In the past few days, you may have noticed something new inside Meta’s apps, including Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp: an artificially intelligent chatbot. Within those apps, you can chat with Meta AI and type in questions and requests like “What’s the weather this week in New York?” or “Write a poem about two dogs living in San Francisco.” The assistant will come up with responses immediately, such as “The corgi was short, with a butt so wide, the lab was tall, with a tongue that would glide.” You can also instruct Meta AI to produce pictures — like an illustration of a family watching fir ..read more

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — On a Monday morning last month, tech executives, engineers and sales representatives from Amazon, Google, TikTok and other companies endured a three-hour traffic jam as their cars crawled toward a mammoth conference at an event space in the desert, 50 miles outside Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The lure: billions of dollars in Saudi money as the kingdom seeks to build a tech industry to complement its oil dominance. To bypass the congestion, frustrated eventgoers drove onto the highway shoulder, kicking up plumes of desert sand as they sped past those following traffic rules. A ..read more

A high school athletic director in Maryland has been accused of using artificial intelligence to impersonate a principal on an audio recording that included racist and antisemitic comments, authorities said last month. Authorities said the case appears to be among the first of its kind in the country and called for new laws to guard against the technology. Experts also warned that artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly powerful, while the ability to detect it may lag behind without more resources. Dazhon Darien faked the voice of Pikesville High School’s principal in response to conv ..read more

By MIKE SCHNEIDER (Associated Press) The rate of businesses in the U.S. using AI is still relatively small but growing rapidly, with firms in information technology, and in locations like Colorado and the District of Columbia, leading the way, according to a new paper from U.S. Census Bureau researchers. Overall use of AI tools by firms in the production of goods and services rose from 3.7% last fall to 5.4% in February, and it is expected to rise in the U.S. to 6.6% by early fall, according to the bureau’s Business Trends and Outlook Survey released this spring. The use of AI by firms is stil ..read more

No, TikTok will not suddenly disappear from your phone. Nor will you go to jail if you continue using it after it is banned. After years of attempts to ban the Chinese-owned app, including by former President Donald Trump, a measure to outlaw the popular video-sharing app has won congressional approval and is on its way to President Biden for his signature. The measure gives Beijing-based parent company ByteDance nine months to sell the company, with a possible additional three months if a sale is in progress. If it doesn’t, TikTok will be banned. So what does this mean for you, a TikTok user ..read more

Colorado has led the nation on regulating methane emissions and now companies in the state are major contributors to a new satellite expected to be an important tool in identifying and quantifying the emissions globally. Space & Mission Systems, formerly Ball Aerospace, built the instrument that will identify and measure methane, a prime contributor to the heat-trapping emissions that are driving climate change. The company, acquired earlier this year by British-based BAE Systems, tested the instrument, integrated it with the spacecraft and is commissioning the spectrometer as it orbits Ea ..read more

With everything a smartphone can do these days, it is often easy to overlook one of the device’s most basic functions: voice calls. Communicating by telephone has become more complicated in a world of robocalls and automated voice trees, but your phone may already have the tools to make talking to people (or not) easier. Here are a few suggestions. Quickly contact businesses Need to call a business that is not in your contacts list? Just search for the company online with Apple’s Siri, the Google Assistant (or its new Gemini helper) or Samsung’s Bixby. When you see the establishment listed in ..read more

WASHINGTON — Don Beyer’s car dealerships were among the first in the U.S. to set up a website. As a representative, the Virginia Democrat leads a bipartisan group focused on promoting fusion energy. He reads books about geometry for fun. So when questions about regulating artificial intelligence emerged, the 73-year-old Beyer took what for him seemed like an obvious step, enrolling at George Mason University to get a master’s degree in machine learning. In an era when lawmakers and Supreme Court justices sometimes concede they don’t understand emerging technology, Beyer’s journey is an outlier ..read more

On a recent afternoon, I held a bagel in front of me and said: “Look and tell me if this is healthy.” A monotone voice responded that the bagel was unhealthy because it was high in carbohydrates, which could contribute to weight gain. I wasn’t talking to a tech bro obsessed with the ketogenic diet. This was the Ai Pin, a $700 tiny computer featuring a virtual assistant pulling data from OpenAI (the research firm behind the ChatGPT chatbot), Google, Microsoft and others to answer questions and perform tasks. Shaped like a lapel pin that may be a throwback to “Star Trek,” it attaches to your clo ..read more

Ibotta, the Denver-based digital marketing and consumer rebate platform, raised $328 million for its investors and $198 million for itself in an initial public offering that outstripped expectations this week. Underwriters had expected the company could get between $76 to $84 a share, in an offering that was intended to allow earlier investors to exit with a nice return. But on Wednesday night, demand was so strong that Ibotta’s underwriters were able to price 6.6 million shares at $88 apiece, a figure that included 2.5 million for corporate uses. When those shares hit the New York Stock Excha ..read more