Alphabet Inc
Big Tech Is Proving Resilient as the Economy Cools
No boom can last forever, even for the technology industry’s most affluent companies. Investors punished the biggest tech companies earlier this year, erasing $2 trillion in market value over fears the industry would falter in the face of rising inflation and a slowing economy. But this week, as the United States reported that economic output […]
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What Sheryl Sandberg’s Exit Reveals About Women’s Progress in Tech
But many of them encountered difficulties steering aging tech companies. Of those women, only Ms. Catz, Ms. Hood and Ms. Porat remain in their roles. “The snail’s pace of progress for women leaders in Silicon Valley is worse than disappointing,” said Nicole Wong, a deputy chief technology officer for the Obama administration and a former […]
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Big Tech Is Getting Clobbered on Wall Street. It’s a Good Time for Them.
Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has a longstanding philosophy that Apple should continue to invest for the future amid a downturn. It more than doubled its staff during the Great Recession and nearly tripled its sales. Lately, it has increased bonuses to some hardware engineers by as much as $200,000, according to Bloomberg. John Chambers, […]
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Another Firing Among Google’s A.I. Brain Trust, and More Discord
Less than two years after Google dismissed two researchers who criticized the biases built into artificial intelligence systems, the company has fired a researcher who questioned a paper it published on the abilities of a specialized type of artificial intelligence used in making computer chips. The researcher, Satrajit Chatterjee, led a team of scientists in […]
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Obama Calls for More Oversight of Social Media in Speech at Stanford
PALO ALTO, Calif. — Former President Barack Obama on Thursday called for greater regulatory oversight of the country’s social media giants, saying their power to curate the information that people consume has “turbocharged” political polarization and threatened the pillars of democracy across the globe. Weighing in on the debate over how to address the spread […]
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Barack Obama Takes On a New Role: Fighting Disinformation
Republicans, for their part, accuse the companies of suppressing free speech by censoring conservative voices — above all former President Donald J. Trump, who was barred from Facebook and Twitter after the riot on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6 last year. With so little agreement about the problem, there is even less about a solution. […]
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A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?
But as GPT-3’s fluency has dazzled many observers, the large-language-model approach has also attracted significant criticism over the last few years. Some skeptics argue that the software is capable only of blind mimicry — that it’s imitating the syntactic patterns of human language but is incapable of generating its own ideas or making complex decisions, […]
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‘La French Tech’ Arrives Under Macron, but Proves No Panacea
PARIS — In full Steve Jobs mode, President Emmanuel Macron of France donned a black turtleneck in January and took to Twitter to celebrate the creation in France of 25 “unicorn” start-ups — companies with a market value of over 1 billion euros, or almost $1.1 billion. He declared that France’s start-up economy was “changing […]
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E.U. Takes Aim at Big Tech’s Power With Landmark Digital Act
GÖTTINGEN, Germany — The European Union agreed on Thursday to one of the world’s most far-reaching laws to address the power of the biggest tech companies, potentially reshaping app stores, online advertising, e-commerce, messaging services and other everyday digital tools. The law, called the Digital Markets Act, is the most sweeping piece of digital policy […]
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