Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie in HBO Max’s ‘Heated Rivalry.’ Courtesy: Sabrina Lantos | HBO Max When the holiday season rolled around last year, Margaret Hecox knew exactly what her grandmother would love. The 23-year-old wrote in a card about “Heated Rivalry,” the breakout Canadian TV series following a clandestine love story between two male…
Alphabet has squashed concerns that artificial intelligence will destroy its Google tech empire. One of its biggest weapons in the fight: homegrown silicon chips. Google’s in-house tensor processing units (TPUs) serve as the engine to the company’s Gemini chatbot, which has bolstered its image in the past year against rivals like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. They also…
Rainstar | E+ | Getty Images For the fifth year in a row, imposter scams ranked as the most reported type of fraud in 2025, according to the Federal Trade Commission’s latest data. While 80% of the roughly 1 million who filed an imposter scam report didn’t lose money, the other 20% lost a collective…
Zhipu‘s GLM 5.2 artificial intelligence model landed last week with the kind of Silicon Valley buzz that followed DeepSeek‘s launch last year. The Chinese AI startup‘s new open source model has blown past every other open release and now sits within a percentage point of Anthropic‘s Opus 4.8 on one closely watched agentic benchmark, at…
Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk, right, speaks on a media tour of the Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas, on Sept. 23, 2025. Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images Oracle just wrapped up its worst week on Wall Street in 25 years as concerns continue to mount about the software company’s debt load and whether…
Governor Gavin Newsom attends the 94th Annual Meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors in Long Beach, California on June 4, 2026. Myraneli Fabian | Anadolu | Getty Images California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is widely viewed as a 2028 presidential contender, on Friday called for a nationwide tax on billionaires as part of…
U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks during a visit to a Mack Trucks’ assembly plant, in Macungie, Pennsylvania, U.S., June 23, 2026. Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters President Donald Trump on Friday threatened to impose a “100% TARIFF” on the goods of any country that imposes a digital services tax on U.S. companies. “This TARIFF will…
This report is from this week’s The Tech Download newsletter. Like what you see? You can subscribe here. Rollercoaster. That’s probably the most accurate word to describe SpaceX’s opening two weeks as a public company. The stock surged for several successive days following a record-breaking IPO, briefly overtaking both Amazon and Microsoft in terms of market…
Hello, this is Priyanka Salve, writing to you from Singapore. Welcome to the latest edition of “Inside India“ — your one-stop destination for stories and developments from the world’s fastest-growing large economy. India is seen as a laggard in the global AI race, but having the world’s second-largest workforce and relatively low labor costs has led…
LOS ANGELES — Electric vehicle startup Slate Auto expects to defy challenging market conditions and avoid the losses its peers have seen by profitably selling a highly customizable EV that starts at just under $25,000. Slate CEO Peter Faricy said every vehicle produced by the Michigan-based EV startup — which is backed by Amazon founder…
