After hundreds of workers were laid off in early February from Jack Dorsey’s Block, some of the people remaining at the company say the internal culture has devolved to a point where performance anxiety is running rampant, using generative AI is required, and overall morale is rapidly deteriorating. Block is the parent company behind the merchant payment processor Square and the payment app Cash App. Dorsey cofounded the company in 2009 after previously cofounding Twitter.“Morale is probably the worst I’ve felt in four years,” reads an employee complaint submitted to Dorsey in a recent all-hands meeting, a transcript of which…
Today, Meta went to trial in the state of New Mexico for allegedly failing to protect minors from sexual exploitation on its apps, including Facebook and Instagram. The state claims that Meta violated New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act by implementing design features and algorithms that created dangerous conditions for users.…
Employees at Salesforce are circulating an internal letter to chief executive Marc Benioff calling on him to denounce recent actions by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, prohibit the use of Salesforce software by immigration agents, and back federal legislation that would significantly reform the agency.The letter specifically cites the “recent…
For Elon Musk, the US Justice Department’s release of 3 million additional files related to criminal investigations of Jeffrey Epstein last month was immediately embarrassing. Attention in particular fell on emails Musk sent the financier several years after he pleaded guilty to solicitation of prostitution and of procurement of minors…
OpenAI’s president and cofounder Greg Brockman doesn’t consider himself political, which is surprising, because he was one of President Trump’s biggest individual donors of 2025.Greg and his wife, Anna Brockman, gave $25 million to MAGA Inc—a super PAC that supports President Trump—in September of last year. The pair also gave…
Leah Feiger: Talking about him. Yeah. Absolutely.Brian Barrett: Yeah. It’s just this web. It fills out this web.Leah Feiger: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, these are the tech titans.Brian Barrett: Yeah. Up until as recently as 2019, I think some of these people were actively in touch.Leah…
More Than 880 employees and contractors working for Google signed a petition this week calling on the company to disclose and cancel any contracts it may have with US immigration authorities. In the letter unveiled on Friday, the workers said they are “vehemently opposed” to Google’s dealings with the Department…
Since the middle of last year, there have been at least three major AI “acqui-hires” in Silicon Valley. Meta invested more than $14 billion in Scale AI and brought on its CEO, Alexandr Wang; Google spent a cool $2.4 billion to license Windsurf’s technology and fold its cofounders and research…
Peter Thiel—the billionaire venture capitalist, PayPal, and Palantir cofounder, and outspoken commentator on all matters relating to the “Antichrist”—appears at least 2,200 times in the latest batch of files released by the Department of Justice related to convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.The tranche of records demonstrate how…
“I had very little correspondence with Epstein and declined repeated invitations to go to his island or fly on his ‘Lolita Express,’ but was well aware that some email correspondence with him could be misinterpreted and used by detractors to smear my name,” Musk said in a post on X…
Mistral AI has released a new family of AI models that it claims will clear the path to seamless conversation between people speaking different languages.On Wednesday, the Paris-based AI lab released two new speech-to-text models: Voxtral Mini Transcribe V2 and Voxtral Realtime. The former is built to transcribe audio files…
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is asking companies to provide information about “commercial Big Data and Ad Tech” products that would “directly support investigations activities,” according to a request for information posted on Friday in the Federal Register, the US government’s official journal for agency notices, rulemaking, and other public…
TikTok is currently experiencing a widespread service outage in the US, causing disruptions for millions of users only a few days after the company officially transferred control of its American business to a group of majority-US investors.The technical issues led many TikTok users to speculate about whether the app’s new…
On cue, the room fell silent. A man seated to my left at a long wooden table began to scratch at a piece of paper with a coloring pencil. To my right, another guy picked up a book. Across the way, someone buried themselves in a puzzle. We had gathered…
Dan Peguine, a tech entrepreneur and marketing consultant based in Lisbon, lets a precocious, lobster-themed AI assistant called Moltbot run much of his life.Peguine, a self-professed early adopter and trendspotter, discovered Moltbot several weeks ago—back then it was Clawdbot—after discussing a vibe-coding side project with friends on WhatsApp. He installed…
Spotlight
The past year has been traumatic for many of the volunteer tech…
The Luddites are back, wrecking technology in a Quixotic effort to stop…
But language models can only do so much, and what robots need…
Update January 20th: Samsung Plans To Avoid Galaxy S26 Price RiseUpdate 12:40pm…
