There was a time in the United States when the richest moguls, regardless of their many personal shortcomings, embraced philanthropy in a cynical effort to keep the angry mobs at bay. Andrew Carnegie famously built libraries, John D Rockefeller helped fund research that eventually eradicated hookworm, while JP Morgan donated vast collections of art and…
Dario Amodei’s Anthropic is facing yet another massive legal challenge. Sony Music and Warner, both juggernauts in the music publishing industry, filed a major lawsuit against the AI company late Friday night, accusing it of “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.” More specifically, the publishers said that…
This year’s Elevate Festival will feature a star-studded lineup of guest speakers, including Kyle Lowry, who is not only widely considered to be the greatest Toronto Raptor of all time, but is the CEO of his own tech-focused venture firm. The news: Returning to Toronto on Sept. 22, Elevate Festival announced a stacked lineup of…
When president Donald Trump, in his latest paroxysm, declared that he would be renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” Google instantly capitulated. So eager was it to realize his will that it actually renamed the lake before official government map makers did, Ars Technica noted. No one really expected a tech monopoly to take a…
The AI industry has lost an astonishing amount of goodwill with the public. Once seen as exciting new tech that could make our lives easier and better, the construction of countless new data centers to support power-hungry AI models has soured the mood considerably. Protesters are waging a war against $130 billion in data center…
Now that AI models have officially passed the Turing Test, there’s no doubt that they’re capable of imitating human traits — at least in text form — to a degree that would have flabbergasted even an expert just few years back. After all, large language models are built by digesting copious amounts of human-authored content,…
William “Sonny” Criss was the consummate working musician. Having started on the saxophone at 11 years old, Criss began his professional career filling in on gigs with bandleader Johnny Otis, before going on to play alongside jazz legends like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Cole Porter, and Dizzy Gillespie. Though he might never have risen to…
Back in 2015, Firat Eren put his money into a neat little online bartering platform that grew out of a Facebook group called Bunz. In 2020, following a controversial pivot to a cryptocurrency model that led to a ‘Bunxit’ of users and top leadership, he went from a mere first investor to the brand’s sole…
Patronscan, the Calgary-based company behind a multinational network used to verify ID documents, is once again facing questions over how it collects, stores, and handles private data. The news: Earlier this month, the CBC reported that a Canadian woman was labelled a “public safety concern” by Patronscan’s platform, which uses proprietary technology to scan and…
A Canadian wildfire-detection startup is buying a US competitor’s business amid disastrous wildfires on both sides of the border. Vancouver-based SenseNet is acquiring the wildfire technology business of US company N5 Sensors, as the Canadian startup aims to grow its US presence. As part of the deal, all of N5’s wildfire division team will join…
