Elon Musk says its xAI company has acquired the social media platform X in an all-stock transaction. "The combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45 billion less $12 billion debt)," said Musk. He writes on X: Since its founding two years ago, xAI has rapidly become one of the leading AI labs in the world, building models and data centers at unprecedented speed and scale. X is the digital town square where more than 600M active users go to find the real-time source of ground truth and, in the last two years, has been transformed into one of the most efficient companies in the world, positioning it to deliver scalable future growth.

xAI and X's futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent. This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI's advanced AI capability and expertise with X's massive reach. The combined company will deliver smarter, more meaningful experiences to billions of people while staying true to our core mission of seeking truth and advancing knowledge. This will allow us to build a platform that doesn't just reflect the world but actively accelerates human progress.

I would like to recognize the hardcore dedication of everyone at xAI and X that has brought us to this point. This is just the beginning. Thank you for your continued partnership and support.

uninet writes: The same year Apple launched the iPhone, it unveiled a massive upgrade to Mac OS X known as Leopard, sporting "300 New Features." Two years later, it did something almost unheard of: it released Snow Leopard, an upgrade all about how little it added and how much it took away. Apple needs to make it snow again. Current releases of MacOS Sequoia and iOS/iPadOS 18 are riddled with easily reproducible bugs in high-traffic areas, the author argues, suggesting Apple's engineers aren't using their own software. Messages can't reliably copy text, email connections randomly fail, and Safari frequently jams up. Even worse are the baffling design decisions, like burying display arrangement settings and redesigning Photos with needless margins and inconsistent navigation.

Apple's focus on the Vision Pro while AI advances raced ahead has left them scrambling to catch up, the author argues, with Apple Intelligence features now indefinitely delayed. The author insists that Apple's products still remain better than Windows or Android alternatives -- but "least bad" isn't the premium experience Apple loyalists expect. With its enormous resources, Apple could easily have teams focus on cleaning up existing software while simultaneously developing AI features.

Further reading: 'Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino' .

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: Virginia is set to become the first state in the country to require some reckless drivers to put devices on their cars that make it impossible to drive too fast. D.C. passed similar legislation last year. Several other states, including Maryland, are considering joining them. It's an embrace of a technological solution to a human problem: Speeding contributes to more than 10,000 deaths a year. Under the Virginia legislation, a judge can decide to order drivers to install the speed limiters in their vehicles in lieu of taking away their driving privileges or sending them to jail. It takes effect in July 2026.

Del. Patrick A. Hope (D-Arlington) said various advocacy groups, including Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the National Safety Council, gave him the idea. He drove a car outfitted with the technology and was impressed. "It was easy to use, and once you're engaged it's impossible to go over the speed limit," he said. "It will make our streets safer." He thinks the device is preferable to suspending drivers' licenses, a punishment that people frequently ignore because they have no other way of getting to work or the store or taking their children to school. It's an approach similar to using an interlock device that requires a person convicted of drunken driving to pass a Breathalyzer test to start their car.

Hope wanted anyone convicted of reckless driving after going 100 mph or more to be required to use a limiter for two to six months, but Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) struck that part of the bill, leaving all use of the limiting technology up to the state courts. Hope expressed concern about the governor's amendment but will urge the General Assembly to accept it, as the legislature typically does when the bill's sponsor signals support. Drivers must pay for the speed limiters themselves. (As in D.C., indigent defendants are exempt from paying.) The limiters won't be used in Virginia on commercial vehicles. Attempting to evade the speed limiter by tampering with it or driving a different car is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Fashion retailer H&M is to use artificial intelligence (AI) to create digital "twins" of 30 models. It says it will use the AI doppelgangers in some social media posts and marketing in the place of humans, if given permission by models. "We are curious to explore how to showcase our fashion in new creative ways -- and embrace the benefits of new technology -- while staying true to our commitment to personal style," said its chief creative officer Jorgen Andersson in a statement.

The initiative was first reported by industry publication Business of Fashion. H&M told the outlet that models would retain rights over their digital replicas and their use by the company and other brands for purposes such as marketing. Its images are likely to be initially used in social media posts, with watermarks that make their AI use clear, it added. H&M also said models would be compensated for use of their digital twins in a similar way to current arrangements -- which sees them paid for use of their images based on rates agreed by their agent.

