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Category: Technology

Elon Musk is grasping the levers of power by attempting to control the government’s payment systems

Elon Musk is grasping the levers of power by attempting to control the government’s payment systems

Greg Sargent writes: President Donald Trump has granted Elon Musk unprecedented power to carry out his war on the “deep state.” The justification for this is supposed to be that the government is corrupted to its core precisely because it is stocked with unelected bureaucrats who are unaccountable to the people. Musk, goes this story, will employ his fearsome tech wizardry to root them out, restoring not just efficiency to government but also the democratic accountability that “deep state” denizens…

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Musk operatives have infiltrated yet another government agency

Musk operatives have infiltrated yet another government agency

Wired reports: Elon Musk’s minions—from trusted sidekicks to random college students and former Musk company interns—have taken over the General Services Administration, a critical government agency that manages federal offices and technology. Already, the team is attempting to use White House security credentials to gain unusual access to GSA tech, deploying a suite of new AI software, and recreating the office in X’s image, according to leaked documents obtained by WIRED. Some of the same people who helped Musk take…

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Musk operatives lock government workers out of computer systems at Office of Personnel Management

Musk operatives lock government workers out of computer systems at Office of Personnel Management

Reuters reports: Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials. Since taking office 11 days ago, President Donald Trump has embarked on a massive government makeover, firing and sidelining hundreds of civil servants in his first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists. Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO and…

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Elon Musk bragged about his talent at video games — until he was exposed as a cheat

Elon Musk bragged about his talent at video games — until he was exposed as a cheat

The Washington Post reports: Elon Musk — head of six companies, father of 11 children, a friend of the president and the richest man on the planet — often brags to the world about one of his great passions: his skill at video games. He boasted to Joe Rogan that he ranked among the world’s best players of the role-playing game “Diablo IV,” a feat for which Rogan said he had “to be exceptional — period — as a human…

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The major technology companies are eating themselves alive

The major technology companies are eating themselves alive

Mihir A. Desai writes: Nvidia, the much-beloved creator of the next generation of A.I. chips whose stock was crushed on Monday, gets almost half of its revenue from its siblings in the Magnificent 7 [Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla, Meta and Alphabet]. In 2022, Google paid Apple $20 billion for the privilege of being the default search engine on Safari, according to unsealed court documents, and therefore very likely accounts for around 20 percent of Apple’s profit. Meta employs Amazon…

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What to make of China’s suddenly popular DeepSeek AI model

What to make of China’s suddenly popular DeepSeek AI model

Matteo Wong writes: One week ago, a new and formidable challenger for OpenAI’s throne emerged. A Chinese AI start-up, DeepSeek, launched a model that appeared to match the most powerful version of ChatGPT but, at least according to its creator, was a fraction of the cost to build. The program, called DeepSeek-R1, has incited plenty of concern: Ultrapowerful Chinese AI models are exactly what many leaders of American AI companies feared when they, and more recently President Donald Trump, have…

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Does the DeepSeek AI advance mark a global technology tipping point?

Does the DeepSeek AI advance mark a global technology tipping point?

Deepseek R1 is AI's Sputnik moment. — Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 (@pmarca) January 26, 2025 The New York Times reports: Advances in artificial intelligence by Chinese upstarts rattled U.S. markets on Monday, with the threat of greater competition prompting a slide in shares of the biggest technology companies. The Chinese A.I. company DeepSeek has said it can match the abilities of cutting-edge chatbots while using a fraction of the specialized computer chips that leading A.I. companies rely on. That’s prompted investors…

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Sweden suspects ‘gross sabotage’ after damage to communications cable under Baltic Sea

Sweden suspects ‘gross sabotage’ after damage to communications cable under Baltic Sea

The New York Times reports: The Swedish authorities on Monday boarded a ship in connection with what they described as “gross sabotage” after an undersea communications cable in the Baltic Sea was damaged a day earlier. The ship was escorted to the coast of Sweden for an investigation, the authorities said. “We suspect that a serious act of sabotage was committed in the Swedish economic zone yesterday,” Mats Ljungqvist, the Swedish prosecutor leading the investigation into the damage, said in…

