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California Attorney General Rob Bonta has sent a cease and desist letter to xAI, days after his office launched an official investigation into the company over reports that Grok was generating nonconsensual
If you'll recall, xAI and Grok have been under fire for taking images of real individuals and putting them in revealing clothing like bikinis upon random users' requests.
Bonta's office demands that xAI immediately cease and desist from creating "digitized sexually explicit material" when the depicted individual didn't consent to it or if the individual is a minor. It also demanded that xAI stop "facilitating or aiding and abetting the creation… or publication of digitized sexually explicit material" of nonconsenting individuals and persons under 18 years of age.
X changed its policies after the issue broke out and prevented the Grok account from being able to edit images of real people into revealing clothing. xAI also moved Grok's image-generating features behind a paywall and geoblocked paying users' ability to edit images of real people into bikinis, but only in regions where it's illegal.
In his announcement, Bonta said xAI developed a "spicy mode" for Grok to generate explicit content and used it as a marketing point. The California AG also said that Grok-generated sexual images are being used to harass both public figures and ordinary users. "Most alarmingly, news reports hav
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We now have some idea of what's at stake in the longstanding feud between Elon Musk and OpenAI. As first reported by Bloomberg, the latest filing, as part of a lawsuit that accuses the AI giant of abandoning its non-profit status, claims that Musk is owed anywhere between $79 billion and $134 billion in damages from the "wrongful gains" of OpenAI and Microsoft.
Musk claimed in the filing that he's entitled to a portion of OpenAI's recent valuation at $500 billion, after contributing $38 million in "seed funding" during the AI company's startup years. Along with providing "roughly 60 percent of the nonprofit's seed funding," Musk offered recruiting of key employees, introductions with business contacts and startup advice, according to the filing. The monetary estimate comes from C. Paul Wazzan, a financial economist who's serving as Musk's expert in the case. According to Wazzan's calculations, OpenAI earned between $65.5 billion and $109.43 billion in wrongful gains, while Microsoft saw between $13.3 billion and $25.06 billion.
The lawsuit between Elon Musk and OpenAI dates back to March 2024, when the xAI CEO first filed a legal action claiming that OpenAI violated its non-profit status. Musk later added Microsoft as
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Google has filed its appeal to the Department of Justice's antitrust case that ended with a federal judge ruling that the company was maintaining a monopoly with its search business. While the company goes through the appeals process, it's also asking that implementation of the remedies from the case, which include a requirement that Google share search data with its competitors, also be paused.
"As we have long said, the Court's August 2024 ruling ignored the reality that people use Google because they want to, not because they're forced to," Google said in a statement. "The decision failed to account for the rapid pace of innovation and intense competition we face from established players and well-funded start-ups. And it discounted compelling testimony from browser makers like Apple and Mozilla who said they choose to feature Google because it provides the highest quality search experience for their consumers."
The company says that the requirement that it "provide syndication services to rivals" and share search data is a privacy risk and could "discourage competitors from building their own products." Both remedies where compromises based on what the Justice Department originally proposed, which included forcing Google t
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 X seems to be working again after struggling with an outage that took the service offline and made it slow to load for much of the morning. According to X's developer platform page, there is an ongoing incident related to streaming endpoints that's caused increased errors. The incident started at 7:39AM PT, according to the page.
That roughly coincides with a spike in reports at Down Detector. The issues seemed to be somewhat intermittent. At some points, X's website loaded partially and only showed older posts. At other times, the app and website failed to load at all.
As of 9:30AM PT, X's Explore and trending pages were loading, but the "following" tab wasn't showing posts and instead suggested users "find some people and topic to follow" (as shown in the screenshot below).
Posts aren't loading.XAs of 11:15AM PT, X's developer site was still indicating ongoing issues, so there may still be some lingering problems even though the website seems to be functioning normally again. Reports on Down Detector have also dropped off considerably.
X didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the outage. As TechCrunch
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 Last year, the Unicode Consortium previewed some of the new emoji that are expected to be added to the iPhone with iOS 26.4 in March or April.
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As part of a new agreement, films from Sony Pictures Entertainment will stream on Netflix first, the companies announced via a joint statement. The new deal expands on the exclusive rights Netflix had to Sony films in the US, and means the service will be the first place people will be able to stream upcoming projects like the live-action adaptation of The Legend of Zelda, and a quartet of biopics about The Beatles.
Sony's films will stream worldwide on Netflix in what's called "Pay-1," the first window of availability after a movie's theatrical and VOD releases. As part of the deal, Netflix is also licensing an undisclosed number of films and television shows from the Sony Pictures back catalog to help fill out its library. Netflix says the new arrangement "will roll out gradually" as licensing rights become available throughout the year, with full availability happening sometime in 2029. Neither company shared how long this new setup will last, but did describe the deal as a "multi-year agreement."
Netflix and Sony's partnership has been fruitful so far. Films like Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Uncharted and Anyone But You have had popular second lives on the streaming service. In the
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The European Commission on Monday slammed Apple with a huge $1.95 billion fine for anti-competitive conduct in the music streaming market. In response to the decision, Apple fired back at the EU and Spotify, saying the move "just cements the dominant position of a successful European company that is the digital music market's runaway leader."
Apple will appeal.
The company also says it intends to comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) within days.
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AI will play a significant role in enterprise IT in the coming year, and the influence of generative AI will permeate other tech trends on the horizon. Smart robots, a rise in employee unionization, and growing power-availability concerns are among the top predictions for 2024 and beyond from research firm Gartner, which is hosting its annual IT Symposium/Xpo this week.
"This is the first full year with generative AI (GenAI) at the heart of every strategic decision, and every other technology-driven innovation has been pushed out of the spotlight," said Leigh McMullen, distinguished vice president analyst at Gartner. "GenAI has broken the mold and has kept building more excitement."
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