Artificial Intelligence

  Toyota said Wednesday it will triple its planned investment for its first U.S. battery factory due to rising consumer demand for electric vehicles. The automaker now plans to spend $3.8 billion, up from the initial $1.3 billion announced, to build a plant near Greensboro, North Carolina. Toyota Battery Manufacturing North Carolina is expected to begin producing batteries for hybrid and battery-electric vehicles in 2025. The additional funding brings Toyota’s global investment to $5.6 billion as it aims to go carbon-neutral by 2035. Automakers have staged a land grab across the country this month, announcing multibillion-dollar battery projects slated to begin bearing fruit by the middle of the decade. The cadence of declarations has accelerated since Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides incentives and tax credits for EV manufacturers. On Monday, Honda announced a $4.4 billion joint venture with LG Energy Solutions to make batteries for i...

  Snap CEO Evan Spiegel announced this morning that the company behind Snapchat will reduce its staff by 20% as part of larger restructuring. Snap has struggled financially for months. In May, Spiegel wrote in an internal memo that the company would  miss its revenue goals  for the second quarter of the year. Sure enough, even though revenue for the quarter was $1.11 billion, up 13% year over year, the company  badly missed  its previous guidance of 20% to 25% growth. “Our forward-looking revenue visibility remains limited, and our current year-over-year QTD revenue growth of 8% is well below what we were expecting earlier this year,” Spiegel wrote in a  company memo , which was also posted on Snap’s website. “For planning purposes we have modeled a range of outcomes, some of which assume that low revenue growth continues into next year, and we have built our 2023 plan to generate free cash flow even in a low growth scenario.” Laid off employees in the U.S....

  Following a preview in April, Microsoft this morning   announced   the general availability of virtual machines (VMs) on Azure featuring the   Ampere   Altra, a processor based on the Arm architecture. The first Azure VMs powered by Arm chips, Microsoft says that they’re accessible in 10 Azure regions today and can be included in Kubernetes clusters managed using Azure Kubernetes Service beginning on September 1. The Azure Arm-based VMs have up to 64 virtual CPU cores, 8 GB of memory per core and 40 Gbps of networking bandwidth as well as SSD local and attachable storage. Microsoft describes them as “engineered to efficiently run scale-out, cloud-native workloads,” including open source databases, Java and .NET applications and gaming, web, app and media servers. Preview releases of Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise and Linux OS distributions including Canonical Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux, CentOS and Debian are available on the VMs day...

  The first pitching machine dates back well over 100 years. Obviously things have come a long way since that injury-inducing, gunpowder-fueled machine made its debut at Princeton University, but most modern systems are more or less the same. A ball is manually or mechanically dropped into a spinning wheel or wheels, which propel it toward the battery at high velocity. It’s gotten the job done, so why quibble, right? But there’s a lot of potential room for innovation here. Advances in AI, stat tracking, advanced metrics and robotics could fit together nicely for a proper 21st-century twist on a classic. This is my first time seeing the Trajekt Arc, but the product seems to speak for itself. It’s a pitching robot designed to learn and re-create real-world pitches from real-world pitchers. The Athletic  ran a nice spot  the other week about how the Cubs are using the system to mimic Madison Bumgarner in practice. The system adjusts to the World Series hero’s left arm releas...

  Super Troopers premiered at Sundance to a receptive, giggling crowd but if you judged it based on its Rotten Tomato score and reviews, you’d think it flopped. Writer, director, comedian, and recent founder Jay Chandrasekhar never felt right about the critiques from random strangers online. So he set about creating  Vouch Vault, an app in which friends can recommend media, restaurants, and products to each other and users can trust those reviews because they’re coming from people with similar tastes. He talks with Darrell and Jordan about using a Hollywood approach to funding a tech company and how he is thinking about changing user behavior. LO MEDIA Blogs

  Netflix is developing features that would allow members to play its mobile games with one another and competitively rank themselves on gaming leaderboards. The company, starting last month, quietly launched the ability for users to create unique “game handles” in a subset of its mobile games, including Into The Breach, followed by Bowling Ballers, Mahjong Solitaire and Heads Up!. In addition, references uncovered in the Netflix app point to expanded gaming ambitions, including the ability to invite other users to play games with you and a feature that would let you see where you rank on leaderboards, among other things. The company confirmed it’s exploring various gaming features in a statement provided to TechCrunch but couldn’t speak to which features, beyond game handles, would be publicly rolled out to users or when that would occur. “We are always looking to improve our member’s experience on the service and are exploring different features to enrich the Netflix mobile games...

  Twitter is officially deviating into the world of podcasts. The social network announced today that it's integrating podcasts into its platform as part of its newly designed Spaces tab. The revamped Spaces tab and the addition of podcasts will be visible to a group of global English speaking audience on iOS and Android starting today. The redesign introduces personalized hubs for users called “Stations” that group content together based on different topics, such as news, music, sports and more. The recommendations that you see will be based on the themes and people that you follow. Twitter users will now be able to access a personalized selection of live and recorded Spaces. The hubs will also feature the most popular podcasts from around the world. Once you come across podcasts, you can give a podcast a thumbs up or thumbs down to let Twitter know if the content is interesting to you. Once you open the Spaces Tab, you will see three sections. The top of the tab will show you Sta...

  Snap the parent company of Snapchat, has reached a $35 million settlement in a class action lawsuit in Illinois. The suit alleges that Snapchat's filters and lenses violated Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). which is a powerful state measure that has tripped up tech companies in recent years. The news was first reported by the Chicago Tribune. Snapchat users in Illinois who used the app's lenses and filters between November 17, 2015 and the present may be eligible to receive a cut of the settlement. TheChicago Tribune reports individual payouts are estimated to be between $5B and $117. Although the settlement amount still needs to go through a final approval hearing in November, users who think they may be eligible can submit a clean online. A spokesperson for Snap told LOG MEDIA in an email that the social media company denies that Lenses violate BIPA, nothing that Lenses don't collect biometric data that can be used to identify a specific person. T...

 It's the question that comes up every time there's a Mac refresh, that why don't Macbook have touchscreens. Having reviewed practically every MacBook since the beginning of the Intel Mac era to the current M2 chip versions. I've seen a lot of features added, taken away, and sometimes added back again. That goes for HDMI ports, SD card slots and even the MagSafe connector. But one occasionally requested feature that has never been part of an Apple-made computer is a touchscreen. I haven't given the idea much through lately, being more concerned with questions like: Why does theM2 13-inch MacBook Pro exist?  Recently OS changes make iPadOS a little more Mac like and MacOS a little like iPad- like, but there's still a lot of daylight between them. If anything, the pendulum is swinging more toward adding Mac features to iPads than the other way around. Windows laptops just need it more . Because most Windows laptops have an OS made by Microsoft, chips made by inte...

  Tesla CEO Elon Musk has subpoenaed his friend and Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey as part of an effort to back out of his $44 billion agreement to acquire the company Dorsey helped found, according to court documents.                     Image Credits:  Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket  /  Getty Images Dorsey stepped down as Twitter CEO last November and handed the role over to current Twitter CEO Parag Agarwal. Dorsey has displayed his support for Elon Musk in the past, and previously tweeted that he believes the Tesla CEO is the "singular solution" he trusts to operate the company he co-founded. Last week, Musk's legal team subpoenaed Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter's former head of company product, and Bruce Falck, who was Twitter's former revenue and product lead. the two were ousted in May by Agrawal amid buyout turmoil. Twitter's bid to get Elon Musk to follow through with his multibillion-dollar bid to acquire...