Business / Computers and Software

Forgive me for starting with a cliché, a piece of finance jargon that has recently slipped into the tech lexicon, but I’m afraid I must talk about “moats.” Popularized decades ago by Warren Buffett to refer to a company’s competitive…

Rene Haas is half-prone on a couch in his office in San Jose, California. A basketball rests in his hand, partly obscuring his face. Haas had grimaced when WIRED’s photographer first asked him to assume this position. The headlines came to…

The Internal Revenue Service paid Palantir $1.8 million last year to improve a custom tool designed to help the tax agency identify the “highest-value” cases for audits, collection of unpaid taxes, and potential criminal investigations,…

Luis von Ahn could have retired to a beach somewhere years ago. Best known as the CEO of the learning app Duolingo, von Ahn in the 2000s invented the captcha, those infuriating little online tests that force people to prove they’re not…

This week on Uncanny Valley, hosts Brian Barrett and Zoë Schiffer discuss the highlights from Nvidia’s annual developer conference, and why Tesla recently got in trouble with some of its most loyal fans online. Plus, Meta’s initial decision…

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the governor of New Jersey made an unusual admission: He’d run out of COBOL developers. The state’s unemployment insurance systems were written in the 60-year-old programming language and needed to be updated…

Supercomputers can be measured in several ways, but the vital statistic is their ability to perform floating-point operations per second, or flops. Flopping as fast as possible is what makes you successful. At her peak, Sierra could hit…

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is asking companies to provide information about “commercial Big Data and Ad Tech” products that would “directly support investigations activities,” according to a request for information posted on…

When Sam Altman said one year ago that OpenAI’s Roman Empire is the actual Roman Empire, he wasn’t kidding. In the same way that the Romans gradually amassed an empire of land spanning three continents and one-ninth of the Earth’s…

Earlier this year, WIRED said that AMD CEO Lisa Su was “out for Nvidia’s blood.” The American chipmaker is still small compared to the juggernaut that is Nvidia—their market caps are $353 billion and $4.4 trillion, respectively—but Su’s…