Tech

Executives at Ford are considering killing its flagship electric pickup truck, the F-150 Lightning, according to The Wall Street Journal. The discussions are happening in the wake of Ford’s late October decision to idle F-150 Lightning production while it prioritizes hybrid and gas-engine versions of the popular pickup. The company’s been dealing with production troubles after a fire broke out …

Sora’s Android launch is off to an auspicious start. On its first day on the Google Play Store, the AI video app from ChatGPT maker OpenAI saw an estimated 470,000 downloads across the markets where it was available, according to new estimates from app intelligence provider Appfigures. That makes the Android launch more than 4x the size of the iOS …

SpaceX is buying another $2.6 billion worth of wireless spectrum licenses from EchoStar, an expansion of a $17 billion deal announced in September, as its satellite internet business Starlink continues to win new customers around the world. The spectrum sale comes just a day after SpaceX revealed it has passed 8 million global customers. On Thursday, the company added more …

Meta announced on Thursday that Vibes, its short-form video feed of AI-generated videos, is launching in Europe in the Meta AI app. Think TikTok or Instagram Reels, but every single video you come across is AI-generated. The rollout comes six weeks after Meta introduced the feed in the U.S. A few days after Meta’s launch, OpenAI released Sora, a social …

California-based startup Subtle Computing is tackling the problem of capturing people’s voices in noisy environments with its own voice isolation models — a technology that could benefit voice-based AI products and services. Consumer apps using voice AI are today seeing tremendous growth. AI Meeting notetakers like Granola, Fireflies, Fathom, and Read AI have received both user and investor attention. Existing …

Francesco Nicodemo, a consultant who works with left-wing politicians in Italy, has gone public as the latest person targeted with Paragon spyware in the country.  On Thursday, Nicodemo said in a Facebook post that for 10 months, he preferred not to publicize his case because he “did not want to be used for political propaganda,” but now “the time has …

Decentralized open source social network Mastodon is rolling out its latest release, version 4.5, which brings support for Quote Posts to all server operators, along with other features for admins, conversation improvements, and more. The addition of quote posts is one of the bigger changes to how Mastodon’s social network operates, as the social network attempts to compete against larger …

Peloton is recalling around 833,000 of its original Bike+ machines following reports that some seat posts broke during use, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). The CPSC reports that Peloton has received three complaints related to the issue, including two incidents in which users were injured. The affected Bike+ units were sold between January 2020 and April …

Paul Erlanger and Se Yong Park, co-founders of consumer crypto trading app Fomo, took an unusual route to raising capital that is paying off for them. Their app launched in May and they just announced a $17 million Series A round led by Benchmark — an atypical crypto bet for the top-tier VC firm — bringing total funding to $19 million.  Instead of a …

Spotify has rarely given its users much visibility into their listening habits. So far, users either had to link their account to services like Last.fm to track their music, or wait until the end of the year for Spotify to release its personalized year-in-review, Wrapped, to find out what they listened to. The streaming giant is now changing that with …