Author: zppiot

In the history of U.S. corporate pay packages, there have been plenty of massive payouts worth almost $1 billion in today’s dollars. But none comes close to the $46 billion pay deal Tesla shareholders on Thursday handed to CEO Elon Musk. The results of the shareholder vote, which concluded today, were announced during Tesla’s annual meeting, prompting a standing ovation from shareholders attending the Thursday event at Tesla’s headquarters in Austin, Texas. Musk had already declared victory, writing late Wednesday on his social media platform X that shareholders were voting to approve the pay package by “wide margins.””Hot damn, I love you guys,” an…

It’s a thought that occurs to every video-game player at some point: What if the weird, hyper-focused state I enter when playing in virtual worlds could somehow be applied to the real one? Often pondered during especially challenging or tedious tasks in meatspace (writing essays, say, or doing your taxes), it’s an eminently reasonable question to ask. Life, after all, is hard. And while video games are too, there’s something almost magical about the way they can promote sustained bouts of superhuman concentration and resolve. For some, this phenomenon leads to an interest in flow states and immersion. For others,…

For some, this phenomenon leads to an interest in flow states and immersion. For others, it’s simply a reason to play more games. For a handful of consultants, startup gurus, and game designers in the late 2000s, it became the key to unlocking our true human potential. In her 2010 TED Talk, “Gaming Can Make a Better World,” the game designer Jane McGonigal called this engaged state “blissful productivity.” “There’s a reason why the average World of Warcraft gamer plays for 22 hours a week,” she said. “It’s because we know when we’re playing a game that we’re actually happier…

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) tech has two main steps (as you might guess from the name). First, carbon dioxide is filtered out of emissions at facilities like fossil-fuel power plants. Then it gets locked away, or stored.   Wrangling pollution might seem like the important bit, and there’s often a lot of focus on what fraction of emissions a CCS system can filter out. But without storage, the whole project would be pretty useless. It’s really the combination of capture and long-term storage that helps to reduce climate impact.  Storage is getting more attention lately, though, and there’s something of…

At its Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, Apple for the first time unveiled its vision for supercharging its product lineup with artificial intelligence. The key feature, which will run across virtually all of its product line, is Apple Intelligence, a suite of AI-based capabilities that promises to deliver personalized AI services while keeping sensitive data secure. It represents Apple’s largest leap forward in using our private data to help AI do tasks for us.  To make the case it can do this without sacrificing privacy, the company says it has built a new way to handle sensitive data in the…

“We started with the thesis of how smart energy, through portability and connectivity, can enable many use case scenarios,” Luke says. “Transportation happens to be accounting for something like 27% or 28% of your energy use in your daily life.” And that’s why the company first designed the batteries for two-wheeled vehicles, a popular transportation option in Taiwan and across Asia. Having succeeded in promoting its scooters and the battery-swap charging method in Taiwan, it is now able to explore other possible uses of these modular, portable batteries—more than 1.4 million of which are in circulation at this point.  “Think of smart,…

“Not taking this seriously risks potentially trillions of dollars and billions of tonnes of [greenhouse-gas] emissions, not to mention the trust and goodwill of the American public, which is reasonably skeptical of these potentially critically important technologies,” she wrote in an op-ed in the industry outlet Utility Dive. Global goals Other nations and regions are also accelerating efforts to capture and store carbon as part of their broader efforts to lower emissions and combat climate change. The EU, which has dedicated tens of billions of euros to accelerating the development of CCS, is working to develop the capacity to store…

The pitch offers an implicit contrast with the likes of Alphabet, Amazon, or Meta, which collect and store enormous amounts of personal data. Apple says any personal data passed on to the cloud will be used only for the AI task at hand and will not be retained or accessible to the company, even for debugging or quality control, after the model completes the request.  Simply put, Apple is saying people can trust it to analyze incredibly sensitive data—photos, messages, and emails that contain intimate details of our lives—and deliver automated services based on what it finds there, without actually…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How battery-swap networks are preventing emergency blackouts On the morning of April 3, Taiwan was hit by a 7.4 magnitude earthquake. Seconds later, hundreds of battery-swap stations in Taiwan sensed something else: the power frequency of the electric grid took a sudden drop, a signal that some power plants had been disconnected in the disaster. The grid was now struggling to meet energy demand. These stations, built by the Taiwanese company Gogoro for electric-powered two-wheeled vehicles like scooters,…

AI features to hit Apple devices after new partnership with Open AI announced – CBS News Watch CBS News Apple announced a new partnership with Open AI at its developers conference on Monday. It means Chat GPT, along with other AI features, will be on Apple devices by the end of this year. Be the first to know Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting. Not Now Turn On #features #hit #Apple #devices #partnership #Open #announced

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is threatening to ban his employees from taking Apple devices into their workplaces after Apple CEO Tim Cook announced a partnership on Monday to integrate OpenAI’s artificial intelligence technology into its operating systems. On Monday evening, Musk wrote on his social media platform X that adding OpenAI’s tech into Apple’s systems “is an unacceptable security violation.” He added that visitors to his businesses, which also include SpaceX, “will have to check their Apple devices at the door, where they will be stored in a Faraday cage.”Musk’s threat to ban Apple devices at his workplaces, which employ more…

Gogoro is not the only company working on battery-swapping for electric scooters (New York City recently launched a pilot program to give delivery drivers the option to charge this way), but it’s certainly one of the most successful. Founded in 2011, the firm has a network of over 12,500 stations across Taiwan and boasts over 600,000 monthly subscribers who pay to swap batteries in and out when required. Each station is roughly the size of two vending machines and can hold around 30 scooter batteries. Now the company is putting the battery network to another use: Gogoro has been working…

Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference is typically a springboard for the company to announce new tech features for its software programs, and not as flashy as its yearly September event to trumpet its latest iPhone rollout. But this year, the WWDC could be a make-or-break moment for the tech giant.That’s because CEO Tim Cook on Monday announced Apple’s strategy for integrating artificial intelligence into its tech, an area in which Wall Street analysts say the tech giant has so far lagged behind rivals such as Microsoft and Google. The WWDC announcement may be “a pivotal moment in Apple’s future,” according to…

But the term “digital twin” actually came from a NASA employee named John Vickers, who first used it in 2010 as part of a technology road map report for the space agency. Today, perhaps unsurprisingly, Grieves is head of the Digital Twins Institute, and Vickers is still with NASA, as its principal technologist.  Since those early days, technology has advanced, as it is wont to do. The Internet of Things has proliferated, hooking real-world sensors stuck to physical objects into the ethereal internet. Today, those devices number more than 15 billion, compared with mere millions in 2010. Computing power has…

—Josh A. Goldstein is a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), where he works on the CyberAI Project. Renée DiResta is the research manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory and the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. At the end of May, OpenAI marked a new “first” in its corporate history. It wasn’t an even more powerful language model or a new data partnership, but a report disclosing that bad actors had misused their products to run influence operations.The company had caught five networks of covert propagandists—including players from…

The rise of generative AI, coupled with the rapid adoption and democratization of AI across industries this decade, has emphasized the singular importance of data. Managing data effectively has become critical to this era of business—making data practitioners, including data engineers, analytics engineers, and ML engineers, key figures in the data and AI revolution. Organizations that fail to use their own data will fall behind competitors that do and miss out on opportunities to uncover new value for themselves and their customers. As the quantity and complexity of data grows, so do its challenges, forcing organizations to adopt new data…