No internet, no phone: Canada wildfires expose fragility of rural infrastructure

Shortly before sunset on Friday, residents of Canada’s Yukon territory discovered their connection to the outside world had vanished. Internet access had gone. Mobile phones showed no signal. Landlines had failed. Chaos quickly set in. Electronic payments couldn’t be processed. In Whitehorse, the capital, most ATMs couldn’t function and the few that did were quickly … Read more

Billionaire Frank McCourt says he's putting together a consortium to buy TikTok

Billionaire businessman and real estate mogul Frank McCourt said he’s putting together a consortium to purchase TikTok’s U.S. business, adding to the number of investors hoping to benefit from a new federal law that requires TikTok’s China-based parent company to sell the popular platform or face a ban. The announcement, posted late Tuesday on McCourt’s … Read more

Spate of Self-Driving Probes Points to Higher Safety Bar

A Tesla car with the Autopilot feature engaged. (Christopher Goodney/Bloomberg News) [Stay on top of transportation news: Get TTNews in your inbox.] Companies offering driver-assistance systems and developing autonomous vehicles are entering a new phase of more exacting oversight, with the top U.S. auto safety regulator investigating four of the industry’s most prominent companies in … Read more

Google I/O 2024: Google Unveils AI Video Generator Veo, Takes on OpenAI’s Sora

Google I/O 2024’s keynote session was a 112-minute-long affair where the company made several major announcements focused on artificial intelligence (AI). The announcements ranged from new AI models to integration of AI into Google products, but perhaps one of the most interesting introductions was Veo, an AI-powered video generation model, that can generate 1080p resolution … Read more

OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever departs

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and chief scientist, has left the artificial intelligence start-up six months after moving against its chief executive Sam Altman in a shock coup that ultimately proved unsuccessful. “After almost a decade, … Read more