Science and Technology

Law firms are increasingly relying on generative artificial intelligence to produce research and draft documents.We’d like to hear from lawyers working with generative A.I., including contract lawyers who have been brought on for assignments related to A.I. If you fit this profile, please consider responding to the questions below. Your answers may help us better understand the use of A.I. in law and other professions and inform our reporting.We won’t publish your name or any part of your submission without contacting you first. If you prefer to share tips or thoughts confidentially, you can do so here. More information

Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, blindsided competitors, suppliers and his own employees this week by reversing course on his aggressive push to build electric vehicle chargers in the United States, a major priority of the Biden administration.Mr. Musk’s decision to lay off the 500-member team responsible for installing charging stations, and to sharply slow investment in new stations, baffled the industry and raised doubts about whether the number of public chargers would grow fast enough to keep pace with sales of battery-powered cars. It put the onus on other charging companies, raising questions about whether they can build…

Listen to and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YouTubeWe asked listeners to tell us about the wildest ways they have been using artificial intelligence at work. This week, we bring you their stories. Then, Hank Green, a legendary YouTuber, stops by to talk about how creators are reacting to the prospect of a ban on TikTok, and about how he’s navigating an increasingly fragmented online environment. And finally, deep fakes are coming to Main Street: We’ll tell you the story of how they caused turmoil in a Maryland high school and what, if anything, can be done…

A pair of glasses from Meta shoots a picture when you say, “Hey, Meta, take a photo.” A miniature computer that clips to your shirt, the Ai Pin, translates foreign languages into your native tongue. An artificially intelligent screen features a virtual assistant that you talk to through a microphone.Last year, OpenAI updated its ChatGPT chatbot to respond with spoken words, and recently, Google introduced Gemini, a replacement for its voice assistant on Android phones.Tech companies are betting on a renaissance for voice assistants, many years after most people decided that talking to computers was uncool.Will it work this time?…

Mustafa Suleyman grew up in subsidized housing in one of London’s roughest areas. His father, a Syrian immigrant, drove a taxi. His mother was a nurse with the National Health Service. When the prestigious Queen Elizabeth’s School accepted him at the age of 11, the family moved into a safer, leafier neighborhood a few miles north.There, he met 20-year-old Demis Hassabis, after becoming friends with his younger brother. Demis was a chess prodigy and video game designer whose parents — one a Greek Cypriot, the other a Singaporean — ran a London toy store.Today, they are two of the most…

If 2023 was the tech industry’s year of the A.I. chatbot, 2024 is turning out to be the year of A.I. plumbing. It may not sound as exciting, but tens of billions of dollars are quickly being spent on behind-the-scenes technology for the industry’s A.I. boom.Companies from Amazon to Meta are revamping their data centers to support artificial intelligence. They are investing in huge new facilities, while even places like Saudi Arabia are racing to build supercomputers to handle A.I. Nearly everyone with a foot in tech or giant piles of money, it seems, is jumping into a spending frenzy…

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.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 lucky few took advantage of a special freeway exit dedicated to…

Meta projected on Wednesday that revenue for the current quarter would be lower than what Wall Street anticipated and said it would spend billions of dollars more on its artificial intelligence efforts, even as it reported robust revenue and profits for the first three months of the year.Revenue for the company, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, was $36.5 billion in the first quarter, up 27 percent from $28.6 billion a year earlier and slightly above Wall Street estimates of $36.1 billion, according to data compiled by FactSet. Profit was $12.4 billion, more than double the $5.7 billion a…

In the dizzying race to build generative A.I. systems, the tech industry’s mantra has been bigger is better, no matter the price tag.Now tech companies are starting to embrace smaller A.I. technologies that are not as powerful but cost a lot less. And for many customers, that may be a good trade-off.On Tuesday, Microsoft introduced three smaller A.I. models that are part of a technology family the company has named Phi-3. The company said even the smallest of the three performed almost as well as GPT-3.5, the much larger system that underpinned OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot when it stunned the world…

Mr. Doctorow noted that, just as the internet has made routine tasks less burdensome, it has also made scams much easier to pull off. Picture an old-school boiler room in which fast-talking con artists place hundreds of phone calls in an effort to fleece strangers out of their savings, he said. Now fast forward to 2024, when scammers can send out millions of phishing texts and emails with the help of bots.“If you can automate parts of it,” Mr. Doctorow said, “you can cast a much wider net.”Text scams tricked Americans out of $300 million in 2022, the Federal Trade…