-
The Italian government said in a press release on Wednesday that a spyware campaign revealed by WhatsApp, and carried out with spyware made by Paragon Solutions, targeted people across several countries in Europe. The government, led by far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni, denied being behind the targeting of Italian citizens Francesco Cancellato, a journalist who…
-
Operatives working for Elon Musk have gained unprecedented access to a swath of U.S. government departments — including agencies responsible for managing data on millions of federal employees and a system that handles $6 trillion in payments to Americans. During the past two weeks, Musk’s group of representatives — a presidential advisory board within the…
-
Google will no longer have diversity hiring targets and will review its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, according to an email sent to employees seen by The Wall Street Journal. Google now joins other tech companies rolling back DEI practices, especially as DEI practices come under fire from conservative groups. Amazon and Meta have also…
-
Field service engineers may not be the first group of customers that come to mind when you think about lucrative opportunities in B2B technology. But that same blind spot speaks of the opportunity in the space for those who are stepping up and targeting “the job site.” One of the players in that space, XOi …
-
The tech layoff wave continued through 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, 2024 saw more than 150,000 job cuts across 542 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Large companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap, and Microsoft conducted sizable layoffs in 2024, while smaller-sized startups also experienced cuts, and in some…
-
Ampere, the semiconductor business founded by former Intel exec Renee James, is reportedly on the cusp of selling itself to SoftBank — the latest in an ongoing saga over the company’s future ownership. The deal could value Ampere at about $6.5 billion, Bloomberg reports. That’s a price cut from the $8 billion valuation in 2021,…
-
Boston Dynamics Wednesday announced a partnership designed to bring improved reinforcement learning to its electric Atlas humanoid robot. The tie-up is with the Robotics & AI Institute (RAI Institute), earlier known as The Boston Dynamics AI Institute. Both organizations were founded by Marc Raibert, a former MIT professor who served as Boston Dynamics’ CEO for…
-
Sonos announced that it has laid off 200 people in a letter posted to its site Wednesday. The news follows a 100-person layoff in August. Both rounds arrive in the wake of a disastrously botched update to the Sonos app that alienated broad swaths of the premium audio hardware firm’s extremely loyal fanbase. The new…
-
AI researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington were able to train an AI “reasoning” model for under $50 in cloud compute credits, according to a new research paper released last Friday. The model known as s1 performs similarly to cutting-edge reasoning models, such as OpenAI’s o1 and DeepSeek’s r1, on tests measuring math…
-
Scout Motors’ plan to eschew traditional dealerships and sell EVs directly to consumers is running into legal trouble. A group of Volkswagen and Audi dealers filed a lawsuit this week against Scout Motors, the EV that spun out of Volkswagen. The lawsuit, which was first reported by Automotive News, seeks to block Scout’s direct-to-consumer sales…