Techlife News

Shares of Nvidia, already one of the world’s most valuable companies, skyrocketed Thursday after the chipmaker forecast a huge jump in revenue, signaling how vastly the broadening use of artificial intelligence could reshape the tech sector. The California company is close to joining the exclusive club of $1 trillion companies like Alphabet, Apple and Microsoft, after shares jumped 25% in early trading. Late Wednesday the maker of graphics chips for gaming and artificial intelligence reported a quarterly profit of more than $2 billion and revenue of $7 billion, both exceeding Wall Street expectations. Yet its projections for sales of $11 billion this quarter is what caught Wall Street off guard. It’s a 64% jump from last year during the same period, and well above the $7.2 billion industry analysts were forecasting. “It looks like…

Delaware’s low elevation mixed with crowded beaches and limited exit routes make the state particularly vulnerable to massive flooding, but officials hope an influx of federal infrastructure money will trigger future evacuation plans automatically via artificial intelligence. The Biden administration was set to announce a total of $53 million in grants Thursday to Delaware and seven other states aimed at high-tech solutions to traffic congestion problems. Although the money comes from the infrastructure law the president signed in 2021, many of the programs — including the $5 million for flood response efforts in Biden’s home state — have evolved since then. “What’s new is the predictive analysis; the machine learning,” U.S. Federal Highway Administrator Shailen Bhatt, Delaware’s former transportation secretary, said in an interview. “Because now we have access to all this…

Virgin Galactic completed what’s expected to be its final test flight Thursday before taking paying customers on brief trips to space. Six of the company’s employees, including two pilots, landed at Spaceport America in southern New Mexico after the short up-and-down flight that included a few minutes of weightlessness. It took about an hour for the mother ship to carry the spaceplane to an altitude where it could fire its rocket and make the final push to the edge of space. “Successful boost, WE HAVE REACHED SPACE!” Virgin Galactic tweeted. The flight came nearly two years after founder Richard Branson beat fellow billionaire and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and rocket company Blue Origin into space. Bezos ended up flying nine days later from West Texas and Blue Origin has since launched several passenger…

Best Buy turned in a first-quarter profit that beat Wall Street expectations, while the nation’s largest consumer electronics chain continued to wrestle with weak consumer demand for gadgets. But the Minneapolis-based chain predicted on Thursday that the slump in consumer electronics will bottom out by year-end as customers who bought gadgets at the onset of the pandemic will start to update their devices. For now, Best Buy reaffirmed its cautious financial outlook, underscoring continued economic uncertainty. Best Buy’s sales during the depths of the pandemic were fueled by oversized spending by Americans who splurged on gadgets to help them work from home or help their children with virtual learning. Government stimulus checks drove a lot of that spending. But more than a year ago, consumers began to pull back from items that were…

In the agonies of the virus that upended most of the world, millions of people from Bogota to Berlin saw what life could be like on two wheels instead of four. Even as commuting to the office and going to school plunged at the height of COVID lockdowns, outdoor recreation, and cycling in particular, surged in country after country as people looked to escape isolation in a relatively safe way. In response, cities worldwide have developed bikeways with new urgency since 2020. The question is whether people stick with their new cycling habit in these closer-to-normal times. On Friday (19), Bike to Work Day in the U.S., the automatic counters that record each passing cyclist in many cities will get the latest numbers. So far the evidence is incomplete and varies by place. But…

A lawyer for Twitter owner Elon Musk accused Microsoft of misusing the service’s data and demanded an audit from the software giant. The letter primarily addresses a seemingly narrow set of alleged infractions by Microsoft in drawing information from Twitter’s database of tweets. But the move could foreshadow more serious developments. Musk has previously accused Microsoft and its partner OpenAI in a tweet of “illegally” using Twitter data to develop sophisticated AI systems such as ChatGPT. “ Lawsuit time,” Musk wrote in that April tweet. But the letter, signed by Musk lawyer Alex Spiro, tiptoed around that concern. It noted that Microsoft’s agreement with Twitter barred it from overuse of the service’s data such as exceeding “reasonable request volume” or “excessive or abusive usage.” Spiro then noted that “despite these limitations,” Microsoft had…