Science and Technology

House Republican leaders are moving this week to pass legislation that would force the Chinese owners of TikTok to sell the platform or face being barred in the United States, even after former President Donald J. Trump came out against targeting the popular social media app he once vowed to ban.Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana and the majority leader, said on Monday that the House would try to speed the bill to passage under special procedures reserved for noncontroversial legislation, which require a two-thirds majority for passage. The approach reflected the bill’s growing momentum on Capitol Hill during an…

“The really striking thing about Musk is the disjuncture between his outsized public persona, and his very, very minimal philanthropic presence,” said Benjamin Soskis, who studies philanthropy at the Urban Institute. Where other billionaires have aimed for a broad impact on society, Mr. Soskis said Mr. Musk’s foundation lacks “any direction or any real focus, outside his business ventures.”Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.A school for his childrenMr. Musk and his younger brother, Kimbal, started the Musk Foundation in 2001, a year before the sale of PayPal, the online payments company he co-founded, to eBay for $1.5…

The conclusion of an investigation into the chaotic firing of Sam Altman from OpenAI more than three months ago represented a resounding victory for the high-profile chief executive as he moves to reassert control of the artificial intelligence company he helped to create.OpenAI, in a news conference on Friday, said that Mr. Altman, who returned to OpenAI just five days after he was pushed out in November, did not do anything that justified his removal and would regain the one role at the company that still eluded him: a seat on the company’s board of directors.Mr. Altman’s ouster stunned Silicon…

Religious content has long been a mainstay on social media, where Christian influencers can garner millions of views. And much of the online reaction to Hallow’s TikTok ads has been positive. Still, Alex Jones, the chief executive of Hallow, said he was aware that some people were surprised to stumble upon the company’s ads on social media.“We do not set any sophisticated or specific targeting,” wrote Mr. Jones, who is not to be confused with the conspiracy theorist of the same name who ran the Infowars website. “Each platform has its own algorithm for determining its feed. We know that…

Cryptocurrency enthusiasts celebrated on Tuesday, as the price of Bitcoin reached a record high of more than $69,000. For believers, it was a moment of vindication after a 2022 industry downturn that sent several major companies into bankruptcy and tainted crypto’s reputation.But is crypto really back from the dead? While the numbers suggest the industry is starting to thrive again, there are major differences between this bull run and the euphoria that drove crypto prices to previous highs.Here’s what to know about the new crypto surge.Why did cryptocurrencies collapse in the past?The last time Bitcoin hit a record was November…

When Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, for breach of contract on Thursday, he turned claims by the start-up’s closest partner, Microsoft, into a weapon.He repeatedly cited a contentious but highly influential paper written by researchers and top executives at Microsoft about the power of GPT-4, the breakthrough artificial intelligence system OpenAI released last March.In the “Sparks of A.G.I.” paper, Microsoft’s research lab said that — though it didn’t understand how — GPT-4 had shown “sparks” of “artificial general intelligence,” or A.G.I., a machine that can do everything the human brain can do.It was a bold…

It would be easy to dismiss Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI as a case of sour grapes.Mr. Musk sued OpenAI this week, accusing the company of breaching the terms of its founding agreement and violating its founding principles. In his telling, OpenAI was established as a nonprofit that would build powerful A.I. systems for the good of humanity and give its research away freely to the public. But Mr. Musk argues that OpenAI broke that promise by starting a for-profit subsidiary that took on billions of dollars in investments from Microsoft.An OpenAI spokeswoman declined to comment on the suit. In…

West Texas, from the oil rigs of the Permian Basin to the wind turbines twirling above the High Plains, has long been a magnet for companies seeking fortunes in energy.Now, those arid ranch lands are offering a new moneymaking opportunity: data centers.Lancium, an energy and data center management firm setting up shop in Fort Stockton and Abilene, is one of many companies around the country betting that building data centers close to generating sites will allow them to tap into underused clean power.“It’s a land grab,” said Lancium’s president, Ali Fenn.In the past, companies built data centers close to internet…

Since Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted of fraud last year, he has hired a new lawyer known for courtroom showmanship. A group of sympathetic law professors has pushed for a reappraisal of his actions. And his parents have turned for help to former employees of FTX, the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange he founded.From a federal detention center in Brooklyn, Mr. Bankman-Fried, 31, has continued to fight his case behind the scenes, as he argues for a lenient sentence and prepares to appeal his conviction. On Tuesday, his lawyers are scheduled to file a legal memo in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan,…

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Monday in a pair of cases that could fundamentally change discourse on the internet by defining, for the first time, what rights social media companies have to limit what their users can post.The court’s decision, expected by June, will almost certainly be its most important statement on the scope of the First Amendment in the internet era, and it will have major political and economic implications. A ruling that tech platforms like Facebook, YouTube and TikTok have no editorial discretion to decide what posts to allow would expose users to a greater variety…