Parmy Olson

It’s well established that the European Union has some of the strictest privacy laws in the world, threatening fines of up to 4% of a company’s annual turnover. A lesser-known fact, and one which large tech firms would like to keep quiet, is that the EU hasn’t enforced those rules very strictly. …

It’s par for the course to make mistakes in technology. A product goes nowhere so you shut it down and move on; regulators give you slaps on the wrist; you fight the odd lawsuit. Most costs amount to pocket change because when you’re moving fast and breaking things in tech, consequences aren’t that…

Restructuring is a horrible time for the staff of any company, but it’s also an opportunity to concentrate on what reliably makes money. Elon Musk has made cuts so deep at Twitter Inc. that his team has started asking dozens of workers to return after being laid off last Friday, when about half of…

Artificial intelligence has been moving so fast that even the scientists are finding it hard to keep up. In the past year, machine learning algorithms have started to generate rudimentary movies and stunning fake photographs. They’re even writing code. In the future, we’ll probably look back on…

You have to hand it to Mark Zuckerberg. In the face of criticism about the radical strategic shift he has chosen for Facebook, he is stubbornly focused on turning it into a metaverse company. Other tech billionaires may lash out at dissent, but Zuckerberg remains stoic, tuning out the noise to give…

Mass layoffs are one of the more painful consequences of a looming economic recession, and the high-flying and well-funded tech industry isn’t immune. Microsoft Corp. on Monday provided an omen of what’s to come, when it confirmed that it had cut jobs across multiple divisions including its…

Just a few months ago, the concept of using artificial intelligence to generate unique artwork seemed cutting-edge and futuristic. Pretty soon it will be as mundane as running a Google search. Microsoft Corp. announced this week that it was making the most of its $1 billion investment in OpenAI,…

AI’s creative abilities are outstripping its driving skills. While self-driving car technology is going nowhere, there’s been a remarkable explosion in research around generative models, or artificial intelligence systems that can create images from simple text. In just the past week, AI…

Elon Musk likes to “go big or go home.” So it was no surprise after news broke that he was buying Twitter Inc. after all, that he would tease a huge ambition for the company: Musk is not simply buying Twitter to make it better. He claims a much grander plan: creating an “everything app” that…

You can’t control when a recession hits. But although tech platforms like Alphabet Inc. and Snap Inc. are slimming down to cope with the global economic rout, Meta Platforms Inc.’s own restructuring couldn’t come at a worse time for the firm. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff on Thursday to…