Technology

This coming week, as the network fall television season gets underway, ABC will begin airing “The Golden Bachelor,” a spinoff of “The Bachelor” that centers on an offbeat twist: The main contestant is a 72-year-old man, and the 22 women vying for his affection range in age from 60 to 75.On Sunday nights, the network will carve out three hours for “The Wonderful World of Disney,” a television tradition that dates back to the 1950s. On Tuesdays, there’s “Dancing With the Stars.” On Wednesdays, there will be special prime-time episodes of decades-old standbys like “Wheel of Fortune" and “Jeopardy!”It’s no secret that network television ratings have plummeted in recent years as viewers have fled prime-time lineups in favor of stream-at-your-leisure outlets like Netflix and Hulu.But there’s one...

Two hours after pressing the launch button on Wednesday on Threads, Instagram’s new app for real-time, public conversations, Mark Zuckerberg posted that more than two million people had downloaded his latest creation.That was just the beginning.Another two hours later, five million people had downloaded Threads. By the time Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, went to bed on Wednesday night, the number of downloads had soared to 10 million. When he woke on Thursday morning, the app had been downloaded more than 30 million times, he said. In less than a day, Threads — which is aimed as a rival to Twitter — appears to have taken the crown as the most rapidly downloaded app ever. It easily outstripped ChatGPT, the chatbot, which was downloaded one million times within its first five d...

Hank Asher was a drug smuggler with a head for numbers — until he figured out how to turn Americans’ private information into a big business.

ChatGPT, the artificial-intelligence-powered chatbot made by OpenAI, has wowed the world in recent months with the text it can generate. Now the chatbot is delighting users anew by creating charts and maps and turning images into videos.That’s because of a new feature that OpenAI rolled out to ChatGPT Plus subscribers last week, called code interpreter. Here’s what to know about it.What is code interpreter?Code interpreter allows ChatGPT to analyze data, create charts, solve math problems and edit files, among other uses. It also supports uploading and downloading files, which was not possible in ChatGPT before.Code interpreter became available Thursday to subscribers of ChatGPT Plus, a service that costs $20 a month. Similar add-on features, which give ChatGPT users access to third-party ...

In his statement to employees on Thursday Mr. Murdoch wrote, “The battle for the freedom of speech and, ultimately, the freedom of thought, has never been more intense.” While Lachlan was “absolutely committed to the cause” Mr. Murdoch wrote, he planed to remain “involved every day in the contest of ideas.”He had a message, too, for his longtime nemeses in the so-called “MSM,” or mainstream media, writing that “most of the media” was “in cahoots’’ with “elites” who have “open contempt for those who are not members of their rarefied class.”It was not all that different from the language he used when he first arrived in the United States in the early 1970s, criticizing the “intellectual showmanship” of the big name journalists who, in his view, had lost touch in all the self-celebration of t...

When we — Brian X. Chen and Mike Isaac, both longtime tech journalists — got an assignment from our editor last week to review Threads, the new social network from Meta, it was like a blast from the past.Both of us have written about social networks for over a dozen years. In the last half dozen of those years, the social media landscape has been largely static — with the exception of the rise of the short-video app TikTok — and was dominated by Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook.The arrival of Threads, which was spun out of Instagram and is aimed as a prime place for public, real-time conversations, shakes up that scene. While the new app could end up a fad, it could also be a potent threat to Twitter, which has retained its crown as a hub of conversation for more than a decade.But h...

Just before FTX collapsed in November, one of its outside lawyers at the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell emailed a colleague at another firm, insisting that the cryptocurrency exchange’s finances were stable.Rumors of FTX’s demise were “silliness,” the lawyer, Andrew Dietderich, wrote. “FTX is rock solid, doesn’t use customer funds or take credit risk at all,” he said.Four days later, FTX filed for bankruptcy. Mr. Dietderich quickly arranged for Sam Bankman-Fried, the exchange’s founder, to step down so that a new chief executive, John Jay Ray III, a specialist in corporate turnarounds, could lead the company. When Mr. Ray needed lawyers to manage the bankruptcy, a lucrative assignment, he asked a judge to appoint the same ones who had helped get him the job: Sullivan & Cromwell.Now, ...

Imagine if every time you went to the supermarket, your shopping cart came loaded with the same box of cereal.This cereal happens to be the most popular, so it’s convenient for the store to have it in the cart. If you don’t like it, it’s simple enough to put it back on the shelf and grab a different box.That’s essentially the crux of Google’s defense against the Justice Department in a consequential antitrust trial — the federal government’s first such case in the modern internet era — that is now unfolding in court.The government has accused Google of illegally using partnerships with handset makers, computer manufacturers and browser developers to stifle competitors in online search. Under those partnerships, the Justice Department argues, Google made its search engine the default servic...

This week, Bard — Google’s competitor to ChatGPT — got an upgrade.One interesting new feature, called Bard Extensions, allows the artificial intelligence chatbot to connect to a user’s Gmail, Google Docs and Google Drive accounts.(Google also gave Bard the ability to search YouTube, Google Maps and a few other Google services, and it introduced a tool that would let users fact-check Bard’s responses. But I’m going to focus on the Gmail, Docs and Drive integrations, because the ability to ask an A.I. chatbot questions about your own data is the killer feature here.)Bard Extensions is designed to address one of the most annoying problems with today’s A.I. chatbots, which is that while they’re great for writing poems or drafting business memos, they mostly exist in a vacuum. Chatbots can’t se...

Anyone seduced by A.I.-powered chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard — wow, they can write essays and recipes! — eventually runs into what are known as hallucinations, the tendency for artificial intelligence to fabricate information.The chatbots, which guess what to say based on information obtained from all over the internet, can’t help but get things wrong. And when they fail — by publishing a cake recipe with wildly inaccurate flour measurements, for instance — it can be a real buzzkill.Yet as mainstream tech tools continue to integrate A.I., it’s crucial to get a handle on how to use it to serve us. After testing dozens of A.I. products over the last two months, I concluded that most of us are using the technology in a suboptimal way, largely because the tech companies gave us poor direction...