Tech

For the release of her twelfth album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” Taylor Swift sent fans on an online scavenger hunt this weekend, which began by searching for “Taylor Swift” on Google. But as fans unveiled secret videos as part of the campaign, some fretted that the clips looked like they were AI-generated — and they were not pleased. A …

Microsoft is buying 100 megawatts of solar capacity from Japanese developer Shizen Energy, the latest in a string of renewable energy deals designed to power the tech company’s growing compute needs.  The agreement, which the companies announced late last week, covers four different solar developments; one is already operating and three are under construction. The deal covers output from the …

OpenAI unveiled new API updates at its Dev Day on Monday, introducing GPT-5 Pro, its latest language model, its new video generation model Sora 2, and a smaller, cheaper voice model.   The updates were part of a series of announcements geared towards wooing developers to OpenAI’s ecosystem, including the launch of an agent-building tool and the ability to build apps in ChatGPT.  The addition of GPT-5 Pro might appeal to developers building …

Top YouTube creator MrBeast is worried about AI’s impact on creators’ livelihoods, despite having dabbled with using the technology himself. On Monday, the creator posted his concerns on social media, where he openly wondered how AI-generated videos could affect the “millions of creators currently making content for a living.” “Scary times,” he added. MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, …

Instagram announced on Monday that it’s launching an awards program, with 25 creators set to receive a gold ring next week. The company says the new awards program will recognize creators around the world who shift culture and break barriers. The judges panel for the new awards program includes Instagram head Adam Mosseri, director Spike Lee, designer Marc Jacobs, YouTuber …

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Monday announced the launch of AgentKit, a toolkit for building and deploying AI agents, at the firm’s Dev Day event.   “AgentKit is a complete set of building blocks available in the open AI platform designed to help you take agents from prototype to production. It is everything you need to build, deploy, and optimize agent workflows with way less …

OpenAI is launching a new way for developers to build applications inside of ChatGPT. Starting Monday, users in ChatGPT will be able to access interactive applications from companies like Booking.com, Expedia, Spotify, Figma, Coursera, Zillow, and Canva. OpenAI is also launching a preview of the Apps SDK, the developer-facing toolkit to build these apps. OpenAI made the announcement at its …

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Monday that ChatGPT has reached 800 million weekly active users, marking an increase of adoption among consumers, developers, enterprises, and governments.   ChatGPT’s impressive growth comes as OpenAI is on a race to secure as many AI chips and build as much AI infrastructure as possible. In August, OpenAI said it was on the cusp of reaching 700 million weekly active …

Like every Big Tech company these days, Meta has its own flagship generative AI model, called Llama. Llama is somewhat unique among major models in that it’s “open,” meaning developers can download and use it however they please (with certain limitations). That’s in contrast to models like Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, xAI’s Grok, and most of OpenAI’s ChatGPT models, which can only be accessed via APIs.  In the interest of giving developers …

Oracle has fixed a zero-day vulnerability in one of its flagship business software products that a hacking group is currently abusing to steal personal information about corporate executives.  In a brief post updated over the weekend, Oracle chief security officer Rob Duhart said the tech giant released a new patch to fix a vulnerability in its Oracle E-Business suite, and …