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Google revives its open-source game with Gemma models
Google announced today a set of new large language models, collectively called “Gemma,” and a return to the practice of releasing new research into the open-source ecosystem. The new models w
Reddit is seemingly leaning further into its community of users as it closes in on its public offering. The Wall Street Journal reports that the social media site plans to reserve an undetermined number of its IPO shares for its most active users when it IPOs next month. While the number is not yet set, the Journal said it is “a big chunk” of the offering.
Some 75,000 power-users of the site will reportedly be able to buy shares at the IPO price, a privilege thatȁ
Ask Google’s generative AI tool Gemini to create images of American revolutionary war soldiers and it might present you with a Black woman, an Asian man and a Native American woman wearing George Washington’s bluecoats.
That diversity has gotten some people, including Frank J. Fleming, a former computer engineer and writer for the Babylon Bee, really mad. Fleming has tweeted a series of his increasingly frustrated interactions with Google as he tries to get it to portr
If your mental picture of Montana includes snow-capped mountain peaks, a small town with a river running through it, or vast stretches of ranch land, you’ll find them all in Dillon, a small ranching community about 115 miles southwest of Bozeman. What may surprise here is a sprawling Patagonia store, one of only six outlets for the clothing company. The location is perhaps more fitting than meets the eye: Yvon Chouinard started Patagonia by making pitons for rock climbing from an old h
Since the day the iPhone first went on sale, it’s come with Apple’s apps for checking the weather and monitoring stock prices. Now the company is finally getting around to offering an app that delivers timely information of a different sort with at least as much mass appeal: sports scores.
Named (probably inevitably) Apple Sports, the app is available in the App Store starting today. It features schedules of upcoming games, real-time play-by-play details on ones in progre
History might be made this week.
On Thursday, the space-exploration company Intuitive Machines is planning to land a robotic spacecraft on the moon. If it’s successful, this will be America’s first soft landing on the lunar surface since the end of the Apollo program. Here’s everything you need to know about landing:
What’s happening and how can I watch it?
The Nova-C lander, called Odysseus (“Odie” for short), is sched
Ask ChatGPT to answer a question and you’re likely not expecting it to reply “— and it is” over and over. Nor are you likely to have much patience if it starts apologizing for replying in gibberish, saying “the cogs en la tecla might get a bit whimsical.” Yet both instances have occurred in the last 24 hours, leaving users of the chatbot befuddled and asking what the hell is going on.
On X and Reddit, users are scratching their heads as the
Stocks are opening lower on Wall Street as weakness in technology companies continues to drag on the market. The S&P 500 was off 0.3% in the early going Wednesday. The tech-heavy Nasdaq gave up 0.5% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 153 points, or 0.4%. Palo Alto Networks was a big loser. The network security company lost a quarter of its value after giving forecasts for future billings that came in well below what analysts were looking for. Amazon rose following an announcement th
Greetings from Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech update from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or you’re reading it on FastCompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Wednesday morning. Write to me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com.
In case you haven’t seen them yet, four Fast Company tech stories worth your time:
Within the next few decades, perhaps sooner, quantum computers will revolutionize the computing landscape by being able to carry out tasks thousands or even millions of times faster than today’s most powerful supercomputers. When that happens, a quantum computer of the future will easily be able to crack today’s end-to-end encryption technologies, leaving our messages in secure messaging apps like Apple’s iMessage, WhatsApp, and Signal vulnerable to malevolent nation stat