Technology

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT, said it has finalized a funding round that will bring in $40 billion from SoftBank Group Corp. and other investors at a $300 billion valuation, including money raised.

The AI developer’s financing round is the largest of all time, according to data compiled by research firm PitchBook. The deal values the ChatGPT maker at almost double its previous valuation of $157 billionwhen it raised money in October. Bloomberg reported on March 26 that OpenAI was close to buttoning up the $40 billion financing deal.

“Hundreds of millions people use ChatGPT each week,” Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said in a statement Monday. “This investment helps us push the frontier and make AI more useful in everyday life.”

SoftBank, which is leading the deal, will initially invest $7.5 billion in the company along with $2.5 billion from an investor syndicate, according to a person familiar with the agreement. Additional investors in the group include Microsoft Corp., Coatue Management, Altimeter Capital Management, and Thrive Capital, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing private details. There will be a second tranche of $30 billion invested by the end of 2025, including $22.5 billion from SoftBank and $7.5 billion from a syndicate, this person said.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.01-142912/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-01/roblox-partners-with-google-to-offer-in-game-advertising

Roblox Corp. is partnering with Alphabet Inc.’s Google to offer ads that encourage player engagement, marking a significant step in the video-game platform’s push to generate more revenue from advertising. 

Rewarded video ads allow users to earn in-game perks for watching up to 30-seconds of full-screen video ads, according to a statement from Roblox on Tuesday. 

Roblox shares gained 1.9% $59.40 Tuesday morning in New York. 

The gaming platform, which has 85 million daily users, has been increasing its advertising capability over the last few years, creating lucrative partnerships with the likes of Ralph Lauren Corp., Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. and other brands. Roblox doesn’t give details of how much revenue it generates from advertising. Chief Executive Officer Dave Baszucki said in a recent earnings call that “when we feel advertising is big enough, we’ll break it out.”

Following months of testing, Plex has started to roll out its redesigned mobile app to Android and iOS devices, and it will arrive to everyone within the next week. The new app comes with an updated navigation system that should make it easier to access different parts of the app and find content to watch, along with a dedicated tab for centralized media libraries.

It also has a button in the top-right corner of the screen for your Watchlist and more artwork across detail pages for shows and movies, as well as cast and crew profiles. In a post on the Plex forum, the company outlines a ton of improvements it has made to the app since the preview, including faster load times and scrolling, the addition of a sleep timer, and picture-in-picture support.

2024 was "a year of growth," according to fire-suppression company Fire Rover, but that's not an entirely good thing.

The company, which offers fire detection and suppression systems based on thermal and optical imaging, smoke analytics, and human verification, releases annual reports on waste and recycling facility fires in the US and Canada to select industry and media. In 2024, Fire Rover, based on its fire identifications, saw 2,910 incidents, a 60 percent increase from the 1,809 in 2023, and more than double the 1,409 fires confirmed in 2022.

Publicly reported fire incidents at waste and recycling facilities also hit 398, a new high since Fire Rover began compiling its report eight years ago, when that number was closer to 275.

Vibe coding is interacting with the codebase via prompts. As the implementation is hidden from the "vibe coder", all the engineering concerns will inevitably get ignored. Many of the concerns are hard to express in a prompt, and many of them are hard to verify by only inspecting the final artifact. Historically, all engineering practices have tried to shift all those concerns left – to the earlier stages of development when they’re cheap to address. Yet with vibe coding, they’re shifted very far to the right – when addressing them is expensive.

The question of whether an AI system can perform the complete engineering cycle and build and evolve software the same way a human can remains open. However, there are no signs of it being able to do so at this point, and if it one day happens, it won’t have anything to do with vibe coding – at least the way it’s defined today.

Smart TVs and streaming devices running Amazon’s Fire OS have screensaver ads, too. Even LG, which is considered a more premium brand, launched screensaver adsin September, but users can disable them.

Startup Telly is a standout example of a company trying to monetize idle TV time. Announced in 2023, Telly TVs have a secondary screen that can show ads when the TV is not in use. Telly TVs are free to purchase in exchange for providing the company with user data, including disclosing your favorite news outlets, film and TV genres, foods, and services, your gender and race, and other information before you’re able to order the TV.