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Leaked documents expose deepening ties between Israeli army and Microsoft

Leaked documents expose deepening ties between Israeli army and Microsoft

Yuval Abraham reports: Microsoft has a “footprint in all major military infrastructures” in Israel, and sales of the company’s cloud and artificial intelligence services to the Israeli army have skyrocketed since the beginning of its onslaught on Gaza, according to leaked commercial records from Israel’s Defense Ministry and files from Microsoft’s Israeli subsidiary. The documents reveal that dozens of units in the Israeli army have purchased services from Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, in recent months — including units in…

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The tech broligarchs dark vision for the new Trump term

The tech broligarchs dark vision for the new Trump term

Sigal Samuel writes: There’s a dominant narrative in the media about why tech billionaires are sucking up to Donald Trump: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, all of whom have descended on the nation’s capital for the presidential inauguration, either happily support or have largely acquiesced to Trump because they think he’ll offer lower taxes and friendlier regulations. In other words, it’s just about protecting their own selfish business interests. That narrative is not exactly wrong — Trump has…

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Trump launches meme coin. Rakes in over $25 billion in value overnight

Trump launches meme coin. Rakes in over $25 billion in value overnight

Politico reports: President-elect Donald Trump late Friday launched a cryptocurrency token that exploded in value overnight, potentially increasing his net worth by tens of billions of dollars on paper just days before he is set to be sworn in as president. Trump launched the so-called memecoin — a digital token with no intrinsic real-world value that is traded on a digital ledger technology called blockchain — with posts on his social media site and X after 9 p.m., prompting the…

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How Stephen Miller has become one of the most powerful unelected people in America

How Stephen Miller has become one of the most powerful unelected people in America

The New York Times reports: When Stephen Miller met with Mark Zuckerberg at Mar-a-Lago late last year, the 39-year-old Trump adviser was in a position of power that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. Back then, Mr. Miller was a mere Senate staffer railing about the evils of immigration. Now he was holding forth on U.S. policy with the billionaire chief executive of Meta, a man he had vilified for years as a globalist bent on destroying the nation….

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A euphoric tech industry is ready to celebrate Trump and itself

A euphoric tech industry is ready to celebrate Trump and itself

The New York Times reports: A party at the Beaux-Arts mansion of the venture capitalist Peter Thiel. A blowout organized by hosts of the popular tech podcast “All-In” at a brand-new members-only club. A viewing ceremony hosted by an ascendant, Silicon Valley-inflected network of wealthy donors. Some of the most coveted parties during President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inaugural weekend will be hosted by the Silicon Valley donors who are flush with power at the dawn of his second administration. The…

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Increased AI use linked to eroding critical thinking skills

Increased AI use linked to eroding critical thinking skills

Phys.org reports: A study by Michael Gerlich at SBS Swiss Business School has found that increased reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) tools is linked to diminished critical thinking abilities. It points to cognitive offloading as a primary driver of the decline. AI’s influence is growing fast. A quick search of AI-related science stories reveals how fundamental a tool it has become. Thousands of AI-assisted, AI-supported and AI-driven analyses and decision-making tools help scientists improve their research. AI has also become…

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Tech coup: How Elon Musk has secretly recruited Silicon Valley executives to infiltrate the U.S. government

Tech coup: How Elon Musk has secretly recruited Silicon Valley executives to infiltrate the U.S. government

The New York Times reports: An unpaid group of billionaires, tech executives and some disciples of Peter Thiel, a powerful Republican donor, are preparing to take up unofficial positions in the U.S. government in the name of cost-cutting. As President-elect Donald J. Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency girds for battle against “wasteful” spending, it is preparing to dispatch individuals with ties to its co-leaders, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to agencies across the federal government. After Inauguration Day, the…

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