Hours after the House passed a bill that could ban TikTok in the United States, Shou Chew, the company’s CEO urged users to “protect your constitutional rights.” Chew also implied that TikTok would mount a legal challenge if the bill is passed into law.

“We will not stop fighting and advocating for you,” Chew said in a video posted to X. “We will continue to do all we can including exercising our legal rights to protect this amazing platform that we have built with you.” He also asked TikTok users in the US to share their stories with friends, families, and senators. “This legislation, if passed into law, will lead to a ban of TikTok in the United States,” Chew said. “Even the bill’s sponsors admit that’s their goal.”

The bill, known as the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” passed the House on Wednesday with bipartisan support just days after it was introduced. Should the bill pass into law, it would force TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, a Chinese corporation, to sell TikTok to a US company within six months, or be banned from US app stores and web hosting services. TikTok has challenged state-level bans in the past. Last year, TikTok sued Montana, which banned the app in the state. A federal judge temporarily blocked that ban in November before it went into effect.

Last week, TikTok sent push notifications to the app’s more than 170 million users in the US urging them to call their representatives about the potential ban. “Speak up now — before your government strips 170 million Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression,” the notification said. The wave of notifications reportedly led to House staffers being inundated with calls from high schoolers asking what a Congressman is. Lawmakers criticized the company they perceived as trying to “interfere” with the legislative process.

In his appeal, Chew said that banning TikTok would give “more power to a handful of other social media companies.” Former President Donald Trump, who once tried to force ByteDance to sell TikTok in the US, recently expressed a similar sentiment, claiming that banning TikTok would strengthen Meta whose platform, Reels, competes with TikTok directly. Chew also added that taking TikTok away would also hurt hundreds of thousands of American jobs, creators, and small businesses.

X has canceled a high-profile partnership with former CNN host Don Lemon to stream a video talk show on the platform. Lemon said that the company canceled his contract hours after he interviewed X’s billionaire owner Elon Musk for the first episode of “The Don Lemon Show,” which was scheduled to stream on the platform this Monday.

“Elon Musk is mad at me,” Lemon said in a video posted to X on Wednesday. “Apparently, free speech absolutism doesn’t apply when it comes to questions about him from people like me.”

Lemon’s announcement came a day after company CEO Linda Yaccarino declared that X was becoming a “video first” platform. It announced the partnership with Lemon in January as part of a larger strategy to stream more original content on the service. This included striking deals with former representative Tulsi Gabbard and sports radio commentator Jim Rome to stream their own shows on the platform. Last year, X reportedly made a similar deal with Tucker Carlson after he was fired from his hosting duties at Fox News. X’s decision to cancel Lemon’s show raises questions about the company’s strategy.

“The Don Lemon Show is welcome to publish its content on X, without censorship, as we believe in providing a platform for creators to scale their work and connect with new communities,” X said in a statement. “However, like any enterprise, we reserve the right to make decisions about our business partnerships, and after careful consideration, X decided not to enter into a commercial partnership with the show.”

Lemon said that he will now stream the first episode of “The Don Lemon Show” on X, YouTube and other podcast platforms, and is preparing for a legal fight in case X refuses what is reportedly a multi-million dollar payout. “Don has a deal with X and he expects to be paid for it,” a spokesperson for Lemon told Variety. “If we have to go to court, we will.” However, two anonymous sources claimed to Semafor that Lemon may not have actually signed a contract with X. Musk has a history of withholding payments. A group of former Twitter executives including the company’s ex-CEO Parag Agrawal are suing Musk and X over millions of dollars in unpaid severance benefits.

Lemon’s interview with Musk, which was recorded on Friday, spanned a wide range of topics including the presidential election, and, reportedly, the billionaire’s alleged ketamine use, the subject of a Wall Street Journal story published earlier this year. “Hardcore questions were asked,” Lemon told an X user. In a written statement, Lemon said that he had a “good conversation” with Musk, but the billionaire clearly didn’t seem to think so.

