The evolution of Musk’s X network is complete; why Reddit is profitable; and niche Halloween costumes * Don’t get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m Blake Montgomery, technology news editor at Guardian US. Today in the newsletter: X’s final form, learnings from a packed week of earnings, and niche online Halloween costumes. Thank you for joining me. With the US election, X’s transformation into Elon Musk’s weapon reaches its peak. He has succeeded in bending his social network to his will. Continue reading...

Campaigners say 21% of people at workshops did not disclose on their applications relationships with firms being discussed More than one in five attenders at EU events on regulating big tech companies did not disclose links to the industry when applying to take part, according to transparency campaigners who say hidden networks are distorting public debate. Researchers at three NGOs analysed nearly 4,000 registrations at European Commission workshops organised earlier this year to test companies’ compliance with the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a law to curb anti-competitive behaviour. Continue reading...

As a new show co-created by an AI performer opens in France, industry leaders including Wayne McGregor, Tamara Rojo and Jonzi D contemplate the technology’s possibilities and perils ‘I think AI’s going to change everything,” Tamara Rojo, artistic director of San Francisco Ballet, told me earlier this year. “We just don’t know quite how.” The impact of artificial intelligence on the creative industries can already be seen across film, television and music, but to some extent dance seems insulated, as a form that so much relies on live bodies performing in front of an audience. But this week choreographers Aoi Nakamura and Esteban Lecoq, collectively known as AΦE, are launching what is billed as the world’s first AI-driven dance production, Lilith.Aeon. Lilith, the performer, is an AI entity, who has co-created the work, with Nakamura and Lecoq. “She” will appear on an LED cube that the audience move around, their motion triggering Lilith’s dance. Nakamura and Lecoq insist they’re interested not in chasing the latest technology for its own sake but in enhancing their storytelling. Working as dancers with theatre company Punchdrunk turned them on to the idea of immersive experiences, which led to virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and now AI. Their question is always: “How can we make this tech come alive?” But not in a robots-taking-over-the-world way. Continue reading...

Anthropic says model is able to carry out computer tasks – as fears mount such technology will replace workers An artificial intelligence startup backed by Amazon and Google says it has created an AI agent that can carry out tasks on the computer such as moving a mouse cursor and typing text. US company Anthropic said its AI model, called Claude, could now perform computing tasks including filling out forms, planning an outing and building a website. Continue reading...

Matt Garman, head of AWS unit, says ‘there are other companies around’, according to transcript A senior Amazon executive has suggested that staff who do not like the company’s new five-days-a-week office-working policy should quit. The head of the tech company’s cloud computing business told an internal meeting that if employees did not support the change they could look for a job elsewhere, according to a transcript reviewed by Reuters. Continue reading...

Company says it signed three agreements on developing small modular reactor nuclear power technology Amazon.com said on Wednesday it has signed three agreements on developing small modular reactor (SMR) nuclear power technology, becoming the latest big tech company to push for new sources to meet surging electricity demand from data centers. Amazon said it will fund a feasibility study for an SMR project near a Northwest Energy site in Washington state. The SMR is planned to be developed by X-Energy. Financial details were not disclosed. Continue reading...

This RPG is the third massively multiplayer online game Amazon has published in four years, and lets you morph your heroes into animals. Is it worth a shot? Amazon has been trying to break into the games industry for years, yet despite using the vast resources at its disposal to hire some of the best designers in the business, the company struggled for years to make headway. Lately, however, Amazon has found success publishing massively multiplayer online games. First came 2021’s New World, Amazon Games’ homebrew fantasy with an emphasis on survival and player-built settlements. The following year brought Lost Ark, developed by Korean studio SmileGate, which combined large-scale multiplayer with Diablo-style fighting. Critical reception was mixed, but both games proved popular with players. This week, Amazon publishes its third MMO in four years, Throne and Liberty, also developed in Korea. Here’s everything you need to know about this latest free offering. What is Throne and Liberty? Continue reading...

Many fear the arrival of tech giants such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google in the state of Querétaro will place too much of a strain on scarce water and electricity resources In a nondescript building in an industrial park in central Mexico, cavernous rooms hold stack after stack of servers studded with blue lights, humming with computations and cooled by thousands of little fans and large vents blasting great columns of air across the room. “Datacentres are the lungs of digital life,” says Amet Novillo, the managing director of Equinix Mexico, a digital infrastructure company, as he stands in the middle of the airflows that stop the hardware overheating. Continue reading...

Smart alarm clock ticks most boxes with distraction-free screen and room-filling sound Amazon’s latest attempt to usurp the humble bedside alarm clock is the revamped Echo Spot, equipped with a speaker and small display for a customisable Alexa clock. The new Spot straddles the line between Amazon’s Echo Show smart displays and its basic Echo smart speakers in price and capability. The Spot costs £80 (€95/£80/A$149), though frequently much less in Amazon’s numerous sales. Dimensions: 113 x 103 x 111 mm Weight: 405g Touchscreen: 2.83in Connectivity: wifi 5 (ac), Bluetooth Speaker: 1.73in Continue reading...

Agency accuses Meta, Google, TikTok and other companies of sharing troves of user information with third-parties Social media and online video companies are collecting huge troves of your personal information on and off their websites or apps and sharing it with a wide range of third-party entities, a new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) staff report on nine tech companies confirms. The FTC report published on Thursday looked at the data-gathering practices of Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Discord, Reddit, Amazon, Snap, TikTok and Twitter/X between January 2019 and 31 December 2020. The majority of the companies’ business models incentivized tracking how people engaged with their platforms, collecting their personal data and using it to determine what content and ads users see on their feeds, the report states. Continue reading...