Google has announced a significant change to its Android operating system development process, moving all development work to internal branches. This shift means that the public will no longer have visibility into the development of upcoming Android versions until their official release.

Historically, Android's development was conducted in a more transparent manner, with significant portions of the process accessible through public channels. This openness allowed developers, manufacturers, and enthusiasts to monitor progress, contribute feedback, and prepare for upcoming changes.

After years of companies promising that their quantum dot light-emitting diode TVs use quantum dots (QDs) to boost color, some industry watchers and consumers have recently started questioning whether QLED TVs use QDs at all. Lawsuits have been filed, accusing companies like TCL of using misleading language about whether their QLED TVs actually use QDs.

In this article, we'll break down why new conspiracy theories about QLED TVs are probably overblown. We'll also explore why misleading marketing from TV brands is responsible for customer doubt and how it all sets a bad precedent for the future of high-end displays, including OLED TVs and monitors.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.01-092612/https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-xiaomi-says-actively-cooperating-with-police-after-fatal-accident-2025-04-01/

HONG KONG, April 1 (Reuters) - China's Xiaomi (1810.HK), opens new tab said on Tuesday that it was actively cooperating with police after a fatal accident involving a SU7 electric vehicle on March 29 and that it had handed over driving and system data.

The incident marks the first major accident involving the SU7 sedan, which Xiaomi launched in March last year and since December has outsold Tesla's Model 3 on a monthly basis.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.31-011236/https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-elon-musk-satellite-cell-phone-services-ed2d2730

Apple AAPL -2.66%decrease; red down pointing triangle is clashing with Elon Musk in its push to eliminate cellphone dead spots with satellite technology.

The iPhone maker is investing heavily in satellite-based communications that keep users connected in places where traditional wireless signals aren’t available. Musk’s SpaceX, meanwhile, has launched more than 550 satellites that provide cellphone connectivity via its Starlink service.

To build capacity, the companies are competing for valuable spectrum rights—airwaves to carry their signals—which are in limited supply. Apple’s outer-space investments have drawn Musk’s ire, people familiar with the matter said. SpaceX has pushed federal regulators to stall an Apple-funded satellite expansion effort.

The conflict intensified in recent months after SpaceX and its partner, T-Mobile, sought Apple’s cooperation to offer Starlink on iPhones, some of the people said. The companies engaged in tense discussions and eventually reached an agreement that allows the SpaceX and T-Mobile satellite cellphone service, which will debut this summer, to appear seamlessly on newer iPhones. Apple retains tight control over the iPhone’s largely closed software ecosystem.

There’s a popular adage in policy circles: “The party can never fail, it can only be failed.” It is meant as a critique of the ideological gatekeepers who may, for example, blame voters for their party’s failings rather than the party itself.

That same fallacy is taking root among AI’s biggest backers. AI can never fail, it can only be failed. Failed by you and me, the smooth-brained Luddites who just don’t get it. (To be sure, even AI proponents will acknowledge available models’ shortcomings — no one would argue that the AI slop clogging Facebook is anything but, well, slop — but there is a dominant narrative within tech that AI is both inevitable and revolutionary.)

Tech columnists such as the New York Times’ Kevin Roose have suggested recently that Apple has failed AI, rather than the other way around.

After adding in-app English translations and bilingual subtitles, Xiaohongshu recently opened a Hong Kong office, and posted a role for global business development based in Hong Kong on its official LinkedIn account. The city is often the first step for Chinese companies expanding overseas. Earlier this month, it also launched a global e-commerce pilot program for mainland Chinese merchants that initially targets the U.S., Hong Kong, and Macau.

“RedNote’s pivot signals an evolution to take markets outside China seriously,” Ivy Yang, a China tech analyst and founder of consulting firm Wavelet Strategy, told Rest of World. While the company had been trying to expand overseas, the “TikTok refugee phenomenon likely made this pivot a must-have rather than simmering on the back burner.”

