Author: GT

People gather at the beach after sunset with offshore oil and gas platform Esther in the distance on January 5, 2025 in Seal Beach, California. Mario Tama | Getty ImagesOil executives are warning that President Donald Trump’s tariffs and his “drill, baby, drill” message have created uncertainty in energy markets that is already impacting investment.The executives, shielded by anonymity, bluntly criticized Trump in their responses to a survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas from March 12 to March 20.”The administration’s chaos is a disaster for the commodity markets,” one executive said. “‘Drill, baby, drill’ is nothing short of…

Amazon started the Alexa Fund in 2015 to back early-stage voice startups. With the advent of large language models and Amazon launching Gen AI-powered Alexa+, along with a family of multimodal AI models, the fund now wants to broaden its scope and invest more in AI startups. In a blog post Amazon shared with TechCrunch ahead of publication, Alexa Fund leader Paul Bernard explained that the company now wants to invest in areas including AI-enabled hardware and smart agents. “While the Alexa Fund’s mission has evolved beyond the initial focus on voice technology over the years, the rapid developments in…

With the stock market off its record high, it looks like investors have adopted a more cautious approach toward cryptocurrencies as well. After the market cap of the digital asset industry peaked at about $3.7 trillion in December, it has fallen 22% (as of March 24). The asset class is once again showing investors how cyclical it can be. If you’re a long-term investor, though, then there’s an opportunity to take advantage of the volatility and fear. In fact, there’s one cryptocurrency, which is currently trading 19% off its peak, that has 14,623% upside. That’s according to Michael Saylor, the…

Since the integration of Google Assistant for Waze on iOS in 2020, iPhone users have faced ongoing issues that the company has struggled to resolve for “over a year,” Waze wrote in a post, apologizing for the “prolonged inconvenience.”  On Wednesday, the navigation app officially discontinued the feature. Many users had reported on Reddit that when they click the microphone button and speak, there is no response, even though Assistant seems to detect their voice.  As a replacement, the company plans to introduce an “enhanced voice interaction solution” sometime in the near future, as stated in a recent announcement on…

The crypto industry will be listening closely when Paul Atkins, President Trump’s pick to run the Securities and Exchange Commission, testifies before the Senate Thursday in his nomination hearing. Atkins is expected to reexamine and revise a lot of what the agency did during the Biden administration, notably its approach toward regulating digital assets. For years, Atkins has made it clear he favors clearer regulations of cryptocurrencies that don’t impose unnecessary oversight — and he intends to repeat that point before Senate lawmakers Thursday. “I have seen how ambiguous and non-existent regulations for digital assets create uncertainty in the market…

YouTube is changing how it counts views on YouTube Shorts to give creators a deeper understanding of how their short-form content is performing, the company announced on Wednesday. Shorts views will now count the number of times a creator’s Short starts to play or replay. In the past, a view had been counted after a Short was viewed for a certain number of seconds. As a result of this change, view counts will be higher moving forward. YouTube says that it’s making the change because it heard that creators want to understand how often their Shorts are actually seen. The…

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a sophisticated attack campaign leveraging a fraudulent website that impersonates the Indian Post Office to deliver malware to both Windows and Android users. The fake website, hosted at postindia[.]site, employs device detection techniques to serve tailored malicious payloads based on the victim’s operating system, demonstrating the threat actor’s technical sophistication and calculated approach. When accessed via desktop browsers, the malicious site attempts to gain clipboard access and prompts users to download a PDF containing “ClickFix” instructions. These instructions guide victims to press Win+R and paste a PowerShell command, potentially compromising their systems with malware. Mobile visitors,…

Gemini 2.5 is being hailed by Google DeepMind as its “most intelligent AI model” to date. The first model from this latest generation is an experimental version of Gemini 2.5 Pro, which DeepMind says has achieved state-of-the-art results across a wide range of benchmarks. According to Koray Kavukcuoglu, CTO of Google DeepMind, the Gemini 2.5 models are “thinking models”.  This signifies their capability to reason through their thoughts before generating a response, leading to enhanced performance and improved accuracy.     The capacity for “reasoning” extends beyond mere classification and prediction, Kavukcuoglu explains. It encompasses the system’s ability to analyse information, deduce…

Sez Us, a social app founded by Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, is trying to build a platform without rage-bait. Rage-bait refers to any posts that are intended to stoke controversy. This might be an intentionally controversial political take, or it can be a wholly fabricated scenario designed to farm engagement (e.g., a satirical creator got 1.5 million views on a TikTok where she claims to file for divorce after her husband booed Taylor Swift). Most existing social networking apps incentivize rage-bait, including Instagram, X, TikTok, and YouTube. These platforms have programs for creators that pay them based on how many…

Bitcoin miners won’t just mine Bitcoin — they’ll become full-blown energy companies. That’s the future, says Evan Owens, VP of Business Development at Kadena. “Bitcoin miners today are obviously mining Bitcoin, but in 10 years, they’ll be energy companies, and Bitcoin mining will be a small part of that,” Owens told TheStreet Roundtable’s Jackson Hinkle. He believes critics have misunderstood how mining will evolve — and that the industry will end up helping to rebuild America’s energy infrastructure and power up undeveloped nations. Built by ex-J.P. Morgan developers, Kadena is a layer 1 that doubles down on proof-of-work (PoW) but…