Google is rolling out new AI-powered features across Maps, Search, and Hotels to simplify travel planning, including a screenshot-detection tool in Maps that identifies and saves locations mentioned in image text. The Verge reports: Once the new screenshot list is enabled in Maps, the Gemini-powered feature will detect places that are mentioned in text within screenshots on the device, show users the locations on the map, and allow them to review and save locations to a sharable list. The screenshot list feature will start rolling out in English this week to iOS users in the US, with Android support "coming soon."

AI Overviews for Google Search are also being updated to expand travel planning tools, with itinerary-building features rolling out in English to mobile and desktop devices in the US this week that can create trip ideas for "distinct regions or entire countries." Users can use terms like "create a vacation itinerary for Greece that focuses on history" to explore reviews and photos from other users alongside a map of location recommendations, which can be saved to Google Maps or exported to Docs or Gmail.

MojoKid writes: Similar to Nvidia's recent desktop graphics launches, there are four initial GeForce RTX 50 series laptop GPUs coming to market, starting this month. At the top of the stack is the GeForce RTX 5090 laptop GPU, which is equipped with 10,496 CUDA cores and is paired to 24GB of memory. Boost clocks top out around 2,160MHz and GPU power can range from 95-150 watts, depending on the particular laptop model. GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs for both laptops and desktops feature updated shader cores with support for neural shading, in addition to 4th gen ray tracing cores and 5th gen Tensor cores with support for DLSS 4. The GeForce RTX 50 series features a native PCIe gen 5 interface, in addition to support for DisplayPort 2.1b (up to UHBR20). These GPUs are also fed by the latest high speed GDDR7 memory, which offers efficiency benefits that are pertinent to laptop designs as well. Performance-wise, NVIDIA's mobile GeForce RTX 5090 is the new king of the hill in gaming laptops, and it easily bests all other discrete mobile graphics options on the market currently.

Microsoft plans to roll out a new Windows scheduled task in May that launches automatically to help Microsoft Office apps load faster. From a report: The company says the "Startup Boost" task will launch in the background on logon, with the roll-out to start in mid-May and worldwide general availability to be reached by late May 2025. On systems where it's toggled on, users will see new Office Startup Boost and Office Startup Boost Logon tasks in the Windows Task Scheduler, which will ensure that Office apps can preload "performance enhancements."

"We are introducing a new Startup Boost task from the Microsoft Office installer to optimize performance and load-time of experiences within Office applications," Microsoft says on the Microsoft 365 message center. "After the system performs the task, the app remains in a paused state until the app launches and the sequence resumes, or the system removes the app from memory to reclaim resources. The system can perform this task for an app after a device reboot and periodically as system conditions allow."

The U.S. Space Force has certified United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur rocket for national security missions after successful test flights and resolution of a booster nozzle issue. This certification allows ULA to join SpaceX in conducting launches under the National Security Space Launch program, with Vulcan missions expected to begin this summer. SpaceNews reports: "Thank you to all our customer partners who have worked hand-in-hand with us throughout this comprehensive certification process. We are grateful for the collaboration and excited to reach this critical milestone in Vulcan development," said Tory Bruno, president and chief executive of United Launch Alliance in a ULA statement about the vehicle's certification.

Bruno said at the roundtable that the next launch by ULA will be of its Atlas 5, carrying a set of Project Kuiper broadband satellites for Amazon. That launch is expected as soon as next month. He said then that would be followed by the first two Vulcan national security launches, missions designated USSF-106 and USSF-87. ULA did not give a schedule for those upcoming Vulcan launches but Space Systems Command, in a summary accompanying its press release, said the first NSSL mission on Vulcan is planned for the summer. Bruno said at the roundtable that the payloads for those missions have "complex processing" requirements beyond a typical mission, and did not state how long it would take them to be ready for a launch.

Bruno said ULA is projecting a dozen launches this year, split roughly evenly between Atlas and Vulcan and between national security and commercial missions. ULA has been stockpiling components, such as BE-4 engines and solid rocket boosters, needed for those missions. "We're all staged up and ready, and as spacecraft show up, we'll be able to fly them," he said. He noted the company wants to get to a "baseline tempo" of two launches a month by the end of this year and perform 20 launches next year.

