CNN – Social Media/Technology

By Catherine Thorbecke, CNN Waymo, the self-driving car division of Google’s parent company Alphabet, said on Wednesday that it has cut approximately 8% of its staff across two rounds of layoffs this year. Some 209 jobs were eliminated in total, after cuts in late January and another more recent round, the company confirmed on Wednesday.

By Brian Fung, CNN A personal Twitter account belonging to Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee was suspended without warning or explanation, according to the senator. Tweeting from his official Senate account, Lee said he has reached out to Twitter “seeking answers.” “My personal Twitter account — @BasedMikeLee — has been suspended,” Lee tweeted. “Twitter did

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business Prepare to see ChatGPT responses in even more places. OpenAI is opening up access to its ChatGPT tool to third-party businesses, paving the way for the viral AI chatbot to be integrated into numerous apps and services. The company on Wednesday said developers can now access ChatGPT’s application programming

By Brian Fung, CNN Twitter has unveiled a new policy on violent speech that expands restrictions on some types of threats uttered on its platform, including new prohibitions on using coded language to incite violence indirectly as well as a ban on wishing harm on others and on making direct threats against physical infrastructure. “Healthy

By Clare Duffy, CNN Twitter’s timeline page appeared to experience a prolonged outage on Wednesday morning, marking the latest service disruption for the platform under new owner Elon Musk. Some Twitter users who opened up their “for you” timeline were greeted with a blank screen and a message saying, “welcome to your timeline,” encouraging them

By Rhea Mogul, CNN India imposed the highest number of internet shutdowns globally in 2022, a new report has revealed, in what critics say is yet another blow to the country’s commitment to freedom of speech and access to information. Of 187 internet shutdowns recorded worldwide, 84 took place in India, according to the report

By Catherine Thorbecke, CNN Mark Zuckerberg said Meta is creating a new “top-level product group” to “turbocharge” the company’s work on AI tools, as it attempts to keep pace with a renewed AI arms race among Big Tech companies. In a Facebook post late Monday, Zuckerberg said the elite new group will initially be formed

By Catherine Thorbecke, CNN Elon Musk has reclaimed the title of the richest person in the world, per Bloomberg’s tally. The Tesla CEO was unseated from the top spot by Bernard Arnault, CEO of French luxury brand LVMH, in December of last year, making Musk No. 2 on the list for more than two months.

By Brian Fung, CNN The Canadian government is banning TikTok from official electronic devices, making it the latest to announce restrictions on the short-form video app in light of cybersecurity concerns. The ban is set to take effect on Tuesday. Government-issued devices will be blocked from downloading TikTok, and existing installations of the app will

By Jennifer Korn Nokia redesigned its logo for the first time in decades to distance itself from its public image as a phone company. The new logo, announced on Sunday, features five different shapes coming together to spell NOKIA. The font is sleeker and the classic shade of blue associated with the brand is replaced

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business Meta is taking steps to crack down on the spread of “revenge porn” images of teenagers on Facebook and Instagram. A new tool, called Take It Down, takes aim at a practice where someone posts an explicit picture of an individual without their consent to publicly embarrass them. Revenge

By Chris Isidore, CNN Twitter’s massive job cuts continued this weekend, as the company cut about 10% of its remaining staff, according to a report in the New York Times. The latest axing of about 200 jobs takes the company’s headcount down to under 2,000 staffers, according to the Times. That’s down from the 7,500

By Nectar Gan, CNN Want to send your faraway lover a kiss? A Chinese contraption with warm, moving silicon “lips” appears to have just the answer. The device, advertised as a way to let long-distance couples share “real” physical intimacy, is causing a buzz among Chinese social media users, who have reacted with both intrigue

By Catherine Thorbecke, CNN When Susan Wojcicki was named CEO of YouTube in 2014, she was in relatively good company as a woman leader in Silicon Valley. Marissa Mayer, her former colleague at Google, was running Yahoo and posing for magazine covers. Sheryl Sandberg was the influential second-in-command at Facebook who had just published a

By Jessie Yeung and Wayne Chang, CNN Several popular Chinese apps have removed access to ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that has taken the world by storm even as major Chinese tech companies race to develop their own equivalent. ChatGPT, developed by the American research lab OpenAI, is not officially available in China, but several

By Brian Fung and Tierney Sneed, CNN After back-to-back oral arguments this week, the Supreme Court appears reluctant to hand down the kind of sweeping ruling about liability for terrorist content on social media that some feared would upend the internet. On Wednesday, the justices struggled with claims that Twitter contributed to a 2017 ISIS

By Brian Fung, CNN The Supreme Court is set to hear back-to-back oral arguments this week in two cases that could significantly reshape online speech and content moderation. The outcome of the oral arguments, scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday, could determine whether tech platforms and social media companies can be sued for recommending content to