The unexpected surge of global users in January due to fears of a TikTok ban could provide a windfall for Xiaohongshu. But for the platform to compete with Western social media apps, it must retain these users, build cross-border e-commerce functions, and clarify its overseas business strategy, experts and business owners told Rest of World.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.28-144842/https://www.theverge.com/news/637228/madison-square-garden-james-dolan-facial-recognition-fan-ban

A concert on Monday night at New York’s Radio City Music Hall was a special occasion for Frank Miller: his parents’ wedding anniversary. He didn’t end up seeing the show — and before he could even get past security, he was informed that he was in fact banned for life from the venue and all other properties owned by Madison Square Garden (MSG).

After scanning his ticket and promptly being pulled aside by security, Miller was told by staff that he was barred from the MSG properties for an incident at the Garden in 2021. But Miller says he hasn’t been to the venue in nearly a decade.

“They hand me a piece of paper letting me know that I’ve been added to a ban list,” Miller says. “There’s a trespass notice if I ever show up on any MSG property ever again,” which includes venues like Radio City, the Beacon Theatre, the Sphere, and the Chicago Theatre.

By 2012 — one year after joining Facebook — Wynn-Williams had ample evidence of the platform's role in enabling violence and harm upon its users, and state-sanctioned digital repression, yet her memoir neither mentions these events nor the repeated warnings to her team from civil society groups in Asia before the situation escalated... In recounting events, the author glosses over her own indifference to repeated warnings from policymakers, civil society, and internal teams outside the U.S. that ultimately led to serious harm to communities.

She briefly mentions how Facebook's local staff was held at gunpoint to give access to data or remove content in various countries — something that had been happening since as early as 2012. Yet, she failed to grasp the gravity of these risks until the possibility of her facing jail time arises in South Korea — or even more starkly in March 2016, when Facebook's vice president for Latin America, Diego Dzodan, was arrested in Brazil. Her delayed reckoning underscores how Facebook's leadership remains largely detached from real-world consequences of their decisions until they become impossible to ignore.

Perhaps because everyone wants to be a hero of their own story, Wynn-Williams frames her opposition to leadership decisions as isolated; in reality, powerful resistance had long existed within what Wynn-Williams describes as Facebook's "lower-level employees."

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.28-120233/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-28/reddit-s-50-plunge-fails-to-entice-dip-buyers-as-growth-slows

The gloomy sentiment around Reddit Inc. has failed to dissipate after its shares fell 50% from a February high, with volatile technology stocks under pressure. 

The social media platform has struggled to recover since an earnings report in February showed that it is failing to keep up with larger digital advertising peers such as Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. Reddit’s outlook seemed precarious because its traffic took a hit from a change in Google’s search algorithm.

In recent weeks, the short interest in Reddit — a proxy for the volume of bets against the company — has ticked up, and forecasts for the company’s share price have fallen. One analyst opened coverage of Reddit this month with a recommendation that investors sell the shares, in part due to the company’s heavy reliance on Google.

“It’s been super overvalued,” Bob Lang, founder and chief options analyst at Explosive Options said of Reddit shares. “Their growth rate is very strong, but they still are not making any money”

An examination of a large number of ChatGPT responses found that the model consistently exhibits values aligned with the libertarian-left segment of the political spectrum. However, newer versions of ChatGPT show a noticeable shift toward the political right. The paper was published in Humanities & Social Sciences Communications.

Large language models (LLMs) are artificial intelligence systems trained to understand and generate human language. They learn from massive datasets that include books, articles, websites, and other text sources. By identifying patterns in these data, LLMs can answer questions, write essays, translate languages, and more. Although they don’t think or understand like humans, they predict the most likely words based on context.

Often, the responses generated by LLMs reflect certain political views. While LLMs do not possess personal political beliefs, their outputs can mirror patterns found in the data they were trained on. Since much of that data originates from the internet, news media, books, and social media, it can contain political biases. As a result, an LLM’s answers may lean liberal or conservative depending on the topic. This doesn’t mean the model “believes” anything—it simply predicts words based on previous patterns. Additionally, the way a question is phrased can influence how politically slanted the answer appears.