JPMorgan Chase used a quantum computer from Honeywell's Quantinuum to generate and mathematically certify truly random numbers -- an advancement that could significantly enhance encryption, security, and financial applications. The breakthrough was validated with help from U.S. national laboratories and has been published in the journal Nature. From a report: Between May 2023 and May 2024, cryptographers at JPMorgan wrote an algorithm for a quantum computer to generate random numbers, which they ran on Quantinuum's machine. The US Department of Energy's supercomputers were then used to test whether the output was truly random. "It's a breakthrough result," project lead and Head of Global Technology Applied Research at JPMorgan, Marco Pistoia told Bloomberg in an interview. "The next step will be to understand where we can apply it."

Applications could ultimately include more energy-efficient cryptocurrency, online gambling, and any other activity hinging on complete randomness, such as deciding which precincts to audit in elections.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet, written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols: Despite the minor delay, Linux 6.14 arrives packed with cutting-edge features and improvements to power upcoming Linux distributions, such as the forthcoming Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42. The big news for desktop users is the improved NTSYNC driver, especially those who like to play Windows games or run Windows programs on Linux. This driver is designed to emulate Windows NT synchronization primitives. What that feature means for you and me is that it will significantly improve the performance of Windows programs running on Wine and Steam Play. [...] Gamers always want the best possible graphics performance, so they'll also be happy to see that Linux now supports recently launched AMD RDNA 4 graphics cards. This approach includes support for the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 graphics cards. Combine this support with the recently improved open-source RADV driver and AMD gamers should see the best speed yet on their gaming rigs.

Of course, the release is not just for gamers. Linux 6.14 also includes several AMD and Intel processor enhancements. These boosts focus on power management, thermal control, and compute performance optimizations. These updates are expected to improve overall system efficiency and performance. This release also comes with the AMDXDNA driver, which provides official support for AMD's neural processing units based on the XDNA architecture. This integration enables efficient execution of AI workloads, such as convolutional neural networks and large language models, directly on supported AMD hardware. While Rust has faced some difficulties in recent months in Linux, more Rust programming language abstractions have been integrated into the kernel, laying the groundwork for future drivers written in Rust. [...] Besides drivers, Miguel Ojeda, Rust for Linux's lead developer, said recently that the introduction of the macro for smart pointers with Rust 1.84: derive(CoercePointee) is an "important milestone on the way to building a kernel that only uses stable Rust functions." This approach will also make integrating C and Rust code easier. We're getting much closer to Rust being grafted into Linux's tree.

In addition, Linux 6.14 supports Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile processor, enhancing performance and stability for devices powered by this chipset. That support means you can expect to see much faster Android-based smartphones later this year. This release includes a patch for the so-called GhostWrite vulnerability, which can be used to root some RISC-V processors. This fix will block such attacks. Additionally, Linux 6.14 includes improvements for the copy-on-write Btrfs file system/logical volume manager. These primarily read-balancing methods offer flexibility for different RAID hardware configurations and workloads. Additionally, support for uncached buffered I/O optimizes memory usage on systems with fast storage devices. Linux 6.14 is available for download here.

The U.S. has added 80 entities to its export blacklist to prevent China from acquiring advanced American chips for military development, including AI, quantum tech, and hypersonic weapons. The Verge reports: More than 50 of the new entities added to the list are based in China, with others located in Iran, Taiwan, Pakistan, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates. BIS says the restrictions have been applied to entities that acted "contrary to US national security and foreign policy," and are intended to hinder China's ability to develop high-performance computing capabilities, quantum technologies, advanced artificial intelligence, and hypersonic weapons.

Six of the newly blacklisted entities are subsidiaries of Inspur Group -- China's leading cloud computing service provider and a major customer for US chip makers such as Nvidia, AMD, and Intel -- which BIS alleges had contributed to projects developing supercomputers for the Chinese military. The Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence is another addition to the list, which has criticized its inclusion. "American technology should never be used against the American people," said Jeffrey Kessler, Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security. "BIS is sending a clear, resounding message that the Trump administration will work tirelessly to safeguard our national security by preventing U.S. technologies and goods from being misused for high performance computing, hypersonic missiles, military aircraft training, and UAVs that threaten our national security."

Transport for London will ban most e-bikes across its network from March 31 amid growing safety concerns over battery fires, the transport authority announced on Wednesday. The ban, covering London Underground, Overground, Elizabeth Line and DLR trains, exempts only folding e-bikes, which are considered less likely to have been modified and pose a reduced safety risk.

TfL implemented the measure following union strike threats after several incidents, including an e-bike that exploded into flames at Rayners Lane Underground platform last month. The train drivers' union Aslef said the incident could have caused mass casualties.

