In a video ad Google posted on Twitter, its yet-to-be-launched AI chatboard Bard confidently spouted misinformation about the James Webb Space Telescope. "JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system," the chatbot replied, which is patently false. (It was the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope that captured images of exoplanets for the first time.) Now, the tech giant is looking to improve Bard's accuracy, and according to CNBC, it's asking employees for help. 

Google's VP for search, Prabhakar Raghavan, reportedly sent an email to staff members, asking them to rewrite Bard responses on topics they know well. The chatbot "learns best by example," Raghavan said, and training it with factual answers will help improve its accuracy. Raghavan also included a list of "dos" and "don'ts" when it comes to fixing Bard's responses, based on the email seen by CNBC. 

Responses should be in first person POV, should be unopinionated and neutral, and they should have a polite, casual and approachable tone. Employees are also instructed to "avoid making presumptions based on race, nationality, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, political ideology, location, or similar categories." They're asked not to describe Bard as a person, imply that it has emotions or claim that it has human-like experiences. Plus, they're instructed to thumbs down any responses the chatbot might give containing "legal, medical, financial advice" or are hateful and abusive.

Raghavan's memo came after Google CEO Sundar Pichai emailed employees, asking them to spend a few hours each week testing the AI chatbot. Google employees reportedly criticized Pichai for a "rushed" and "botched" Bard rollout. The CEO is now giving staffers the chance to "help shape [the chatbot] and contribute" by testing the company's new product. He also reminded everyone that some of Google's "most successful products were not first to market" and that they "gained momentum because they solved important user needs and were built on deep technical insights." 

People have been anticipating Google's response to ChatGPT ever since the OpenAI chatbot arrived late last year. The Microsoft-backed technology has gained tremendous popularity over the past few months, enough to rattle Alphabet and its investors. Google tried to assuage investors' concerns during its quarterly earnings call in early February by talking about its own chatbot and by touching on its work developing an AI-powered Search to compete with the next-gen Bing. 

Apple will rely on your previous purchases and spending habits to decide how much it will lend you for its upcoming "buy now, pay later" service, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. Apparently, the tech giant intends to evaluate your eligibility based on your purchases at its retail stores, your App Store transactions and even the peer-to-peer transfers you've made using Apple Cash. 

Whether or not you've applied for an Apple Card in the past will also reportedly factor into the amount the company will lend you, along with your spending habits using any other card linked to your Apple Pay. The company will take which Apple devices you own into account, as well, Bloomberg says. Apple Financing, the subsidiary the company established last year, is expected to be in charge of conducting customer background checks and loan approvals. 

The tech giant first announced the "buy now, pay later" functionality for Apple Pay at its WWDC event in June 2022 with the intention of launching it later that year. While Apple didn't explain why it didn't arrive with iOS 16 like it originally intended, Gurman said at the time that the delays were caused by "fairly significant technical and engineering challenges in rolling out the service." To test the feature, Apple reportedly gave its retail employees access to it for their own purchases. In Gurman's latest report, he says testers have been seeing loan approvals for as much as $1,000. 

When it first announced the pay later offering, Apple said it will give you a way to split the cost of purchases into four equal installments that you can pay over six weeks. That's a short amount of time, but you at least won't incur any additional interest or fees. The company reportedly plans to offer another option later on that would let you pay for larger purchases over several months, though that one will charge you interest on top of the base amount. 

Platformer has interviewed Twitter employees to figure out why people's For You feeds turned into The Elon Musk show, and they said the company's engineers truly did build a system that benefited their CEO alone. According to the publication, Elon's cousin and Twitter employee James Musk sent an urgent message on the company's Slack on Monday morning. "We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform," he wrote, calling the situation "high urgency" and asking everyone who can write code to help. The situation? President Biden's tweet about rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles got more engagement than Musk's. 

Apparently, the president's tweet generated almost 29 million impressions, whereas Musk's generated 9.1 million only before he deleted it. Musk's issue with his tweets not getting as much engagement as he would like started before the Super Bowl, however. Platformer previously reported that he fired one of Twitter's two remaining principal engineers because he suggested that Musk's tweets aren't generating as many impressions anymore because people are no longer that interested in what he's saying. 

Around 80 Twitter employees were reportedly tasked to investigate the possible reasons for Musk's waning engagement numbers, and they did consider the possibility that a lot of people had blocked and muted him in recent months. They also looked into legitimate potential technical issues, though, because tweets from users whose posts typically perform well should've been automatically promoted by the website's system. 

The fix they came up with, Platformer says, is to deploy code that would artificially boost Musk's tweets by a factor of 1,000, ensuring that they rank higher than everyone else's in people's feeds. As a result, over 90 percent of Musk's 128.9 million followers saw his tweets, and even those who don't follow the Twitter owner kept seeing his posts on their timeline. 

While Musk didn't speak at length about the issue, he did acknowledge the change in his own way, specifically by posting the "forced to drink milk" meme. He also asked people to stay tuned while Twitter made adjustments to the "algorithm" (his quote, not ours) after users started complaining of seeing all Elon all the time. "Adjustments" reportedly didn't mean removing his advantage completely, though: according to Platformer, Elon's tweets are still artificially boosted, but by a factor less than 1,000. Bottom line, users will still see his tweets a lot, unless they choose to move over to the Following tab instead. 

