Axios

AI experts are pushing the U.S. to ease immigration policies, arguing that the country is hobbling itself in a critical geopolitical race in which American dominance is slipping.

The big picture: Two of the Trump administration's major policy goals seem at cross purposes. Clamping down on immigrants and visitors could hamstring AI development in the U.S., which the White House says is a top priority.

Made-up stories — spoken yarns, art, games, books and films — have always been a diversion reserved for the end of a long day. Now they're becoming alloyed with the rest of our lives, jostling for space with facts.

What's happening: We are surrounded by lifelike synthetic realities — super-engaging parallel worlds, enabled by new technologies, that are coming to define how we understand and interact with each other.

Disney CEO Bob Iger resigned from Apple's board on Tuesday, according to SEC paperwork filed on Friday by Apple.

Why it matters: Presumably, he left due to conflict of interest. Both Disney and Apple are expected to launch rival video streaming subscription services this November.

More than 1,000 accounts across several different social media platforms with suspicious, bot-like characteristics helped push quote tweets, a tweet that is retweeted but additional text is added, from Donald Trump campaign accounts during the third primary debate, according to an analysis provided to Axios by social media intelligence company Storyful. Those tweets accounted for the top 3 most-shared links across several social media platforms, including Facebook, Reddit, etc., during the debate.

Why it matters: Despite attempts by social media companies to weed out malicious behavior online, automated accounts are still driving a large part of the social conversation around political events.

Software designers can work almost anywhere, but writing code for a self-driving car tends to be a hands-on exercise — engineers need to directly experience how a vehicle performs and hone software as needed.

The big picture: Companies that design autonomous vehicles are maturing and beginning to rethink that convention. There's a war for talent across all tech industries, requiring AV companies to get creative to attract the top experts.

As part of its antitrust inquiry into Google, the Justice Department is seeking a variety of documents and information from DuckDuckGo, a privacy-oriented search service that competes with Google, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: The Justice Department appears to be seeking information similar to what was gathered in an earlier EU inquiry — particularly about the types of deals and arrangements that Google and other companies have made to get their services installed by default on various devices and browsers.