Alistair Barr

eBay Launches 'Shoppable Windows' In Stores - Business Insider

US tech giants are growing quickly, minting money, and looking to hire thousands of employees in the coming months. Here’s what you can make.

Deputy tech editor Alistair Barr shares five top stories from the past year, from Gopuff’s rapid growth to what it’s really like to work at Amazon.

Tesla and other electric-vehicle manufacturers have struggled for years to access enough batteries and battery materials.

Electric vehicle architecture is so different that there’s potential for a third revolution in automotive manufacturing, the Tesla exec said.

Silicon Valley Bank was shut down on Friday and customers cant withdraw their money for now

The US government shut another financial institution on Sunday. This time it was Signature Bank, which had 90% of its deposits uninsured by the FDIC.

Elon Musk has been heavily criticized for many of his Twitter decisions, especially a lack of moderation on the service and his recent decision to limit how many tweets users see to tackle spam. Now, two of the most-promising new Twitter rivals are experiencing similar issues. “Spam attacks have picked up so we’re going to have to get tighter on things like rate limits, which is going to mean more unintentionally limiting active people (false positives). If you get caught up those protections le…

Beep beep boop. Did a machine write that, or did I?As the generative AI race picks up, this will be one of the most important questions the technology industry must answer.ChatGPT, GPT-4, Google Bard, and other new AI services can create convincing and useful written content. Like all technology, this is being used for good and bad things. It can make writing software code faster and easier, but also churn out factual errors and lies. So, developing a way to spot what is AI text versus human tex…

When the Federal Reserve raises interest rates, that’s not actually the thing that causes borrowing costs to rise for most people.The yield on the 10-year Treasury bond is the one to watch closely. That controls the cost of money for many consumers and other important things that flow from that long-term rate.This week, the yield jumped back over 4% and even topped 4.1% for a while. That’s the highest level since late 2022.Sometimes when the Fed raises rates, investors think it has the economy u…

Nvidia is selling boatloads of GPUs. Great!Someone has to pay for these incredibly expensive chips. Not so good.Nvidia’s CEO just put a price tag on this, and it’s a shocker. Late on Wednesday, Jensen Huang predicted $1 trillion will be spent in 4 years on upgrading data centers for AI (GPUs being a big part of that). He even broke it down to the annual cost.“There’s about $1 trillion worth of data centers, call it, a quarter of a trillion dollars of capital spend each year,” he said.A lot of th…

Years before ChatGPT, Nick Vincent was studying how much AI relies on human-generated data. One thing always struck him about the researchers and tech companies behind these powerful models.“They always highlight their clever algorithms, not the underlying data,” said Vincent, an assistant professor of computing science at Simon Fraser University near Vancouver.That’s beginning to change as the question of what data is used for AI, and the value of that information, becomes a hot topic.Giant mod…

When your conference leads to one of the biggest AI startup acquisitions ever, you probably want to organize another event soonish.This is exactly what’s happening. Cerebral Valley, an AI conference run by Eric Newcomer’s eponymous publication, just announced its second gathering of 2023.CVAI2 (Cerebral Valley AI Summit version 2.0) will take place on November 15 at the SFJAZZ Center in Hayes Valley, San Francisco. The neighborhood is nicknamed Cerebral Valley these days, due to the plethora of…

Earlier this year, ChatGPT usage suddenly fell. ChatGPT was supposed to be the fastest-growing tech product in history, so this reversal got the technosphere theorizing as to why the chatbot wasn’t so hot anymore.One hypothesis stood out: Millions of students went on summer break, so they didn’t need ChatGPT to cheat — er, I mean research. The summer is over now, school is back in session, and the data confirms this theory. Similarweb tracks weekly visits to OpenAI’s ChatGPT website and traffic…

Powerful AI models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, are being bombarded by digital bots that are “extracting intelligence” in new and nefarious ways.The phenomenon was spotted recently by Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a startup that helps developers build websites that integrate with many of the biggest AI models.He discussed this new breed of bot on the No Priors podcast with venture capitalists Elad Gil and Sarah Guo.“It’s almost like, extracting intelligence,” Rauch said. “Let’s call it web scraper…

Earlier this week, the FTC filed a 172 page antitrust complaint against Amazon. The response was a giant shrug. ”*yawn*,” Bernstein Research sales specialist Mark Schlisky wrote in a note to investors the morning after. “You know how many inbounds I fielded yesterday on this particular issue? Zero.“His advice: Invest in companies that are accused of being monopolies. US antitrust law is mostly about consumer prices. Have prices for regular people gone up due to a company’s market dominance? FTC…

When you’re building a house, you can do it in various ways. You can build all the tools you need and then hike into a forest to chop down wood and turn that into your final structure. Or, you can go to Home Depot and buy wood that’s already been chopped down, along with all the nails, hammers and other equipment you need.Or, you can pay a contractor to do most of the work. Over the past 15 years, Amazon Web Services became the go-to contractor for anyone wanting to build something online. A web…

“Live experiences are the new luxury good,” Kevin Hartz said in 2013 when Eventbrite, the ticketing startup he cofounded, got a big new funding round.By that point, modern factories, supply chains, and Amazon had boiled down “stuff” to a commodity. You can now buy an overwhelming variety of tennis shoes, or spatulas, or sweatpants online. This abundance has taken much of the satisfaction away from purchasing physical things. This is why experiences, which by definition are finite, became more va…

In June, we told you about a startup mass extinction event that was just beginning.Four months later, this wave of shutdowns is rising fast, and it’s beginning to drag on the cloud sector.212 startups went bankrupt or dissolved in some other way during the third quarter, according to data from Carta, which tracks startup shutdowns closely.This doesn’t capture all the closures as not every startup is a client of Carta. But the rate of change is notable. So far this year, Carta has seen 543 startu…

By now, most major online content creators realize tech companies have been using their copyrighted work for years to train AI models without permission or payment.Some of these content owners are taking action, and even beginning to have success in stopping this activity.The New York Times discovered that Common Crawl, one of the largest AI training datasets, contained millions of URLs linking to its paywalled articles and other copyrighted content.Common Crawl was built by scraping most of the…