A group of Tesla workers in New York has sent company chief Elon Musk a letter stating their intention to unionize, according to Bloomberg. It could end up being the first Tesla union if successful, seeing as previous attempts fizzled out before organizers could petition for a vote. The employees involved in the campaign are in charge of labeling data for Tesla's Autopilot technology at the company's Buffalo, New York facility. Bloomberg says the group is asking for better pay, job security and a better work environment that eases the production pressures placed on them. 

Workers told the news organization that they've been skipping bathroom breaks, since Tesla keeps a close eye on their every move. Apparently, the company monitors their keystrokes to see how long they spend on each particular task and how much time they spend working per day. They also said that the company shut down an internal chatroom where they can air their grievances, such as the how Tesla handles snow days. It was after that happened that the group started talking about unionizing. They're now planning to distribute Valentine-themed materials at the facility with links to a website where employees can sign union cards. 

The employees are working with Service Employees International Union affiliate Workers United, which unionized Starbucks cafes across the US. While Workers United has a good track record, the group still faces a tough road ahead, considering Elon Musk is known to be a staunch critic of unions. In 2017, he fired back against allegations of poor working conditions at Tesla's Fremont factory and criticized the United Auto Workers (UAW) for inciting the company's workers to unionize. He said UAW's allegiance is in "giant car companies, where the money they take from employees in dues is vastly more than they could ever make from Tesla."

Last year, he also challenged UAW to hold a union vote, claiming that Tesla's (non-unionized) factory workers have the highest compensation in the auto industry. And let's not forget one of his perhaps most infamous tweets regarding unionization. In 2018, he tweeted that there's nothing stopping Tesla's workers from unionizing, but then he added: "why pay union dues [and] give up stock options for nothing?" The NLRB asked Musk to delete his post, deeming it as a threat that employees would be giving up company-paid stock options if they join a union. The tweet in question is still live, and Tesla is still appealing the labor board's ruling. 

Toyota has revealed its plans for the future under a new CEO, and it looks like the company is finally prioritizing electrification. In his announcement, new President and CEO Koji Sato said the automaker is going to create new electric vehicles unique to Toyota and Lexus, its luxury division. He also said that the company is developing its "next-generation" battery electric vehicles, which will launch under the Lexus brand in 2026. It's not quite clear what "next-generation" means, but Sato said Toyota is working on "everything from the battery and platform to how a car is built optimized for BEVs" while also expanding its current EV lineup.

As Reuters notes, Toyota is getting flak for dragging its feet when it comes to embracing electric vehicle technology and for its reluctance to move beyond its hybrid models, such as the Prius. Sato explained during the press conference that the automaker's slow EV adoption was mostly caused by communication issues. He also announced that the automaker will continue its "multi-pathway" and "omni-directional" approach, which means it's not going to drop its hybrid vehicles anytime soon. However, Toyota intends to accelerate its EV plans under its new management and to take on "a BEV-first mindset"

So far, the automaker has only released one vehicle, the bZ4X, based on its e-TNGA BEV platform. The company previously vowed that it was going to be the first among the seven "Beyond Zero" electric vehicles it plans to release by 2025. Meanwhile, Lexus has yet to start selling the RZ, the brand's first model that was built from the ground up as an EV.

T-Mobile suffered network outages on Monday night, leading to intermittent issues with its voice, text and data services, according to Reuters. Based on reports submitted to Downdetector, over 80,000 subscribers in several areas in the US were experiencing problems by around 10:14PM ET on February 14th. T-Mobile responded to users' complaints on Twitter, initially to tell people that the carrier was working on a fix for the disruption and then to update everyone about its progress. Shortly after midnight on February 14th, Neville Ray, the company's President of Technology, announced that T-Mobile has seen "significant improvement and are operating at near normal levels."

Indeed, the number of outage reports on Downdetector dramatically went down after its peak at 10PM on Monday. Ray said the outage was caused by a third-party fiber interruption issue that affected its services — for some people, even emergency numbers were inaccessible. The outages also seemed to have affected not just T-Mobile's own customers, but people who use MVNOs that rely on the carrier's network, as well. 9to5Google says Google Fi users have also been experiencing intermittent access to its services, though they'll likely be able use them as usual soon, if T-Mobile truly was able to fix the problem. 

Microsoft reportedly plans to introduce upgraded Office apps with AI features in the coming weeks. According to The Verge, the tech giant is preparing to show what its Prometheus AI technology and OpenAI's language AI can do for Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and other Microsoft 365 apps as soon as this March. Microsoft recently launched a reimagined Bing that can generate conversational responses to search queries, thanks to the Prometheus model, which was built with the help of OpenAI. 

