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More than half a decade in the making, Apple’s in-house modem system will debut next spring, according to people familiar with the matter. The technology is slated to be part of the iPhone SE, the company’s entry-level smartphone, which will be updated next year for the first time since 2022.

A modem is a critical piece of any mobile phone, letting the device connect to cell towers in order to make calls and link up with the internet. Apple’s first version of the component will be followed by further generations that become increasingly more advanced. The company aims to ultimately overtake Qualcomm’s technology by 2027, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the project is confidential.

On Monday, OpenAI released Sora Turbo, a new version of its text-to-video generation model, making it available to ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers through a dedicated website. The model generates videos up to 20 seconds long at resolutions reaching 1080p from a text or image prompt.

Open AI announced that Sora would be available today for ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers in the US and many parts of the world but is not yet available in Europe. As of early Monday afternoon, though, even existing Plus subscribers trying to use the tool are being presented with a message that "sign ups are temporarily unavailable" thanks to "heavy traffic."

Global Internet traffic grew 17.2% in 2024. 🔗

Google maintained its position as the most popular Internet service overall. OpenAI remained at the top of the Generative AI category. Binance remained at the top of the Cryptocurrency category. WhatsApp remained the top Messaging platform, and Facebook remained the top Social Media site. 🔗

Global traffic from Starlink grew 3.3x in 2024, in line with last year’s growth rate. After initiating service in Malawi in July 2023, Starlink traffic from that country grew 38x in 2024. As Starlink added new markets, we saw traffic grow rapidly in those locations. 🔗

Googlebot, Google’s web crawler, was responsible for the highest volume of request traffic to Cloudflare in 2024, as it retrieved content from millions of Cloudflare customer sites for search indexing. 🔗

Traffic from ByteDance’s AI crawler (Bytespider) gradually declined over the course of 2024. Anthropic’s AI crawler (ClaudeBot) first started showing signs of ongoing crawling activity in April, then declined after an initial peak in May & June. 🔗

13.0% of TLS 1.3 traffic is using post-quantum encryption. 🔗

AI retrospectives often bristle at the ignorance of other disciplines, yet its early practitioners had their own blind spots. Their inability to conceptualize topics such as boredom was not an isolated oversight: it reflects their fundamental failure to reckon with the non-teleological forms of intelligence—those that aren’t focused on problem solving or goal attainment. By reducing all intelligence to such matters, they overlooked alternative paths—ones that explore how computer technologies might amplify, augment, or transform other forms of intelligence, or how the technology itself would need to evolve to accommodate and nurture them.

In fairness, it’s unsurprising they didn’t ask these questions. The Efficiency Lobby knew exactly what it wanted: streamlined operations, increased productivity, and tighter hierarchical control. The emerging AI paradigm promised all of that and more. Meanwhile, there was no organized opposition from citizens or social movements—no Humanity Lobby, so to speak—advocating for an alternative. Had there been one, what might this path have looked like?

TikTok asked that a US law forcing a sale or ban of the app by China-based parent company ByteDance Ltd. be put on hold to give the US Supreme Court a chance to review.

A pause to the law will also give the incoming administration under President-elect Donald Trump time to determine its position, which could “moot both the impending harms and the need for Supreme Court review,” according to a filing on Monday to the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.

A pause will pose “no imminent threat to national security” or “material harm on the government,” according to the motion.

The government asked that the court quickly deny TikTok’s request.

With Reddit Answers, redditors can ask questions and receive answers using a new, AI-powered conversational interface. Once a question is asked, curated summaries of relevant conversations and details across Reddit will appear, including links to related communities and posts. Redditors can easily read relevant snippets and answers inline from real redditors, jump into the full conversations, and go deeper in their search with their own or suggested follow-up questions.

Reddit Answers is initially rolling out to a limited number of users in the U.S., with support currently in English; we plan to expand to additional languages and locations in the future. Redditors who want to learn more and be notified when the feature is available in their location can head here.

In a paper published in Nature, DeepMind researchers said they found that GenCast outperforms the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts’ ENS — apparently the world’s top operational forecasting system.

And in a blog post, the DeepMind team offered a more accessible explanation of the tech: While its previous weather model was “deterministic, and provided a single, best estimate of future weather,” GenCast “comprises an ensemble of 50 or more predictions, each representing a possible weather trajectory,” creating a “complex probability distribution of future weather scenarios.”

The thorium atom transition has a frequency roughly one million times higher than the caesium atom's. This means that, although it has been measured with a lower accuracy than the current state-of-the-art strontium clock, it promises a new generation of clocks with much more precise definitions of the second.

Measuring time to the nineteenth decimal place, as nuclear clocks could do, would allow scientists to study very fast processes. Think of two runners tied in a photo finish. If the referee's stopwatch had a few extra digits, they would be able to identify the winner.

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Intel’s disclosures include new research that enhances gate-all-around (GAA) transistor scaling and performance both with silicon and with atomically-thin 2D transistors that use beyond-silicon materials. Intel also outlined its subtractive Ruthenium technology that improves interconnect performance and scalability, ultimately enabling smaller wires between transistors, and a chip packaging breakthrough that improves chip-to-chip assembly throughput by 100x.

