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US Charges Gautam Adani With Fraud Over Bribery Scheme
Gautam Adani and his associates were accused of paying more than $250 million in bribes to obtain lucrative solar energy contracts.
Reddit Says It Has Resolved Outage
Tens of thousands of users reported that the website and app were inaccessible starting just before 3 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday.
U.S. Plans to Propose Breakup of Google to Fix Search Monopoly
In a landmark antitrust case, the government will ask a judge to force the company to sell its popular Chrome browser, people with knowledge of the matter said.
Nvidia’s Profit Doubles as A.I. Chip Sales Soar
The company, which dominates the market for chips used to build artificial intelligence, expects another big jump in the current quarter.
Gary Wang, a Top FTX Executive, Is Given No Prison Time
Mr. Wang is the last close colleague of the FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried to be sentenced for the fraud that caused the crypto exchange to collapse in 2022.
Ford to Cut 4,000 Jobs in Europe as Electric Vehicle Sales Slow
The American automaker said the cost-cutting measure would help it compete with Chinese rivals in the face of slowing demand for electric vehicles.
How Google Spent 15 Years Concealing Its Internal Conversations
Trying to avoid antitrust suits, Google systematically told employees to destroy messages, avoid certain words and copy the lawyers as often as possible.
How to Add Extra Security Layers to Your Phone or Tablet
New features in Apple’s iOS 18 and Google’s Android 15 can lock up apps with sensitive information and even hide them from view.
Physicist Who Made Superconductor Claims Exits University of Rochester
Journals had retracted papers on superconductors that worked at room temperature and materials science that involved Ranga Dias.
Severing of Baltic Sea Cables Was ‘Sabotage,’ Germany Says
Germany’s defense minister said damage to two fiber-optic cables on the sea floor appeared deliberate, but a culprit was not known.
Robots Struggle to Match Warehouse Workers on ‘Really Hard’ Jobs
The machines can load and unload trucks, move goods and do other repetitive tasks but are stymied by some, like picking items from a pile.
The AI health coach from OpenAI and Arianna Huffington sounds like it's still out of shape
The AI health coach hyped up by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Arianna Huffington earlier this summer as Thrive AI Health may not be ready to come off the bench just yet, as first found in what seems to be a brief and inadvertently released demo by TechCrunch. The health data tracker uncovered seems like a limited version of ChatGPT centered on sharing information gathered from your health wearables and leveraged to design workout routines.
If that sounds familiar, it's because it's basically the same as a million other health apps, not to mention those services built into Apple and Android mobile devices. Personalizing (and misspelling) suggested prompts like “Can you analyze my sleep patterns?” and “What were my [sic] heart rate over the last week?” doesn't come off as much of a revolution in personal health and wellness the way Thrive's backers envisioned.
Huffington's wellness technology firm Thrive Global and the OpenAI Startup Fund set up Thrive AI Health in the summer to eventually offer personalized health coaching with expert-level guidance. Altman and Huffington boasted in a shared op-ed that the AI choice could help reduce chronic diseases by promoting healthier daily behaviors.
The personal suggestions are supposedly created from peer-reviewed scientific research as well as biometric data. Thrive AI Health hired former Google product management leader DeCarlos Love as CEO, which made sense as he had overseen Fitbit, the Pixel Watch, and Wear OS.
Coach Crunch"Thrive AI Health Coach is the product to solve the limitations of current AI and LLM-based solutions by providing personalized, proactive, and data-driven coaching across the five daily behaviors," Love said in a statement when the company launched. "This is how it will improve health outcomes, reduce healthcare costs, and significantly impact chronic diseases worldwide."
Since then, the company hasn't said much about its plans, and the website doesn't offer anything beyond a beta access signup sheet for those interested in trying out the AI coach. TechCrunch noted that the only recent mention of the company was when personal health management platform Function Health cited Thrive AI Health as part of a deal where members can share their data with the AI health coach for better advice.
Using AI to personalize health and wellness makes sense, but it may be harder to embed in a product than Altman and Huffington realized. If rumors that developers are struggling to make the next generation of AI models meet expectations are true, Thrive AI may not be as close to a full release as the founders hope.
You might also like...Samsung might finally launch a Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses rival in 2025
The Samsung XR headset project has been an open secret for some time, but a new report suggests it has finally settled on a design we’ll see in 2025. The bad news? It could be landing later in the year than we’d like and might not be as ‘XR’ as we had hoped.
The report is from Wellsen XR Research from China, and has been shared by the likes of Samsung leaker @Jukanlosreve on social media. With the highlight being the Q3 2025 release date (that’ll be July, August, or September). Samsung usually hosts one of its Unpacked events in July for its foldables, so it’s possible it’ll slip its glasses into the mix for 2025 if we’re lucky.
