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Sam Altman’s brand is stronger than ever—and that’s why OpenAI will be fine

The visionary founder brand is alive and well with the dramatic return of Sam Altman as CEO of OpenAI after five days of corporate drama the likes of which the tech industry hasn’t seen since . . . the Sam Bankman-Fried trial ended three weeks ago!

On Tuesday, I wrote about how the real brand winner in this whole imbroglio was Microsoft, in how both stating that it had hired Altman to head up its internal AI research lab and continuing its partnership with OpenAI, it hedged i

It’s not Black Friday yet, but online shoppers have already spent more than last year

Black Friday’s creep from a single day event to a month-long one seems to be paying off for retailers.

A new report from Adobe Analytics finds that the holiday shopping season is off to a strong start with consumer spending already on a record pace.

In the first 20 days of the holiday season (November 1 through November 20), consumers have already spent $63.2 billion online, a 5% increase from a year ago. Seventeen of those days have seen people spending $3 billion

OpenAI’s meltdown won’t be the last corporate drama spurred by AI

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A very happy Thanksgiving Day to you. In case you haven’t seen them yet,

TikTok is America’s next major news source

A man stares into the camera and hits me with: “Hey everyone. Genocide is bad.” I scroll down to the next video where another guy proclaims that young liberals are “rooting for a radical Islamic Nazi death cult.” I keep scrolling, eager to get back to fantasy football commentary or dog-grooming videos.

Welcome to TikTok in 2023.

TikTok isn’t just a place for the light-hearted stuff, nor is it solely viral dance crazes, sea shanties, and g

The best smart TV reviews on the internet come from  Montreal

Cedric Demers has never believed in a single best TV for most people.

As the founder and president of Montreal-based RTings, Demers has spent the last decade devising a more granular type of product review, in which practically every attribute from viewing angles to gaming responsiveness gets graded on a 100-point scale. Viewers can then compare those scores for every product to find the best fit.

“There might be one for you, but overall the best, it doesn’t

These massive wind turbine blades are made out of wood

When a wind turbine reaches the end of its life after two or three decades, the giant blades attached to it usually end up in a landfill.

That’s largely because of the materials that are used. “[The blade is] a sandwich of different materials that are all tied together with glue,” says Tom Siekmann, CEO of Voodin Blades, a Germany-based startup that recently designed a wooden version that could replace typical blades. “And even though it might be possible

Why $1 per year won’t solve Twitter/X’s bot problem

For years it’s been obvious that online social services of all kinds are beset by a problem with bots. I work on a cybersecurity product that can go inline and literally watch bot traffic, and too often we’ve had to break the news to a young company that the vast majority of their traffic is bots logging into fake accounts.

Unsurprisingly, there is a lot that people don’t understand about how the bot ecosystem works. Some bots are performing valuable services li

The U.K. approved its first CRISPR gene-editing drug—and the U.S. is expected to follow

Last week, in a global milestone for medicine, U.K. regulators approved the first-ever CRISPR gene-editing drug. The treatment, from Vertex and CRISPR Therapeutics, will be licensed under the brand name Casgevy in the U.K. for patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) and beta thalassemia. The regulatory green light abroad isn’t surprising given the therapy’s established record of clinical trial success in treating these painful, and sometimes fatal, inherited blood disorders. But

Sam Altman is back as OpenAI’s CEO

After firing Sam Altman this past Friday, Open AI—the company behind ChatGPT—announced on X late Tuesday that Altman has been reinstated as CEO. The news caps a dramatic five days in which the company’s board removed Altman and replaced him with former Twitch head Emmett Shear, prompting a staff revolt. Meanwhile Altman was offered a job at Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest investor. Now, coming full circle, Altman is back at the helm of the artificial intelligence start

The blockade already inhibited Gaza’s telecom infrastructure—then the bombing started

As the war in Gaza drags on, the region’s telecommunications infrastructure has repeatedly buckled under the weight of bombings, fuel shortages, and apparent efforts by the Israeli military to cut off internet access in the region. These blackouts have, time and again, thrust the more than two million people in Gaza into a communications black hole, threatening to exacerbate the already dire humanitarian crisis. Just last week, the United Nations announced it was halting humanitarian o


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