A U.S. appeals court has ruled that Apple cannot participate in Google's upcoming antitrust trial, potentially jeopardizing a $20 billion annual deal between the tech giants. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that Apple waited too long to join the proceedings, filing its request 33 days after the government proposed remedies in the case Google lost last August.

"The delay seems difficult to justify," the judges ruled. While Apple can still submit written testimony and file friend-of-court briefs, it cannot present evidence or cross-examine witnesses as it had sought. At stake is Google's practice of paying Apple approximately $20 billion annually to remain the default search engine in Safari browsers across Apple devices. The government's proposed remedies would make such arrangements impermissible.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Software developer Xe Iaso reached a breaking point earlier this year when aggressive AI crawler traffic from Amazon overwhelmed their Git repository service, repeatedly causing instability and downtime. Despite configuring standard defensive measures -- adjusting robots.txt, blocking known crawler user-agents, and filtering suspicious traffic -- Iaso found that AI crawlers continued evading all attempts to stop them, spoofing user-agents and cycling through residential IP addresses as proxies. Desperate for a solution, Iaso eventually resorted to moving their server behind a VPN and creating "Anubis," a custom-built proof-of-work challenge system that forces web browsers to solve computational puzzles before accessing the site. "It's futile to block AI crawler bots because they lie, change their user agent, use residential IP addresses as proxies, and more," Iaso wrote in a blog post titled "a desperate cry for help." "I don't want to have to close off my Gitea server to the public, but I will if I have to."

Iaso's story highlights a broader crisis rapidly spreading across the open source community, as what appear to be aggressive AI crawlers increasingly overload community-maintained infrastructure, causing what amounts to persistent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on vital public resources. According to a comprehensive recent report from LibreNews, some open source projects now see as much as 97 percent of their traffic originating from AI companies' bots, dramatically increasing bandwidth costs, service instability, and burdening already stretched-thin maintainers.

Kevin Fenzi, a member of the Fedora Pagure project's sysadmin team, reported on his blog that the project had to block all traffic from Brazil after repeated attempts to mitigate bot traffic failed. GNOME GitLab implemented Iaso's "Anubis" system, requiring browsers to solve computational puzzles before accessing content. GNOME sysadmin Bart Piotrowski shared on Mastodon that only about 3.2 percent of requests (2,690 out of 84,056) passed their challenge system, suggesting the vast majority of traffic was automated. KDE's GitLab infrastructure was temporarily knocked offline by crawler traffic originating from Alibaba IP ranges, according to LibreNews, citing a KDE Development chat. While Anubis has proven effective at filtering out bot traffic, it comes with drawbacks for legitimate users. When many people access the same link simultaneously -- such as when a GitLab link is shared in a chat room -- site visitors can face significant delays. Some mobile users have reported waiting up to two minutes for the proof-of-work challenge to complete, according to the news outlet.

The Register's Richard Speed reports: Baffled by the plethora of Outlook options out there? You aren't alone. Microsoft veteran Scott Hanselman posted a list of some more variants that could be used to do the same thing. It's a problem common to several Microsoft products. A file needs to be opened, but which app should be used? Should it be Outlook New, or Outlook (New)? With tongue firmly in cheek, Hanselman listed some more options: Outlook (Zero Sugar), Outlook (Caffeine Free), and so on. Hanselman, Developer Community veep at Microsoft, also included Outlook '95, although to our mind the peak came with the version of Outlook in Office 97. A happier, more trusting time when security was less important.

While users can create multiple Outlook profiles to store email account details and data locations, Hanselman's post on Bluesky highlights an issue facing many users of Microsoft's software: which incarnation of the application to use. Teams users often find themselves presented with a variety of applications -- Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Teams (Personal), for example, can often appear side by side in the system tray. [...]

There is a cautionary tale about what happened when a soft drinks company tried to replace a well-liked product with a "new" version and renamed the previous preferred version as "classic." The list posted by Hanselman -- who is also notable for tips on managing Microsoft's personal information manager -- is amusing, but also highlights the perils of having multiple, similarly functioning options to do the same thing, and the potential for confusing users.

