Here at WIRED, we tend to stick to journalism. We talk about our work to anyone who will listen—during podcasts, on social media, over dinner with our politely listening friends—but we tend to confine our bragging to the scoops we get, the stories we write. For our new politics issue, though, we decided to do…
A prototype app called Pixeltone developed by Adobe Research and the University of Michigan showed the possibility of using voice control and touch for photo editing. The top comment on the YouTube video demonstrating the capability is this one, left by a viewer 12 years ago: “Why so much hate? It isn’t for the “real”…
A four-legged robot that keeps crawling even after all four of its legs have been hacked off with a chainsaw is the stuff of nightmares for most people. For Deepak Pathak, cofounder and CEO of the startup Skild AI, the dystopian feat of adaptation is an encouraging sign of a new, more general kind of…
Depending on how you think about it, there’s half a dozen or more approaches to the hardware. And I became excited that within the hardware approach, the neutral atom approach was high potential. So we backed [Thompson’s] company called Logiqal. What happens if you’re right? I’m a venture investor, and we believe in convexity—taking risks…
After a six-week work trip, Xiayun, an employee at a semiconductor company in Silicon Valley, had landed at her hometown in China for vacation when she saw the news about H-1B visas. On Friday afternoon, US president Donald Trump signed a proclamation saying that any H-1B visa holder’s entry into the US will be “restricted,…
The agreement sets out hiring timelines that the company must also hit to receive these tax incentives: Meta can receive the highest property tax exemption as long as it hires the equivalent of 300 “full-time” jobs by 2030, 450 by 2032, 475 by 2033 and 500 by December 31, 2034. Louisiana’s agreements ask for more…
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. The Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a chatbot earlier this year called R1, which drew a huge amount of attention. Most of it focused on the fact that a relatively small and unknown company said it had built a chatbot that rivaled the performance of…
The United States and China may have agreed on a deal to prevent the social platform TikTok from being banned in the US—if you take US president Donald Trump’s word for it. After a long-awaited call between Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping on Friday, Trump announced victory on Truth Social: “The call was a…
Google figured out early on that video would be a great addition to its search business, so in 2005 it launched Google Video. Focused on making deals with the entertainment industry for second-rate content, and overly cautious on what users could upload, it flopped. Meanwhile, a tiny startup run by a handful of employees working…
While the Trump administration was trying to make a TikTok deal happen during a meeting with China last weekend, Beijing was busy adding its own bargaining chips to the table. Actual chips, in fact—semiconductors. In the past week, China has unveiled a series of regulatory actions targeting American chipmakers. The most significant is an anti-dumping…