Musk wrote that Lemon’s approach was “basically just ‘CNN, but on social media’, which doesn’t work, as evidenced by the fact that CNN is dying,” in response to a user asking X about specific reasons for terminating the partnership with Lemon. “And, instead of it being the real Don Lemon," Musk sniped, "it was really just [former CNN President] Jeff Zucker talking through Don, so lacked authenticity.”

Lemon was fired from CNN nearly a year ago after making on-air remarks against former Republican presidential contender Nikki Haley that many considered sexist and ageist, as well as reports showing he engaged in misogynistic behavior over his 15-year tenure at CNN.

Meta is revamping how Facebook recommends videos across Reels, Groups, and the main Facebook Feed, by using AI to power its video recommendation algorithm, Facebook head Tom Alison revealed on Wednesday. The world's largest social network has already switched Reels, its TikTok competitor, to the new engine, and plans to use it in all places within Facebook that show video — the main Facebook feed and Groups — as part of a "technology roadmap" through 2026, Alison said at a Morgan Stanley tech conference in San Francisco.

Meta has made competing with TikTok a top priority ever since the app, which serves up vertical video clips and is known for its powerful recommendation engine that seems to know exactly what will keep users hooked, started exploding in popularity in the US in the last few years. When Facebook tested the new AI-powered recommendation engine with Reels, watch time went up by roughly 8 to 10 percent, Alison revealed. “So what that told us was this new model architecture is learning from the data much more efficiently than the previous generation,” Alison said. “So that was like a good sign that says, OK, we’re on the right track.”

So far, Facebook used different video recommendation engines for Reels, Groups, and the Facebook feed. But after seeing success with Reels, the company plans to use the same AI-powered engine across all these products.

“Instead of just powering Reels, we’re working on a project to power our entire video ecosystem with this single model, and then can we add our Feed recommendation product to also be served by this model,” Alison said. “If we get this right, not only will the recommendations be kind of more engaging and more relevant, but we think the responsiveness of them can improve as well.”

The move is a part of Meta’s strategy to infuse AI into all its products after the technology exploded with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT at the end of 2022. The company is spending billions of dollars to buy up hundreds of thousands of pricey NVIDIA GPUs used to train and power AI models, Zuckerberg said in a video earlier this year.

A former Google engineer was arrested in California on Wednesday for stealing more than 500 files containing artificial intelligence trade secrets from the company and using the information to benefit rival tech companies in China.

In an indictment that was unsealed in a federal California court, prosecutors accused Linwei Ding, a 38-year-old Chinese national who started working at Google in 2019, of uploading trade secrets from his Google-issued laptop to personal cloud storage accounts. The documents that Ding stole involved “building blocks” of Google’s AI infrastructure, according to the indictment. He uploaded them to his personal accounts over a period of one year from May 2022 to May 2023.

Ding was arrested in Newark, California, and charged with four counts of theft of trade secrets. If convicted, he can be sentenced up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 for each count.

“We have strict safeguards to prevent the theft of our confidential commercial information and trade secrets,” Google spokesperson José Castañeda told Engadget. “After an investigation, we found that this employee stole numerous documents, and we quickly referred the case to law enforcement. We are grateful to the FBI for helping protect our information and will continue cooperating with them closely.”

The development comes at a time of heightened tensions between the United States and China over the explosion of artificial intelligence. Last year, the Biden administration banned the export of advanced AI chips designed by American companies like NVIDIA to China to stop the country from using AI to strengthen its military. “Today’s charges are the latest illustration of the lengths affiliates of companies based in the People’s Republic of China are wiling to go to steal American innovation,” said FBI director Christopher Wray in a statement. “The theft of innovative technology and trade secrets from American companies can cost jobs and have devastating economic and national security consequences.”

The indictment revealed all kinds of details about the nature of the crime. Ding allegedly copied information from Google’s files into Apple Notes on his laptop first, and then converted them to PDF files that he uploaded to his personal Google account to evade detection by Google’s data loss prevention systems. He also gave his Google badge to another Google employee in California to make it seem like he was working from Google’s offices in the state while actually working for rival companies in China. Prosecutors said that Ding helped in raising capital for one of the Chinese companies he worked with as its chief technology officer. Last year, he also founded another AI company in China and served as its CEO.

