Keystone Aside, U.s. Eyes Its Own Tar Sands

Tesla Inc. eliminated almost its entire Supercharger organization, which has built a vast network of public charging stations that virtually every major automaker is in the process of tapping into in the US. The decision to cut the nearly 500-person group, including its senior director, Rebecca Tinucci, was made by Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk in the last week, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) On Sunday, word began to spread on social media about a new mystery chatbot named "gpt2-chatbot" that appeared in the LMSYS Chatbot Arena. Some people speculate that it may be a secret test version of OpenAI's upcoming GPT-4.5 or GPT-5 large language model (LLM). The paid version of ChatGPT is currently powered by GPT-4 Turbo. Currently, the new model is only available for use through the Chatbot Arena website, although in a limited way.

Enlarge / An iPhone in Standby mode, charging wirelessly on a desk. (credit: Apple) If your iPhone's alarm hasn't woken you lately, it seems you're not alone: Apple has confirmed to Today that a software bug is to blame, following user complaints on TikTok and other social platforms. Apple is "aware of an issue causing some iPhone alarms to not play the expected sound," according to the report and "is working on a fix." The company's official statement didn't go into more detail on what caused the bug or why it seems to affect some users but not others. These sorts of bugs usually relate to some kind of time change; one circa 2010 iOS alarm bug was caused by Daylight Saving Time, and another cropped up in the first two days of 2011 when alarms suddenly stopped working for the first two days of the year (for whatever reason.

Enlarge (credit: Razer) The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced this week a proposed settlement [PDF] against Razer that would see the tech company pay $1,171,254.33 for its misleading claims about the Zephyr RGB face mask. Razer marketed the device as offering capabilities similar to those of an N95 respirator. On October 21, 2021, Razer began selling the Zephyr and its replacement filters.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Chesnot ) The European Commission today accused Meta of violating rules related to deceptive advertising, political content, and election monitoring. The owner of Facebook and Instagram "may have breached the Digital Services Act (DSA)," the EU government body said in a press release. "The Commission suspects that Meta does not comply with DSA obligations related to addressing the dissemination of deceptive advertisements, disinformation campaigns, and coordinated inauthentic behavior in the EU," the EC said.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Alexander Koerner) Another day, another round of Google layoffs. TechCrunch reports the company has axed people across development teams like the Flutter, Dart, and Python groups. Google confirmed the layoffs to TechCrunch, but didn't say how many people were affected. Flutter is Google's write-once, run-anywhere development kit.