Business

In Sam Altman We Trust?

Lauren Goode: I’m Lauren Goode. I’m a senior writer at WIRED. Zoë Schiffer: I’m Zoe Schiffer, WIRED’s director of business and industry. Michael Calore: OK. I want to start today by going back one year into the past, November 2023, to an event that we refer to as the blip. Lauren Goode: The blip. We…

Cybertruck’s Many Recalls Make It Worse Than 91 Percent of All 2024 Vehicles

And on this metric, the Cybertruck might be wanting. “Cars with ongoing recalls well after launch suggest a much higher lifetime recall total,” says Brauer. He calculates that the Cybertruck’s six recalls to date are “worse than 91 percent” of other 2024 vehicles. All this was possibly foreshadowed in 2023 when a leaked Tesla report…

Elizabeth Warren Calls for Crackdown on Internet ‘Monopoly’ You’ve Never Heard Of

US senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and congressman Jerry Nadler of New York have called on government bodies to investigate what they allege is the “predatory pricing” of .com web addresses, the internet’s prime real estate. In a letter delivered today to the Department of Justice and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a branch…

New York Times Says OpenAI Erased Potential Lawsuit Evidence

Lawsuits are never exactly a lovefest, but the copyright fight between The New York Times and both OpenAI and Microsoft is getting especially contentious. This week, the Times alleged that OpenAI’s engineers inadvertently erased data the paper’s team spent more than 150 hours extracting as potential evidence. OpenAI was able to recover much of the…

The New Hatred of Technology

People have never been better, here in the Year of Our Simulation 2024, at hating the very forces underlying that simulation—at hating, in other words, digital technology itself. And good for them. These everywhere-active tech critics don’t just rely, for their on-trend position-taking, on vague, nostalgist, technophobic feelings anymore. Now they have research papers to…

Silk Road Creator Ross Ulbricht Is Waiting for Trump to Keep His Word—and Set Him Free

At sentencing, the judge was also permitted to take under consideration the murder-for-hire allegations, despite them never having been charged at trial. “Until the Supreme Court rules otherwise, relevant but uncharged crimes of this sort can be and are regularly considered by judges,” says Richman. Ulbricht has never fully acknowledged the harm inflicted by the…