This isn’t the first time that the US has arrested a Chinese national for stealing trade secrets from American companies. In the last few years, the US attorney’s office in San Francisco has charged three former Apple employees for stealing trade secrets related to the Apple Car, a project the company recently canceled, and siphoning them off to companies in China. Last month, one of those engineers was sentenced to six months in prison and asked to pay nearly $150,000 in fines. 

Video game company Electronic Arts will lay off 5 precent of its workforce according to a report it filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday. More than 650 EA employees will lose their jobs as a result of the move, part of a broader restricting that will see the company cutting back on office space and ending work on some video games.

EA’s cuts are the latest in a long line of layoffs that have rocked the video game industry since last year. In 2023, more than 10,500 video game workers lost their jobs, and more than 6,000 people in the industry were cut in January 2024 alone. The video game companies that have laid off workers so far include Microsoft, Riot Games, and Unity among many others. On Tuesday, Sony announced that it was laying off 900 people from its PlayStation division, roughly 8 percent of its headcount.

In a memo sent to EA employees, CEO Andrew Wilson wrote that the company is “streamlining our company operations to deliver deeper, more connected experiences for fans everywhere.” EA expects to finish making the cuts by early next quarter, the memo says. The cuts, Wilson adds, will let EA focus more on its “biggest opportunities — including our owned IP, sports, and massive online communities.”

Ten years, billions of dollars, multiple leadership changes, and dozens of rumors later, the Apple Car project is dead. A new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says that Apple has officially canceled the car, breaking the news to nearly 2,000 employees who had been working on it on Tuesday.

As part of the change, Apple will move “many employees working on the car” to the company’s artificial intelligence division where they will focus on generative AI projects, which Apple is expected to share more about later this year, according to a statement by CEO Tim Cook on the company’s earnings call earlier this month. But the car team also included hundreds of hardware engineers and car designers, some of who, Bloomberg reports, will be able to apply for jobs in other divisions of the company. The rest are likely to be laid off.

Apple has never spoken publicly about its efforts to build a vehicle, internally known as Project Titan. But a number of leaks over the years revealed the company’s ambitions to expand into a brand new product category it had no experience in. At the beginning of the project in 2014, Apple wanted to build fully self-driving car without pedals or a steering wheel with a remote command center ready to take over for a driver. But in recent years, Apple reportedly pared down its ambitions. As recently as last month, new reports suggested that Apple’s car, which could debut in 2028, would be an electric vehicle more akin to a Tesla than something completely new.

Project Titan also went through multiple leadership shakeups. In 2021, Apple appointed Kevin Lynch, the executive who previously oversaw Apple Watch development, to head the car division after Doug Field, Project Titan’s previous head, left for Ford.

Apple had reportedly considered pricing the car at around $100,000, in the ballpark of a high-end Tesla Model X. But Apple executives were reportedly concerned about profit margins at that price. The move is a rare setback for the company, which according to Bloomberg worked on “powertrains, self-driving hardware and software, car interiors and exteriors, and other key components” over the years.

Stability AI, the startup behind Stable Diffusion, the tool that uses generative AI to create images from text prompts, revealed Stable Diffusion 3, a next-generation model, on Thursday. Stability AI claimed that the new model, which isn’t widely available yet, improves image quality, works better with prompts containing multiple subjects, and can more accurate text as part of the generated image, something that previous Stable Diffusion models weren’t great at.

Stability AI CEO Emad Mosque posted some examples of this on X.

The announcement comes days after Stability AI’s largest rival, OpenAI, unveiled Sora, a brand new AI model capable of generating nearly-realistic, high-definition videos from simple text prompts. Sora, which isn’t available to the general public yet either, sparked concerns about its potential to create realistic-looking fake footage. OpenAI said it's working with experts in misinformation and hateful content to test the tool before making it widely available.Stability AI said it’s doing the same. “[We] have taken and continue to take reasonable steps to prevent the misuse of Stable Diffusion 3 by bad actors,” the company wrote in a blog post on its website. “By continually collaborating with researchers, experts, and our community, we expect to innovate further with integrity as we approach the model’s public release.”

