Industry News

ChatGPT has Google spooked. On Friday, The New York Times reported that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin held several emergency meetings with company executives about OpenAI's new chatbot, which Google feels could threaten its $149 billion search business.

Created by OpenAI and launched in late November 2022, the large language model (LLM) known as ChatGPT stunned the world with its conversational ability to answer questions, generate text in many styles, aid with programming, and more.

One of the interesting side effects of Apple's move toward using its own silicon in the Mac is that the Mac update cycle now looks a lot more like the iPhone's: mostly predictable, regular updates that offer modest generation-to-generation boosts to performance and maybe a few additional refinements or new features.

China's government has declared the nation's information security industry needs to grow – fast.

A document with the catchy title of "Guiding Opinions of Sixteen Departments Including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on Promoting the Development of the Data Security Industry" was issued last week, setting out an ambitious program to scale the industry at 30 percent compound annual growth rate, so it reaches ¥15 billion ($22B) of annual revenue by 2025.

Since Omicron became the world’s dominant Covid variant, it’s taken on a lot of shapes. First there was BA.1, then BA.5, and eventually others, including BQ.1 and BQ.1.1. Now all eyes are on another scrambled string of letters and numbers—XBB.1.5, also known as the Kraken, which has swept the northeastern US in recent weeks.

Although China has largely abandoned COVID-19 case reporting, evidence of its massive wave of infection readily shows up in airports outside its borders. On a December 26 flight from the southeastern city of Wenzhou to Milan, Italy, 42 percent of the 149 passengers on board tested positive for COVID-19 upon arrival, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Eurosurveillance.

Since its formation in 2017, the Overwatch League—the professional esports program for Activision Blizzard’s Overwatch hero shooter—has drawn frequent comparisons to traditional sporting institutions. Its stated aim, as WIRED put it in a 2017 feature, was to become the new US National Football League.

When ChatGPT—the ingenious, garrulous, and occasionally unhinged chatbot from OpenAI—was asked this week how much the company behind it is worth, its responses included: “It is likely that its worth is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more.”

Who calls the shots on how many days you end up working in the office? It has gradually dawned on bosses that it isn’t them. The real power holders? The elusive “top talent” that every firm is trying to attract. 

Amid a winter wave of COVID-19 in the US, the latest coronavirus omicron subvariant, XBB.1.5, has grabbed headlines due to its swift rise, raising fears of another towering spike in the disease. But the spotlight is revealing more questions than answers in the early days of the subvariant, which has ominously been described as one of the most immune-evasive omicron subvariants to date.

The Bahamas, best known for its sun, sand, and crystal waters, is also a paradise for crypto companies. Or at least it was, until crypto exchange FTX made the island of New Providence the setting for a historic crypto collapse in early November.