The White House unveiled a multipronged plan Monday to help bolster K-12 schools' cybersecurity as ransomware continues to pummel their systems.
Why it matters: Schools have struggled to improve their cyber defense postures due to a lack of funding and buy-in from district administrators trying to juggle other priorities.
ConductorOne, a startup focused on securing online identities, has closed its Series A round after landing an additional $12 million investment led by Felicis Ventures.
Why it matters: Investors are actively eyeing new investments in startups like ConductorOne that are trying to tackle the growing number of hacks that leverage stolen login credentials to infiltrate company networks.
The Federal Trade Commission has withdrawn an antitrust lawsuit that sought to block Intercontinental Exchange from buying home mortgage software provider Black Knight.
Why it matters: FTC chair Lina Khan has regularly sought court over compromise, but might be changing her tactics after a series of legal losses.
Add artificial intelligence to the long list of topics that evenly divide the American people today.
Yes, but: The relatively even split on overall favorability masks significant differences in attitudes toward and use of AI along income, age and racial and ethnic lines, per an Axios review of more than a dozen recent polls of American adults.
OpenAI, the parent company to ChatGPT, will fund a new journalism ethics initiative at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute with a $395,000 grant, executives told Axios.
Why it matters: It's part of a broader effort by OpenAI to provide support for quality journalism, which it relies on to train its algorithms.
Tricking generative AI to help conduct scams and cyberattacks doesn't require much coding expertise, new research shared exclusively with Axios warns.
Driving the news: Researchers at IBM released a report Tuesday detailing easy workarounds they've uncovered to get large language models (LLMs) — including ChatGPT — to write malicious code and give poor security advice.
A police officer told me what she had for breakfast and a shady man in a fedora seemingly confessed to a crime, but everyone was reluctant to tell me how tall they were when I recently played around with a tech demo called Inworld Origins.
The demo is meant to show the potential of generative AI in dialogue-driven video games.
The world's next Holocaust museum is being built inside one of the planet's most popular video games, Fortnite.
Driving the news: The virtual building, called the Voices of the Forgotten Museum, will let players walk its halls to read plaques describing the genocide against Jews in Nazi Germany and see photos of Jewish resistance fighters and heroic individuals who sheltered Jews.
Apple's comparatively soft hardware sales are a concern for Wall Street, but there's at least one market where the technology giant's products still command top dollar.
Driving the news: Last week — just hours before Apple reported earnings that highlighted its third consecutive quarter of falling turnover in iPhones, iPads and Macs — Rally sold a mint-condition, first-generation iPod on its collectibles investing platform for $29,000.
Telephone and Data Systems said it's exploring options for U.S. Cellular, in which it holds an 83% stake.
Why it matters: Chicago-based U.S. Cellular is America's largest regional wireless carrier with 5 million customers and 4,600 employees, having so far avoided the industry's consolidation wave.
Why it matters: Musk, 52, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, 39 — who have been spoiling all summer about a potential "cage match," perhaps in Vegas — amped up the trash talk yesterday. Both insist they're serious.
General Assembly, a tech-skills training company, has appointed Daniele Grassi president.
Details: Grassi was previously president and chief business officer of tech bootcamp company Ironhack. He replaces Lisa Lewin, who left to be CEO-in-residence at Primary Venture Partners.
In an interview, Grassi tells Axios that he wants to help General Assembly expand its enterprise relationships — such as building training programs for established tech workers inside of businesses.
Flashback: General Assembly was acquired by Adecco Group, a Swiss staffing and workforce development company, in 2018.
By that time, a majority of its revenue had already shifted from consumer-facing to business clients.
Zoom out: Grassi's appointment and vision will undoubtedly further integrate General Assembly's programs into Adecco Group's employer partnerships. This is crucial, as growth in bootcamp enrollment across the industry has been flat this year compared to last year.
There's been a shift in the type of students — from "early adopters" to students from a broad range of sectors, such as professional services and finance — as companies double down on tech, according to Grassi.
What they're saying: "[T]he tech industry has matured and the demand for tech roles has expanded to a broader range of industries," says Grassi, whose official start date was July 31.
What to watch: Demand for data analytics is very high, and will continue to grow with the development of AI and large language models.
Comparatively, UX design skills have become less in demand.
On any given day, Dallas motorists traveling along I-20 or I-45 are likely to be sharing the road with a self-driving truck that has the equivalent of a learner's permit.
Why it matters: Dallas is the hub of autonomous truck testing and development, thanks to its vital freight corridors, business-friendly policies and generally favorable weather.
The big picture: For all the attention garnered by Meta's release of its Llama open source AI models, the company's more essential use of AI has been in leveraging the technology at the heart of its advertising business.
By blitzing a troubled neighborhood with "smart city" technology — including AI cameras on streetlights and ubiquitous Wi-Fi — Dallas officials have seen crime reduction and quality-of-life improvements that they hope to replicate elsewhere.
Why it matters: Smart city initiatives fell out of favor nationally after lots of money was spent with few results — but projects like the one in Red Cloud in Southeast Dallas are starting to deliver on the promise that earlier efforts did not.
