Education on technology

Amazon.com plans to launch its first internet satellites to space in the first half of 2024 and offer initial commercial tests shortly after, the company said Tuesday, as it prepares to vie with Elon Musk's SpaceX and others to provide broadband internet globally. Amazon's satellite internet unit, Project Kuiper , will begin mass-producing the satellites later this year, the company said. Those will be the first of over 3,000 satellites the technology giant plans to launch in low-Earth orbit in the next few years. "We'll definitely be beta testing with commercial customers in 2024," Dave Limp, senior vice president of Amazon devices, said at a conference in Washington. The 2024 deployment target would keep Amazon on track to fulfill a regulatory mandate to launch half its entire Kuiper network of 3,236 satellites by 2026. Limp, who oversees Amazon's consumer devices powerhouse, said the company plans to make "three to five" satellites a day to re

OpenAI, the creator of chatbot sensation ChatGPT, on Tuesday said it is beginning to release a powerful artificial intelligence model known as GPT-4, setting the stage for even more human-like technology to proliferate. The startup, funded by Microsoft , said in a blog post that its latest technology is "multimodal", meaning images as well as text prompts can spur it to generate content. The text-input features will first be available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers and to software developers, with a waitlist, while the image-input ability remains a preview of its research. The highly-anticipated launch signals how office workers may turn to ever-improving AI for still-more tasks, as well as how technology companies are locked in competition to win business from such advances.  Alphabet 's Google on Tuesday announced a "magic wand" for its collaboration software that can draft virtually any document, days before Microsoft is expected to showcase AI for its comp

Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company backed by Alphabet, on Tuesday released a large language model that competes directly with offerings from Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. Large language models are algorithms that are taught to generate text by feeding them human-written training text. In recent years, researchers have obtained much more human-like results with such models by drastically increasing the amount of data fed to them and the amount of computing power used to train them.  Claude, as Anthropic's model is known, is built to carry out similar tasks to ChatGPT by responding to prompts with human-like text output, whether that is in the form of editing legal contracts or writing computer code. But Anthropic, which was co-founded by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, both of whom are former OpenAI executives, has put a focus on producing AI systems that are less likely to generate offensive or dangerous content, such as instructions for compu

India plans to force smartphone makers to allow removal of pre-installed apps and mandate screening of major operating system updates under proposed new security rules, according to two people and a government document seen by Reuters. The new rules, details of which have not been previously reported, could extend launch timelines in the world's No.2 smartphone market and lead to losses in business from pre-installed apps for players including Samsung , Xiaomi , Vivo , and Apple . India's IT ministry is considering these new rules amid concerns about spying and abuse of user data, said a senior government official, one of the two people, declining to be named as the information is not yet public. "Pre-installed apps can be a weak security point and we want to ensure no foreign nations, including China, are exploiting it. It's a matter of national security," the official added. India has ramped up scrutiny of Chinese businesses since a 2020 border clash between

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday had a "fruitful meeting" with Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark during which they discussed India's strides in building next-generation digital infrastructure. In a tweet, Lundmark said it was a privilege to meet Prime Minister Modi and discuss how Nokia is contributing to India's 5G journey and next phase of digital transformation, and also how the firm intends to support India's 6G ambitions. Tagging the Nokia CEO's tweet, Modi said, "A fruitful meeting with Mr @PekkaLundmark in which we discussed aspects relating to technology and leveraging it for the welfare of society." "We also discussed India's strides in building next generation digital infrastructure," the prime minister said on Twitter. Last month, PM Modi had said that technology would help India achieve the target of becoming a developed nation by 2047, outlining digital infrastructure being created to ensure that benefits of digital revo