Intel’s Technology Research team, formerly known as the Components Research team for the last 50 years, is part of Intel Foundry. This team works on developing products intended for commercialization in the nearer term than the more far-looking initiatives at Intel Labs. The Technology Research team is known for paving the way for many of Intel’s fundamental technologies, with the latest innovations like the PowerVia backside power delivery and RibbonFET gate-all-around architecture originating in this group.

TikTok creators took to the app to express their shock and dismay on Friday after a panel of federal judges unanimously upheld a new law that could lead to the popular Chinese-owned video app being banned in the United States by mid-January.

“I’m, like, shaking — I’m so mad, I’m so anxious, because TikTok changed my life,” Katie Wolf, a 38-year-old book editor in Charleston, S.C., said in a video she posted on Friday. She finds 80 percent of her clients through the app, she said, and does not know what she would do without it.

Inside the Trump transition team’s headquarters in West Palm Beach, Fla., the billionaire Marc Andreessen, a tech investor who decades ago founded one of the first popular internet browsers, has interviewed candidates for senior roles at the State Department, the Pentagon and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Jared Birchall, the head of Mr. Musk’s family office with no experience in foreign affairs, has interviewed a few candidates for jobs at the State Department. Mr. Birchall has been involved in advising the Trump transition team on space policy and artificial intelligence, helping to put together councils for A.I. development and crypto policy.

Shaun Maguire, another Musk friend, is now advising Mr. Trump on picks for the intelligence community. Mr. Maguire, a brash Caltech Ph.D. in physics who is an investor at Sequoia Capital, has been a staple of the Trump transition over the last month, including interviewing potential candidates for senior Defense Department jobs.

Among them, reports the outlet: Jared Birchall, the head of Elon Musk’s family office, has interviewed a few candidates for jobs at the State Department; Marc Andreessen has talked with candidates for senior roles at the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Department of Health and Human Services; Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital is poring over picks for the intelligence community; Anduril co-founder Trae Stephens and Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar have both spoken to Trump transition officials about roles at the Pentagon; and entrepreneurs Mark Pincus and David Marcus have been involved in interviews with “prospective Trump personnel.”

Per the Times, even Musk’s mother, Maye, has been involved in the transition, saying to a recent interviewer that she “likes to sit in on meetings” with her son.

The launch of viral influencer Haliey Welch’s Hawk Tuah memecoin sparked outrage across social media as the newly launched token briefly pumped and then dumped rapidly following a controversial deployment involving allegations of snipers and insider wallets.

Welch has denied any insider sales or activity on behalf of her team or any affiliated entities.

The Hawk Tuak (HAWK) memecoin was launched at 10:00 pm UTC on Dec. 4 and quickly rose to a peak market cap of $490 million.

The price of the token then plummeted and was trading at a valuation of $41.7 million at the time of publication, marking a 91% downturn in less than three hours, according to DexScreener data.

Threads is testing the ability for its users to see how well their individual posts performed on the social network. Up until now, Threads’ “Insights” feature only showed you aggregated metrics for all of your posts. Now, the feature can show you metrics for each post.

If you’re in the test, you can sort posts by the highest or lowest number of views, likes, and replies that they received. Plus, you can see a breakdown of views and interactions by followers and non-followers for each post. You will also be able to see how many people followed you from a specific post.

If you’re an Android user, today is your lucky day; Google has announced a swath of new AI features for the entire ecosystem. Broadly speaking, the features make Android devices more accessible, but there’s something here for everyone.

For instance, one of the new enhancements, Expressive Captions, automatically generates subtitles that attempt to capture the emotion and intensity of what’s being said. So, let’s say you’re video chatting with a friend who groans after you make a lame dad joke. The feature will not only transcribe what they said, but it will also include “[groaning]” in the transcription. This works for other subtleties of human speech, too, such as when someone gasps or whispers something, and is compatible across Android, including streaming and social media apps. Per Google, Expressive Captions are available on Pixel 6 and newer Pixel phones, as well as “other compatible” Android devices.

Donald Trump says he is selecting venture capitalist David Sacks of Craft Ventures LLC to serve as his artificial intelligence and crypto czar, a newly created position that underscores the president-elect’s intent to boost two rapidly developing industries.

“David will guide policy for the Administration in Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency, two areas critical to the future of American competitiveness. David will focus on making America the clear global leader in both areas,” Trump said Thursday in a post on his Truth Social network.

Trump said that Sacks would also lead the Presidential Council of Advisors for Science and Technology.

Now, a new artificial intelligence tool from DeepMind, a Google company in London that develops A.I. applications, has smashed through the old barriers and achieved what its makers call unmatched skill and speed in devising 15-day weather forecasts. They report in the journal Nature on Wednesday that their new model can, among other things, outperform the world’s best forecasts meant to track deadly storms and save lives.

“It’s a big deal,” said Kerry Emanuel, a professor emeritus of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the DeepMind research. “It’s an important step forward.”