Business

Soon you could see Waymo self-driving tech in Hyundai cars. The autonomous driving tech developer Waymo said this week that it would partner with the Korean automaker Hyundai to equip a fleet of its electric vehicles with self-driving technology. The vehicles, modified Ioniq 5s, will hit the road as part of Waymo’s self-driving ride-hail service in late 2025, the companies said.

In a statement, Hyundai Motor Company president and global COO José Muñoz called the agreement a “first step” in the two firms’ partnership. “We are actively exploring additional opportunities for collaboration,” he said—opening up the possibility that Waymo self-driving tech could one day be installed on Hyundai passenger vehicles.

Europe’s most famous privacy activist, Max Schrems, landed another blow against Meta today after the EU’s top court ruled the tech giant cannot exploit users’ public statements about their sexual orientation for online advertising.

Since 2014, Schrems has complained of seeing advertising on Meta platforms targeting his sexual orientation. Schrems claims, based on data he obtained from the company, that advertisers using Meta can deduce his sexuality from proxies, such as his app logins or website visits. Meta denies it showed Schrems personalized ads based on his off-Facebook data, and the company has long said it excludes any sensitive data it detects from its advertising operations.

Just one week after America’s 100 percent tariffs on China EVs kicked in, the European Union has voted to officially approve additional tariffs for electric vehicles imported from China, making it harder for Chinese automakers to compete in the European market.

The tariffs were proposed by the European Commission in June after it concluded that Chinese-made EVs have received significant government subsidies that create an unfair advantage. Electric vehicles made in China—both by Chinese brands and by Western ones like Tesla and BMW—will be subject to varying levels of import duties between 7.8 and 35.3 percent.

One phrase encapsulates the methodology of nonfiction master Robert Caro: Turn Every Page. The phrase is so associated with Caro that it’s the name of the recent documentary about him and of an exhibit of his archives at the New York Historical Society. To Caro it is imperative to put eyes on every line of every document relating to his subject, no matter how mind-numbing or inconvenient. He has learned that something that seems trivial can unlock a whole new understanding of an event, provide a path to an unknown source, or unravel a mystery of who was responsible for a crisis or an accomplishment. Over his career he has pored over literally millions of pages of documents: reports, transcripts, articles, legal briefs, letters (45 million in the LBJ Presidential Library alone!). Some seemed deadly dull, repetitive, or irrelevant. No matter—he’d plow through, paying full attention. Caro’s relentless page-turning has made his work iconic.

Meta just announced its own media-focused AI model, called Movie Gen, that can be used to generate realistic video and audioclips.

The company shared multiple 10-second clips generated with Movie Gen, including a Moo Deng-esque baby hippo swimming around, to demonstrate its capabilities. While the tool is not yet available for use, this Movie Gen announcement comes shortly after its Meta Connect event, which showcased new and refreshed hardware and the latest version of its large language model, Llama 3.2.

Zhang Xiaomeng, who lives in Beijing’s expensive central business district and runs her own design agency, had been putting off downloading Pinduoduo. Despite its popularity, she disliked how it gamified shopping, particularly a feature that prompts users to enlist their friends to click on a link in exchange for a price cut. This year, she finally gave in. “Things there are cheap,” she says.

Pinduoduo shares a parent company with Temu, the blockbuster retail app that has permeated US online shopping in recent years. The success of PDD Holdings, which owns both, has come in spite of economic headwinds and intense competitive pressures in China. But an international crackdown on retail imports could bring it back to earth after a meteoric rise.

Just one day after OpenAI announced a $6.6 billion funding round, the company is launching its first major interface evolution for ChatGPT.

In what could be recognition from OpenAI that its transformational chatbot is ready for user experiences beyond a question and answer format, the new beta feature is an editable canvas that opens in a window alongside ChatGPT’s standard chat box.

“The core thing we’re trying to solve is a better way to collaborate with ChatGPT on writing and coding,” says Daniel Levine, a product lead at OpenAI for the canvas feature. Canvas is rolling out in beta to ChatGPT Plus and Team subscribers today, and Enterprise and Edu customers will likely get the feature next week. The feature is fully functional on desktops—mobile users can only view the canvas projects for now.

When Google Lens was introduced in 2017, the search feature accomplished a feat that not too long ago would have seemed like the stuff of science fiction: Point your phone’s camera at an object and Google Lens can identify it, show some context, maybe even let you buy it. It was a new way of searching, one that didn’t involve awkwardly typing out descriptions of things you were seeing in front of you.

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED

You hardly needChatGPT to generate a list of reasons why generative artificial intelligence is often less than awesome. The way algorithms are fed creative work often without permission, harbor nasty biases, and require huge amounts of energy and water for training are all serious issues.

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov today defended recent changes to his platform, amid concerns his arrest in France has made the messaging app more compliant with legal requests to share user data with the authorities.

Durov attempted to minimize the significance of changes made to the app since he was arrested in August and charged with complicity in a range of crimes, including spreading sexual images of children. He was forbidden from leaving France for six months and must appear at a police station twice a week.