It’s not clear when Stable Diffusion 3 will be released to the public, but until then, anyone interested can join a waitlist.

Electric car maker Rivian announced on Wednesday that it’s laying off 10 percent of its salaried workforce to cut costs after facing a quarterly loss. The Amazon-backed company reported that it lost $1.5 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023 and said that it expects to build 57,000 electric vehicles in 2024, the same number it built last year.

“Our business is facing a challenging macroeconomic environment — including historically high interest rates and geopolitical uncertainty — and we need to make purposeful changes now to ensure our promising future,” Rivian’s founder and CEO wrote to employees in an email, CNN reported. "We must strategically prioritize our growth areas of the business, including the launch of Peregrine and R2 as well as investing in our go-to-market capabilities."

As part of its plans to cut costs, Rivian will shut down a factory in Illinois in the middle of this year and will upgrade its manufacturing line to boost production rates by 30 precent.The company is expected to unveil the R2, a compact SUV in the $40,000 to $60,000 range, on March 7, although deliveries of the vehicle won’t start until 2026.

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday issued a safety communication warning people to stay way from smartwatches and smart rings that claim to measure blood sugar levels without pricking the skin. “The FDA has not authorized, cleared, or approved any smartwatch or smart ring that is intended to measure or estimate blood glucose values on its own,” the agency wrote in the communication, and asked consumers, patients, and caregivers to stay away from such devices.

Non invasive blood sugar monitoring isn’t currently possible on any consumer device Popular wearables like the Apple Watch and the Oura ring can, instead, pair with FDA-authorized wearable devices like the Dexcom G7, which uses needles to read your blood sugar levels. Getting a smartwatch or a smart ring to monitor blood sugar levels without penetrating the skin would represent a huge medical advance, allowing people with diabetes, for instance, to stop pricking themselves each day, and alerting pre-diabetics.

Both Apple and Samsung have reportedly been working on the tech for years. Last year, Bloomberg reported that Apple’s no-prick monitoring was at a “proof-of-concept stage” and could come to the market once the company managed to figure out how to shrink its size. Apple has been working on the project since 2010, although it will likely still be years before the technology is small enough to be built into the Apple Watch. Samsung, too, is exploring ways to build the technology into the Galaxy Ring, a product that the company recently announced.

Until that time, be skeptical of any device that claims to do this right now. Current smartwatches and smart rings “do not directly test blood glucose levels,” the FDA writes. If you spot any company selling a device with these claims, you can report it to the FDA through the agency’s MedWatch Voluntary Reporting Form.

Amazon, a company that employs more than 1.54 million people, has claimed that the National Labor Relations Board Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency responsible for protecting the rights of workers, is unconstitutional. Amazon made the claim in a legal document filed on Thursday as part of a case in which prosecutors from the Board have accused the e-commerce giant of discrimination against workers at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island who had voted to unionize, according to The New York Times.

Amazon is not the first company to challenge the Board’s constitutionality. Last month, Elon Musk’s SpaceX sued the NLRB after the agency accused the company of unlawfully firing eight employees and called the agency “unconstitutional” in the lawsuit. Weeks later, grocery chain Trader Joe’s, which the NLRB accused of union-busting, said that the NLRB’s structure and organization was “unconstitutional,” Bloomberg reported. And in separate lawsuits, two Starbucks baristas have independently challenged the agency’s structure as they sought to dissolve their unions.

Amazon’s claim is similar to the existing claims filed by SpaceX and Trader Joe’s. In the lawsuit, the company’s lawyers argued that “the structure of the N.L.R.B. violates the separation of powers” by “impeding the executive power provided for in Article II of the United States Constitution.” In addition, Amazon claimed that the NLRB’s hearings “can seek legal remedies beyond what’s allowed without a trial by jury.”

Seth Goldstein, a lawyer who represents unions in the Amazon and Trader Joe’s cases told Reuters that these challenges to the NLRB increase the chances of the issue reaching the Supreme Court. And they might cause employers to stop bargaining with unions in hope that courts will finally strip the federal agency of its powers, Goldstein said. Amazon has a contentious history with the NLRB, which said the company broke federal labor laws last year.