Microsoft Tops Apple to Become Most Valuable Public Company: New Price Revealed

Today's Technology News

Would Luddites find the gig economy familiar?

The term Luddite is usually used as an insult. It suggests someone who is backward-looking, averse to progress, afraid of new technology, and frankly, not that bright. But Brian Merchant claims that that is not who the Luddites were at all. They were organized, articulate in their demands, very much understood how factory owners were using machinery to supplant them, and highly targeted in their destruction of that machinery.

Their pitiable reputation is the result of a deliberate smear campaign by elites in their own time who (successfully, as it turned out) tried to discredit their coherent and justified movement. In his book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, Merchant memorializes the Luddites not as the hapless dolts with their heads in the sand that they've become synonymous with, but rather as the first labor organizers. Longing for the halcyon days of yore when we were more in touch with nature isn't Luddism, Merchant writes; that's pastoralism—totally different thing.

Source: Ars Technica

Microsoft Tops Apple to Become Most Valuable Public Company

Microsoft has overtaken Apple to become the most valuable public company. This shift reflects the increasing importance of new artificial intelligence technology to both Silicon Valley and Wall Street investors.

Source: The New York Times

At CES, everything was AI, even when it wasn't

This year at CES, AI dominated the show. From large language model-powered voice assistants in cars to the Rabbit R1, AI was the technology that everyone spoke about. However, many of these "AI" features have been around for a while, and companies are only now embracing the branding of artificial intelligence to appear ambitious and forward-thinking.

Source: The Verge

OpenAI quietly removes "military and warfare" ban from usage policy

OpenAI, the organization responsible for the development of the GPT-3 language model, has quietly removed the ban on "military and warfare" use from its usage policy. This change comes as part of a major rewrite to clarify and improve the readability of the policy.

Source: The Intercept