As for what the specs will be capable of, the leaks don’t mention a display and the teased weight doesn’t leave room for one (unless Samsung has developed some super next-gen display tech). Overall, the specs sound remarkably similar to the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses; Samsung’s glasses would apparently also be equipped with a Qualcomm AR 1 chipset, a 12MP camera sensor, and has a 155mAh battery capacity and a 50g weight – compared to Meta’s 154mAh battery and 48g weight.
The only difference this smart glasses clone can claim is it’ll reportedly rely on Google Gemini instead of Meta AI for its AI functionality. Though right now it doesn’t appear one option is significantly better than the other, so the race to the summit of our best smart glasses guide could be a tight one.
No XR, no problem? (Image credit: Meta)The lack of displays means these specs wouldn't really be XR – certainly not in the way the Meta Quest 3 is or the Meta Orion AR Glasses will be.
But it’s not necessarily the end of the world. While wired AR glasses – such as the Xreal Air 2 specs – are a delight, they aren’t faultless. They rinse the battery of the device they’re connected to, and they aren’t smart glasses you wear around casually – they’re best for when you’re sat down and want to watch a movie on a giant virtual screen.
The leaked Samsung glasses, as with the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, are something you wear all the time. And thanks to their solid AI abilities and in-built speakers I’ve been using my pair of Meta glasses a lot more recently and loving it.
While I’d love Samsung to make an XR headset still, I’m not disappointed to hear they’re working on a different kind of smart glasses. And while all rumors should be taken with a pinch of salt the success of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses (and their lack of competition) does suggest there’s room for some rivals in the space.
We’ll have to wait and see what 2025 brings, but for Samsung it looks like it could be an exciting year with yet another major launch.
You might also like- Best Samsung phones: top Galaxy handsets ranked
- Samsung Galaxy S25: latest news, rumors and everything we want to see
- Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra: latest news, rumors, and everything we’ve heard
ESPN creates new AI-powered football analyst that could be the future of watching live sport
- ESPN is testing an AI-generated avatar for SEC Nation
- FACTS will provide analysis during the popular college football show
- ESPN says "It complements our journalists and on-air talent, providing additional insights"
ESPN is trialling a new AI-generated avatar which the TV network hopes to add to its popular college football show, SEC Nation.
The AI avatar called FACTS is being trialed for "pre-game discussions, promoting education and fun around sports analytics." The project has been developed at the ESPN Edge Innovation Center to foster engagement and educate fans on sports analytics related to college football.
Baron Miller, coordinating producer for SEC Network/ESPN told Front Row, "FACTS is designed to test innovations out in the market and create an outlet for ESPN Analytics’ data to be accessible to fans in an engaging and enjoyable segment. It complements our journalists and on-air talent, providing additional insights."
He added, "FACTS is built on NVIDIA Omniverse, using its ACE microservices, and integrates with Azure OpenAI for language processing and ElevenLabs for text-to-speech." Combined with ESPN Analytics data and team statistics, FACTS is seen as a way to engage a new audience wanting to get invested in college football.
AI sports analysis on ESPNESPN hasn't showcased FACTS in action and the company has already used generative AI to create recaps of sports matches. However, the AI recaps have come under scrutiny for errors such as completely forgetting to reference USWNT legend Alex Morgan in the final game of her professional career, instead focusing on the scoreline and the goalscorers.
ESPN doesn't see AI as a way to replace its journalists, however, instead, the company thinks AI-generated recaps frees up its human writers to focus on more interesting topics. An ESPN spokesperson defended the use of AI by saying, "These automated recaps will allow ESPN staff to focus on feature, analysis and breaking news coverage. ESPN has always worked to combine human capability with emerging technologies as part of its mission to serve sports fans."
SEC Nation is an incredibly popular show every Saturday during the college football season. With a start time of 10 AM ET, it's the perfect opportunity to introduce a friendly AI-generated analyst to help educate children and adults alike on the sport. ESPN has yet to announce when we're likely to see FACTS on our TVs, but considering the quick rate of AI adoption across the world of media, we don't expect we'll have to wait long.
You might also like...Substack’s Bet on Politics Newsletters Leads to Subscriber Growth
The newsletter start-up, which once drew an overture from Elon Musk, is betting on politics content and recruiting stars. But profits remain elusive.
Trump Picks Brendan Carr to Lead F.C.C.
Mr. Carr, who currently sits on the commission and is a vocal critic of Big Tech, has said the agency should regulate the tech industry.
How Bluesky, Alternative to X and Facebook, Is Handling Growth
The fledgling social media site has been flooded with new users since the election. It hasn’t all been easy.
Election Reveals Right-Wing Shift of Social Media Platforms
If the election underscored anything about the internet, it was the ascendancy of social platforms for the right. That puts Democrats at a disadvantage.
ChatGPT Defeated Doctors at Diagnosing Illness
A small study found ChatGPT outdid human physicians when assessing medical case histories, even when those doctors were using a chatbot.
Thomas E. Kurtz, co-creator of BASIC programming language, dies at 96
At Dartmouth, long before the days of laptops and smartphones, he worked to give more students access to computers. That work helped propel generations into a new world.