Additionally, the company introduced a new Edge with a built-in "AI copilot" that's also powered by Prometheus. A button on the top-right corner gives users quick access to Bing's new chat feature, and as we mentioned in our hands-on, it's like having ChatGPT right in your browser. The Verge says Microsoft wants its AI technology to be able to generate graphs and graphics for use in PowerPoint or Excel. According to a previous report published by The Information, the company also wants its AI model to be able to generate text using simple prompts within its Office apps. 

That Microsoft seems to be in a hurry to launch new AI-powered features for its products comes as no surprise. The company likely intends to move fast to get as many people as possible to start using its products before Google can launch its ChatGPT rival. Apparently, Microsoft was originally supposed to introduce the new Bing in late February, but it moved up the launch and scheduled it before Google's Bard announcement. The company is also bound to keep expanding its AI-powered feature list, seeing as it recently signed a "multi-billion dollar" investment in OpenAI last month.

NASA has selected Blue Origin's New Glenn, the company's heavy-lift orbital launch vehicle that has yet to go on its first launch, for a science mission to Mars. As Reuters notes, it's also the company's first interplanetary NASA contract. The mission is called Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers or ESCAPADE, and it was designed to study the planet's magnetosphere using twin spacecraft. NASA is targeting a late 2024 launch for the mission, which means we won't have to wait too long to finally see the New Glenn in action — if the Jeff Bezos-owned space corp can prevent further development delays, that is.

The New Glenn vehicle is the company's answer to SpaceX's Falcon Heavy and other company's heavy-lift vehicles. Blue Origin initially targeted a 2020 date for its first launch — and NASA approved it for future unmanned scientific and exploration missions that year — but the event kept getting pushed back. It was moved to 2021 and then to 2022. By the end of March last year, Jarrett Jones, Blue Origin's SVP for New Glenn, admitted that the vehicle wasn't going to fly for the first time in 2022 and that the company was in the process of setting a new date. 

NASA has granted Blue Origin the contract for ESCAPADE under the Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) program, which was designed to foster the growth of commercial launch services in the US. The agency intends to use launch vehicles from program participants specifically for "small satellites and Class D payloads" that can tolerate higher risk. In other words, VADR contracts are meant for lower-cost missions. "By using a lower level of mission assurance, and commercial best practices for launching rockets, these highly flexible contracts help broaden access to space through lower launch costs," NASA said in its announcement of New Glenn's selection. 

The ESCAPADE mission will launch from Space Launch Complex-36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. It will take about 11 months for the mission to reach the red planet. After that, it will take a few more months for the twin spacecraft to reach the orbit ideal for gathering information about the Martian magnetosphere. The data it will provide can help give scientists a better understanding of space weather, so that safeguards could be put in place to better protect astronauts and satellites in our continued exploration of outer space. 

A Reddit employee's credentials were stolen in a targeted phishing attack, an administrator for the website has revealed, and hackers were able to infiltrate its systems on February 5th. Apparently, Reddit employees had been receiving "plausible-sounding prompts," which lead to a website that mimic the looks and behavior of its intranet gateway, designed as such to steal people's logins and second-factor tokens. While one employee did fall for the scheme, they immediately self-reported. That allowed the website's security team to respond quickly and to cut off the infiltrators' access.

The Reddit spokesperson said the bad actors were able to access some of the website's "internal docs, code, as well as some internal dashboards and business systems." Contact information for hundreds of company contracts, current and former employees, as well as some advertisers were also exposed. They assured users, however, that the security team investigating the incident has found no evidence that their passwords or any of their non-public data have been compromised. The team also didn't find evidence that the information stolen from Reddit has been distributed online — at least, at this point in the investigation. 

Reddit's spokesperson said the website is "continuing to investigate and monitor the situation closely." They also said that lessons they learned from a security breach five years ago continue to be useful. If the attackers were only truly able to steal some non-user information this time, the 2018 breach was a much more serious incident. Back then, bad actors were able to grab users' current email addresses, as well as a database backup from 2007 that contained account passwords.

SpaceX has completed its first full static fire test for Starship, if not quite in a way that makes the first orbital test flight next month sound realistic. The company hoped to fire all 33 Raptor engines at once, but Elon Musk noted that two engines didn't make it — the mission team shut off one before startup, while the other "stopped itself." The 31 that did fire lasted the full duration, however, and Musk claims that's enough to reach orbit.

While SpaceX's last static fire testing in November was a success, the company only ignited 14 of the booster's Raptor engines. It also to send Starship on multiple successful test flights before it can ferry astronauts to and from the Moon.

As company president Gwynne Shotwell said at the FAA's annual Commercial Space Transportation conference, Starship has to fly "hundreds of flights before [it flies] people." She also reminded everyone that Starship's first flight "is really a test flight" and that "the real goal [for it] is to not blow up the launch pad."

In mid-2022, SpaceX conducted a test that was designed to simultaneously spin up all 33 engines on the Super Heavy's Booster 7 prototype. The company was aiming to preview the vehicle's start-up sequence, but the booster caught fire during the process at its Boca Chica, Texas facility. SpaceX chief Elon Musk revealed on Twitter that the issue that caused the explosion was "specific to the engine spin start test," because the Raptor engine has a complex start sequence.