Author: InfoForTech

Charles Lamanna (left), Microsoft’s executive vice president of Business Applications & Agents, interviewed by GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop at GeekWire’s Agents of Transformation event at Block 41 in Seattle on March 24. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) Technical job candidates are adding a new line to their list of requests in the AI boom: ample access to AI capacity. Speaking at GeekWire’s Agents of Transformation event in Seattle on Tuesday, Microsoft EVP Charles Lamanna cited the example of a job candidate who said they would come aboard as long as their team was given a certain dollar amount of AI…

Last month, Samsung jacked up the price of two of its flagship smartphones by $100. Now, its two new midrange models—the Galaxy A37 5G and Galaxy A57 5G—are getting $50 price bumps, despite minor hardware updates over last year’s Galaxy A36 and A56. Samsung has also trimmed the lineup—there’s no successor to the Galaxy A26 this year, at least not yet.These price increases may be indicative of the economic climate, what with tariffs, higher oil prices due to the war in Iran, and the memory shortage that has driven up RAM and storage costs across the board. If a phone’s…

Artificial intelligence-native insurance provider Shepherd has just raised $42 million in a new funding round to underwrite the massive infrastructure boom that’s fueling the industry’s growth. The Series B round was led by Intact Private Capital and saw participation from Spark Capital, Costanoa Ventures and others, bringing the company’s total amount raised to $67 million. Cloud hyperscalers, chipmakers and frontier AI labs have collectively poured hundreds of billions of dollars into building out the infrastructure needed to support AI’s growth, such as data centers, power plants and chip fabrication plants. But a bottleneck has emerged that’s holding back many of…

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.Gasoline prices continue ticking higher as the United States and Israel’s war with Iran continues. As of March 23, the national average stands at $3.96 per gallon, nearly a dollar higher than at the start of the conflict. It’s also just shy of a tipping point that could push consumers toward electric vehicles.When gas prices top $4 per gallon, BloombergNEF estimates that the total cost of ownership for EVs becomes lower than for gas-powered vehicles. The exact crossover point depends on local prices…

From enhancing international business logistics to freeing up more hospital beds to helping farmers, MIT Professor Dimitris Bertsimas SM ’87, PhD ’88 summarized how his work in operations research has helped drive real-world improvements, while delivering the 54th annual James R. Killian Faculty Achievement Award Lecture at MIT on Thursday, March 19.Bertsimas also described how artificial intelligence is now being used in some of his scholarly projects and as a tool in MIT Open Learning efforts, which he currently directs — another facet of a highly productive and lauded career over four decades at the Institute. The Killian Award is…

Beyond the standard AI and measurement buzz, discover the hidden shifts in agentic commerce and data licensing that will redefine retail media winners in 2026. Retail media has spent the last two years graduating from a nice-to-have budget line into something brands treat as a core performance channel. The money reflects it. US retail media ad spend is projected to reach $69 billion in 2026- up from $60 billion in 2025. Europe grew 22% year over year, compared to an overall 6% for total ad spend. The market is not slowing down. With growth like that comes a lot of…

It’s about to get a lot easier for creators on Facebook and Instagram to push products to their followers. Meta will now allow creators to include clickable shopping links for products directly in their Reels.Brand partnerships and affiliate links, in which creators earn a portion of sales generated by their recommendations, are central to how creators earn money from Facebook and Instagram. But Meta has limited the ways in which they can direct their followers off-platform. As a result, creators often rely on third-party “link in bio” services for managing links to the stuff they endorse.Now, Meta says it will…

TeamPCP, the threat actor behind the recent compromises of Trivy and KICS, has now compromised a popular Python package named litellm, pushing two malicious versions containing a credential harvester, a Kubernetes lateral movement toolkit, and a persistent backdoor. Multiple security vendors, including Endor Labs and JFrog, revealed that litellm versions 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 were published on March 24, 2026, likely stemming from the package’s use of Trivy in their CI/CD workflow. Both the backdoored versions have since been removed from PyPI. “The payload is a three-stage attack: a credential harvester sweeping SSH keys, cloud credentials, Kubernetes secrets, cryptocurrency wallets, and…

Merely six months after it launched as a standalone app, the Sora AI video generator app is riding into the sunset. The move is pretty surprising, as Google has ramped up its AI video efforts with Veo, while Chinese AI labels continue to deliver impressive results with products such as the viral Seedance AI video engine. A quick death for a viral AI tool “What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing. We’ll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work,” OpenAI shared in a post. Interestingly,…

Artificial intelligence holds promise for helping doctors diagnose patients and personalize treatment options. However, an international group of scientists led by MIT cautions that AI systems, as currently designed, carry the risk of steering doctors in the wrong direction because they may overconfidently make incorrect decisions.One way to prevent these mistakes is to program AI systems to be more “humble,” according to the researchers. Such systems would reveal when they are not confident in their diagnoses or recommendations and would encourage users to gather additional information when the diagnosis is uncertain.“We’re now using AI as an oracle, but we can use…