Libertarians often take these mechanisms for granted and refuse to consider where they come from. For example, you have electricity and drinking water in your home. When you go to the bathroom and flush the water, the sewage goes into a huge sewage system. That system is created and maintained by the state. But in…
Elon Musk’s xAI is facing a potential trademark dispute over the name of its chatbot, Grok. The company’s trademark application with the US Patent and Trademark Office has been suspended after the agency argued the name could be confused with that of two other companies, AI chipmaker Groq and software provider Grokstream. Now, a third…
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI has acquired his social media platform X in an all-stock transaction that values the company at $33 billion, including $12 billion worth of debt, the centibillionaire announced Friday. The sale comes just weeks after Musk reportedly raised an additional roughly $1 billion in debt financing for X that valued…
This week on Uncanny Valley, our hosts ask what impact religion will have on Silicon Valley.
If we all start opting out of our posts being used for training models, doesn’t that reduce the influence of our unique voice and perspectives on those models? Increasingly, the models will be everyone’s primary window into the rest of the world. It seems like the people who care the least about these things will…
“This signal on the oscilloscope may seem simple at first glance, but it demonstrates a key building block for our platform, representing the birth of the world’s first scalable, mass-manufacturable, and energy-efficient probabilistic computing platform,” says Guillaume Verdon, CEO of Extropic and the man behind the wildly popular, provocative, and sometimes controversial online persona Based…
Databricks, a company that helps big businesses build custom artificial intelligence models, has developed a machine-learning trick that can boost the performance of an AI model without the need for clean labeled data. Jonathan Frankle, chief AI scientist at Databricks, spent the past year talking to customers about the key challenges they face in getting…
Genetic testing company 23andMe, once a Silicon Valley darling valued at $6 billion, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection late Sunday as it prepares for a sale of the business. CEO Anne Wojcicki, who cofounded the company in 2006, has also stepped down after months of failed attempts to take the firm private. As uncertainty…
Guillaume Verdon stands before me with a new kind of computer chip in his hand—a piece of hardware he believes is so important to the future of humanity that he’s asked me not to reveal our exact location, for fear that his headquarters could become the target of industrial espionage. This much I can tell…
Dave Cottlehuber, the founder of SkunkWerks, a small tech infrastructure firm in Austria, says he has been moving the company’s few servers and databases away from US providers to European services since the start of the year. “First and foremost, it’s about values,” Cottlehuber says. “For me, privacy is a right not a privilege.” Cottlehuber…