"In a conversation with Tony Yu from Asus China, AMD CEO Lisa Su shared that the Radeon RX 9000 series graphics cards have quickly become a huge hit, breaking records as AMD's top-selling GPUs within just a week of release," writes Slashdot reader jjslash. TechSpot reports: AMD CEO Lisa Su has confirmed that the company's new Radeon RX 9000 graphics cards have been a massive success, selling 10 times more units than their predecessors in just one week on the market. Su also stated that more RDNA 4 cards are on the way, but did not confirm whether the lineup will include the rumored Radeon RX 9060. When asked about the limited availability of the new cards, Su said that AMD is ramping up production to ensure greater supply at retailers worldwide. She also expressed hope that increased availability would help stabilize pricing by discouraging scalping and price gouging.

Google DeepMind has launched Gemini 2.5, a new family of AI models designed to "think" before responding to queries. The initial release, Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental, tops the LMArena leaderboard by what Google claims is a "significant margin" and demonstrates enhanced reasoning capabilities across technical tasks. The model achieved 18.8% on Humanity's Last Exam without tools, outperforming most competing flagship models. In mathematics, it scored 86.7% on AIME 2025 and 92.0% on AIME 2024 in single attempts, while reaching 84.0% on GPQA's diamond benchmark for scientific reasoning.

For developers, Gemini 2.5 Pro demonstrates improved coding abilities with 63.8% on SWE-Bench Verified using a custom agent setup, though this falls short of Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet score of 70.3%. On Aider Polyglot for code editing, it scores 68.6%, which Google claims surpasses competing models. The reasoning approach builds on Google's previous experiments with reinforcement learning and chain-of-thought prompting. These techniques allow the model to analyze information, incorporate context, and draw conclusions before delivering responses. Gemini 2.5 Pro ships with a 1 million token context window (approximately 750,000 words). The model is available immediately in Google AI Studio and for Gemini Advanced subscribers, with Vertex AI integration planned in the coming weeks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: German software company SAP overtook Danish healthcare company Novo Nordisk as Europe's largest company by market capitalization on Monday. At 0900 GMT, SAP had a market cap of $340 billion, slightly more than Novo Nordisk, according to Reuters calculations using LSEG Workspace data. SAP is Europe's largest software maker, providing business application software used by companies for finance, sales, supply chain and other functions.

Its shares have surged in recent years, in part due to optimism that its cloud business will be a major beneficiary of recent investment in generative artificial intelligence. While SAP shares are up 7% so far in 2025, underperforming the broader European STOXX 600 index, which is up 8.3% year-to-date, they have clocked a total return of 160% since the end of 2022, far outperforming the STOXX 600's 28%. In contrast, Novo Nordisk shares have underperformed the market in recent months after data from trials of its experimental next-generation obesity drug Cagrisema disappointed investors.

Meta is considering a paid subscription in the UK that would remove advertisements from its platform. The BBC reports: Under the plans, people using the social media sites could be asked to pay for an ad-free experience if they do not want their data to be tracked. Meta already provides ad-free subscriptions for Facebook and Instagram users in the EU, starting from euros (5 pounds) a month. A spokesperson for the firm said the company was "exploring the option" of offering a similar service in the UK.

They said the firm was "engaging constructively" with the UK data watchdog about the subscription service, following a consultation in 2024. The Information Commissioner's Office previously said it expected Meta to consider data protection concerns before it launched an ad-free subscription. Meta says personalized advertising allows its platforms to be free at the point of access.

Guidance issued by the regulator in January states that users must be presented with a genuine free choice. Social media platforms such as Meta heavily rely on ad revenues, and the company says personalised advertising allows its platforms to be free. Advertising accounted for more than 96% of its revenue in its latest quarterly financial results.

Two in five tech workers quit in the past year due to inflexible workplace policies around hours, location, and workload intensity, with most citing a desire for remote work and greater autonomy. The Register reports: The findings come from a survey of 26,000 plus staff that operate in 35 markets, including 2,548 respondents in tech, and fly in the face of more and more corporations issuing return to office mandates and demanding long working hours. Amsterdam-based recruitment biz Randstad, which commissioned the research, says 40 percent of the tech people it polled said they resigned due to hardline policies, and 56 percent threatened to seek an alternative if their requests for flexibility were ignored.

Almost three-quarters claim remote work boosts a "sense of community" with colleagues -- versus the average of 58 percent across other sectors -- and 68 percent say they'd trust their employer more if they were more easy going on hours, the intensity of the work and the place where they can work. Graig Paglieri, Randstad Digital boss, said the "IT sector has shown that personalized work benefits and flexible options are essential not only for attracting top talent but also for retaining them in competitive markets. Policies should align with organizational, team and individual needs, ensuring a flexible and tailored approach."