Month: September 2024

Enlarge / The Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California. (credit: Anadolu Agency | Getty)

A few weeks back, it was reported that Apple was exploring investing in OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, the GPT model, and other popular generative AI products. Now, a new report from The Wall Street Journal claims that Apple has abandoned those plans.

The article simply says Apple "fell out of the talks to join the round." The round is expected to close in a week or so and may raise as much as $6.5 billion for the growing Silicon Valley company. Had Apple gone through with the move, it would have been a rare event—though not completely unprecedented—for Apple to invest in another company that size.

OpenAI is still expected to raise the funds it seeks from other sources. The report claims Microsoft is expected to invest around $1 billion in this round. Microsoft has already invested substantial sums in OpenAI, whose GPT models power Microsoft AI tools like Copilot and Bing chat.

Enlarge / Waves roll ashore along Lake Michigan in Whiting, Indiana. (credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. 

The aquifer from which Joliet, Illinois, sources its drinking water is likely going to run too dry to support the city by 2030—a problem more and more communities are facing as the climate changes and groundwater declines. So Joliet eyed a huge water source 30 miles to the northeast: Lake Michigan.

It’s the second-largest of the Great Lakes, which together provide drinking water to about 10 percent of the US population, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office for Coastal Management.

Enlarge / Installing the Epic Games Store on Galaxy phones is impossible with the "Auto Blocker" feature turned on. (credit: Getty Images)

Following its antitrust win against Google last year, Epic is now going after both Samsung and Google for allegedly conspiring to set up what it says is a similarly anti-competitive scheme on its Galaxy smartphones.

Epic's newly filed federal lawsuit focuses on Samsung's Auto Blocker feature, a setting designed to prevent Galaxy smartphone users from downloading "unauthorized" apps from third-party sources such as the recently launched Android version of the Epic Games Store. Introduced last year as an opt-in feature, the Auto Blocker feature is now activated by default during the initial setup of a Samsung phone following a July system update (the feature can be turned off with a simple toggle during setup or in the phone's settings afterward).

Epic's lawsuit takes a particular exception to the fact that Samsung doesn't provide any way for a company like Epic to qualify as an "authorized source" that has been judged as safe under the Auto Blocker. "While Samsung half-heartedly claims Auto Blocker is a security feature, its operation is to block all competing stores, regardless of how safe and secure they may be—and without any assessment of their safety or security or any path for other stores to achieve 'authorization,'" the suit argues.

Enlarge / Dish and DirecTV satellite dishes on the roof of an apartment building on April 15, 2013 in San Rafael, California. (credit: Getty Images | Justin Sullivan)

DirecTV today announced an agreement to buy the Dish satellite TV and Sling TV streaming business from EchoStar for a nominal fee of $1 in what the companies called a debt exchange transaction. DirecTV will take on $9.75 billion of Dish debt if the deal is completed.

In a related transaction also announced today, private equity firm TPG plans to buy AT&T's 70 percent stake in DirecTV. TPG already owns the other 30 percent of DirecTV.

The pending DirecTV/Dish deal would combine the two major satellite TV companies in the US, removing a choice for satellite users. But DirecTV claims it "will benefit US video consumers by creating a more robust competitive force in a video industry dominated by streaming services owned by large tech companies and programmers." The agreement, which follows years of on-again, off-again merger discussions between the companies, needs regulatory approval and is tentatively planned to close in Q4 2025.

Enlarge / Hurricane Helene transported moisture from both the Gulf and Atlantic into the southeastern United States. (credit: NOAA)

As of Monday morning, if one wanted to grasp the historic nature of flooding from the remnants of Hurricane Helene in western parts of North Carolina and the surrounding areas, the logical place to begin is at the National Climatic Data Center.

This federal office maintains the world's largest climate data archive and provides historical perspective to put present-day weather conditions and natural disasters into context in a warming world due to climate change.

Unfortunately, the National Climatic Data Center is based in Asheville, North Carolina. As I write this, the center's website remains offline. That's because Asheville, a city in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains, is the epicenter of catastrophic flooding from Hurricane Helene that has played out over the last week. The climate data facility is inoperable because water and electricity services in the region have entirely broken down due to flooding.

Enlarge / The Merlin vacuum engine on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket fired for six minutes to place the Crew-9 mission into low-Earth orbit. (credit: NASA/SpaceX)

SpaceX is investigating a problem with the Falcon 9 rocket's upper stage that caused it to reenter the atmosphere and fall into the sea outside of its intended disposal area after a Saturday launch with a two-man crew heading to the International Space Station.

The upper stage malfunction apparently occurred after the Falcon 9 successfully deployed SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov on SpaceX's Crew-9 mission. Hague and Gorbunov safely arrived at the space station Sunday to begin a five-month stay at the orbiting research complex.

The Falcon 9's second stage Merlin vacuum engine fired for more than six minutes to place the Crew Dragon spacecraft into orbit after liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. The engine was supposed to reignite later to steer the upper stage on a trajectory back into Earth's atmosphere for disposal over the South Pacific Ocean, ensuring the rocket doesn't remain in orbit as a piece of space junk.

Enlarge / California Governor Gavin Newsom, seen speaking to reporters after September's presidential debate. (credit: Getty Images)

California Governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed SB-1047, a controversial artificial intelligence regulation that would have required the makers of large AI models to impose safety tests and kill switches to prevent potential "critical harms."

In a statement announcing the veto on Sunday evening, Newsom suggested the bill's specific interest in model size was misplaced. "By focusing only on the most expensive and large-scale models, SB-1047 establishes a regulatory framework that could give the public a false sense of security about controlling this fast-moving technology," Newsom wrote. "Smaller, specialized models may emerge as equally or even more dangerous than the models targeted by SB-1047—at the potential expense of curtailing the very innovation that fuels advancement in favor of the public good."

Newsom mentioned specific "rapidly evolving risks" from AI models that could be regulated in a more targeted way, such as "threats to our democratic process, the spread of misinformation and deepfakes, risks to online privacy, threats to critical infrastructure, and disruptions in the workforce." California already has a number of AI laws on the books targeting some of these potential harms, and many other states have signed similar laws.