This week, the tech industry saw Apple officially scrap all plans for its “Project Titan” electric car due to profitability concerns. Elsewhere on the product front, Samsung launched its latest wearable dubbed the Galaxy Ring.
It was a busy week in the AI realm. Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its founders on the grounds that the platform is no longer producing artificial intelligence “for the benefit of humanity broadly,” and Adweek got access to internal documents that detail Google’s new beta AI program.
Below, Hypebeast has rounded up the top tech stories of the week so you can stay up to date on trends in the industry.
After being demoed at the 2024 Mobile World Conference, Samsung has officially unveiled its Galaxy Ring.
Samsung’s latest wearable arrives as its own iteration of the trendy Oura Ring, designed to track its wearer’s health data.
“As a new addition to our wearables portfolio, Galaxy Ring will offer users an all-new way to simplify everyday wellness, empowering them with greater insights and more ways to understand themselves day and night,” Samsung said.
While pricing and a release date have yet to surface, the ring is expected to drop sometime this year.
Adweek reported that Google is tapping into a new tool that whips up AI-generated articles. To test out the technology? Google is paying small news outlets to publish these articles.
“The experimental tool is being responsibly designed to help small, local publishers produce high-quality journalism using factual content from public data sources – like a local government’s public information office or health authority,” a Google spokesperson told Hypebeast.
“Publishers remain in full editorial control of what is ultimately published on their site. These tools are not intended to, and cannot, replace the essential role journalists have in reporting, creating, and fact-checking their articles.”
Bloomberg broke the news this week that Apple has officially scrapped all plans for its electric car dubbed “Project Titan.”
In the works for a decade, Project Titan was initially supposed to be a self-driving car. Apple had nixed those plans last month, announcing it would instead pivot to a less autonomous vehicle.
The decision stemmed from profitability concerns, with employees wary of the $100,000 selling point in comparison to the hundreds of millions of dollars Apple continued to invest in Project Titan year after year.
Elon Musk, co-founder and backer of OpenAI, sued the platform and its founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman.
Musk believes the company has departed from its initial purpose of creating AI “for the benefit of humanity broadly” and rather now is created “primarily to serve the proprietary commercial interests of Microsoft.”
“To this day, OpenAI, Inc.‘s website continues to profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI ‘benefits all of humanity.’ In reality, however, OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” the lawsuit reads.
The British footwear designer speaks with Hypebeast on becoming Birkenstock’s first artist-in-residence at its brand-new community space in East London.