By Jennifer Korn Microsoft on Thursday said it’s looking at ways to rein in its Bing AI chatbot after a number of users highlighted examples of concerning responses from it this week, including confrontational remarks and troubling fantasies. In a blog post, Microsoft acknowledged that some extended chat sessions with its new Bing chat tool

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business After asking Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing chatbot for help in coming up with activities for my kids while juggling work, the tool started by offering something unexpected: empathy. The chatbot said it “must be hard” to balance work and family and sympathized for my daily struggles with it. It then

By Michelle Toh, CNN ASML, the Dutch chip equipment maker, has accused a former employee in China of stealing data related to its proprietary technology, in a case that highlights its importance in the global semiconductor supply chain as tension grows between the United States and China. The breach may have violated certain export control

By Eric Cheung and Juliana Liu, CNN Shares in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company fell as much as 4% on Wednesday, after Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway disclosed that it had sold most of its holdings in the chip giant. In a Tuesday filing with the United States’ Securities and Exchange Commission, Berkshire Hathaway said it had

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business Microsoft’s public demo last week of an AI-powered revamp of Bing appears to have included several factual errors, highlighting the risk the company and its rivals face when incorporating this new technology into search engines. At the Bing demo at Microsoft headquarters, the company showed off how integrating artificial

By Catherine Thorbecke, CNN Business When Microsoft President Brad Smith announced in February 2021 that the tech giant had purchased a 90-acre plot of land in Atlanta’s westside, he laid out a bold vision: The company, he said, would invest in the community and put it “on the path toward becoming one of Microsoft’s largest

By Julia Horowitz, CNN Amazon’s Zoox driverless transportation company has started testing its robotaxi on open public roads — with employees on board, for now. The company said Monday that it conducted an initial run of its shuttle service for workers at its headquarters in Foster City, California on February 11, a key step in

By Laura He, CNN Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has sold its remaining stake in Paytm, India’s top digital payment app, as it gradually divests from its Indian investments amid friction between Beijing and New Delhi. Alibaba.com Singapore E-commerce Private Ltd sold 21.43 million shares of One 97 Communications, the parent company of Paytm, at 642.74

By Michelle Toh, CNN A proposal to ban TikTok in the United States “should be looked at,” according to US Senator Chuck Schumer. “We do know there’s Chinese ownership of the company that owns TikTok. And there are some people in the Commerce Committee that are looking into that right now,” Schumer, the Senate majority

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business Let’s be honest: For much of the past decade, tech events have been pretty boring. Executives in business casual wear trot up on stage and pretend a few tweaks to the camera and processor make this year’s phone profoundly different than last year’s phone or adding a touchscreen onto

Story by Clare Duffy, CNN Graphics by Christopher Hickey, CNN More than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers in September were no longer spending on the platform in the first weeks of January, according to data provided to CNN by digital marketing analysis firm Pathmatics by Sensor Tower, in a striking sign of how far

By Brian Fung, CNN The Securities and Exchange Commission has reached a $30 million settlement with the cryptocurrency platform Kraken that will force it to unwind a program offering investment returns to US users who committed their digital assets to the company. That practice, known as “staking,” reflected an unregistered offer and sale of securities,

By Catherine Thorbecke, CNN Yahoo said Thursday that it will cut 20% of its total workforce by the end of this year as it restructures its advertising unit, just the latest example of the layoffs spreading throughout the tech and media industries. A Yahoo spokesperson told CNN that the company’s legacy ad tech division, Yahoo

By Vanessa Yurkevich, CNN The world of Harry Potter is getting new life. Hogwarts Legacy — the new open-world video game by Avalanche and Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent company, will be released Friday, to much anticipation. The single-player game has been five years in the making — experts put its budget at $150 million.

By Michelle Toh, CNN Alibaba says it will launch its own ChatGPT-style tool, becoming the latest tech giant to jump on the chatbot bandwagon. The Chinese behemoth said it was testing an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot internally. It did not share details of when it would launch or what the application would be called. “Frontier innovations

By Michelle Toh, CNN Shares in Baidu soared on Tuesday, after the Chinese search engine giant said it would be launching its own ChatGPT-style service. Its artificial intelligence chatbot called “Wenxin Yiyan” in Chinese or “ERNIE Bot” in English will launch in March, a spokesperson told CNN on Tuesday, adding that the project is currently

By Michelle Toh, CNN Apple supplier Foxconn says its January monthly sales hit a record high as it bounced back from Covid-19 disruptions in China. In a sales update on Sunday, the Taiwanese manufacturing giant reported revenue of 660.4 billion Taiwan dollars ($22 billion) in January, 48% more than the same period a year ago