Month: January 2025

The FAA is facing a major crisis without a leader because Elon Musk pushed him out

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The Federal Aviation Administration is facing its first major aviation disaster in 16 years without a leader because Elon Musk helped push him out. Michael Whitaker stepped down as FAA administrator on January 20th, the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, after clashing with Elon Musk, who’s company SpaceX is regulated by the agency. Musk publicly … Read more

OpenAI will offer its tech to US national labs for nuclear weapons research

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OpenAI says it plans to let U.S. National Laboratories, the Department of Energy’s network of R&D labs, use its AI models for nuclear weapons security and other scientific projects. Per CNBC, OpenAI will work with Microsoft, its lead investor, to deploy a model on the supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The model will be a … Read more

Put Securities On-Chain!

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This week, in a Washington Post op-ed, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev called for a new approach to capital markets in the United States. He suggested a number of policies – modernizing accredited investor standards is an old favorite among finance wonks – but one stood out. “[T]here needs to exist a security token registration regime, … Read more

DeepSeek, Stargate, and the new AI arms race

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On today’s episode of Decoder, we’re talking about the only thing the AI industry — and pretty much the entire tech world — has been able to talk about for the last week: that is, of course, DeepSeek, and how the open-source AI model built by a Chinese startup has completely upended the conventional wisdom … Read more

Little Umbrella’s next Jackbox-style game pits you and your friends against an AI game show host 

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Web-based party games are making a comeback, now with the infusion of generative AI. Among the startups joining the trend, the current forecast looks good for one startup, Little Umbrella, which leverages AI for its social party games.  The company announced on Thursday its $2 million seed funding round. Little Umbrella plans to use the … Read more

Microsoft’s Copilot-focused Surface Pro and Laptop PCs ship with Snapdragon and Intel options

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At an event in New York City on Thursday, Microsoft unveiled two additions to the Surface line of PCs. The new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop both arrive with Copilot+ PC certification. Announced in May 2024, the program aims to identify business-focused devices that are designed specifically for the company’s AI platform, Copilot. It’s a … Read more

Three months with Apple Intelligence

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At Apple’s September 2024 hardware event, the company announced its iPhone 16 lineup, which was “built for Apple intelligence” — but Apple’s leap into AI has had a soft landing. The phones arrived without Apple Intelligence and, over the course of four months, Apple has been slowly rolling out some of the promised features through … Read more

Microsoft announces Intel-powered Surface Pro 11 and Surface Laptop 7

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The rumors are true. Microsoft is launching Intel-powered versions of its Surface Pro 11 and Surface Laptop 7. Available on February 18th, both of these new Surface devices are Copilot Plus PCs, but instead of using Qualcomm’s Arm-based Snapdragon X series of chips, they’ll use Intel’s Lunar Lake processors. Microsoft is targeting these models at … Read more

Kraken Brings Back Crypto Staking for U.S. Customers

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Kraken, one of the longest-standing crypto exchanges, has reinstated blockchain staking products for many of its American customers, another sign that the previously sclerotic environment for crypto assets in the U.S. is rapidly thawing. Customers across 39 eligible states will be able to use Kraken Pro to take part in bonded staking, where tokens are … Read more

Mexican president pushes back against Google’s renaming of Gulf of Mexico

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Google Maps is planning to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order to rename several American landmarks, including the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. However, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said in a press conference on Wednesday that Mexico will send a letter to Google questioning its choice to update the body of water’s name. … Read more

This Meme Coin Saved Solana

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After Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX collapsed in 2022, the future of Solana looked bleak. But from the fraud-fuelled ashes came a meme coin that saved the network. Bonk was created and airdropped to a ton of Solana developers as a way to bring back fun vibes to the network. In many ways, it worked.

AI creations edited by humans can likely be copyrighted in US, agency says

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In the U.S., AI-generated creations — books, movies, and so forth— that have been edited by a human can likely be copyrighted, but those without any human modifications or additions cannot. That’s according to a report published by the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) on Wednesday, which outlined scenarios in which AI-generated content might be eligible … Read more