate how quickly China has adapted to and overcome international restrictions through creative approaches to AI development. According to Lee Kai-fu, CEO of Chinese startup 01.AI and former head of Google China, the gap between Chinese and American AI capabilities has narrowed dramatically. “Previously, I think it was a six to nine-month gap and behind in everything. And now I think that’s probably three months behind in some of the core technologies, but ahead in some specific…