Parmy Olson

It has been an exasperating week for computer scientists. They’ve been falling over each other to publicly denounce claims from Google engineer Blake Lemoine, chronicled in a Washington Post report, that his employer’s language-predicting system was sentient and deserved all of the rights…

News that Alphabet Inc.’s Google sidelined an engineer who claimed its artificial intelligence system had become sentient after he’d had several months of conversations with it prompted plenty of skepticism from AI scientists. Many have said, via postings on Twitter, that senior software engineer…

Meta Platforms Inc. has become a lightning rod for legal challenges in the US, from the FTC’s antitrust case to shareholder lawsuits alleging the company misled investors. Last week, eight complaints were filed against the company across the US, including allegations that young people who…

How did Facebook become a business worth $1 trillion at one point last year? Not just by fulfilling its mission of “connecting people,” but by keeping them hooked on the site, sometimes for hours on end. Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube and Twitter Inc. have spent…

Close to 70% of American adults use Facebook. They peruse the pages of old school friends, browse cooking videos and click on titillating news headlines. Once in a while, they will also stumble across a video of a live shooting or buy a semi-automatic rifle with relative ease. The pattern of…

The saga of Elon Musk’s Twitter Inc. deal has overshadowed nearly everything else happening in the social-media business in the past two months, including signs that the industry’s biggest players are trying to imitate an increasingly powerful competitor: TikTok. Owned by Beijing-based Byte…

Mark Zuckerberg gave his social media giant Facebook a mountain to climb when he switched focus to the metaverse, an abstract concept whose future customers must open their wallets for a relatively experimental technology. His strategy till now: Heavily subsidize the cost of its Oculus Quest…

Google’s groundbreaking DeepMind unit makes a pledge on its website to “benefit humanity” through research into artificial intelligence. It may need to solve a more practical problem first: allowing staff to speak freely about alleged mistreatment in the workplace. An open letter published last…

A popular blockchain game called Axie Infinity has suffered what could well be the biggest security breach in the history of decentralized finance. Hackers forged withdrawals last week from the game’s Ronin Network, which lost approximately $615 million and said it was working with law…

Cybersecurity experts have been puzzled by the absence of a major cyberattack from Russia in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine and in retaliation for crippling sanctions. Kremlin-backed hackers have previously shut down Ukrainian electric grids and propagated malware that caused an estimated $10…