Tesla denies brake failure in deadly collision, Google to pay almost $400 million in privacy settlement, and Twitter is helping its competitors flourish.
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That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now, welcome to Hashtag Trending. It’s Wednesday, November 16, and I’m your host Ashee Pamma.
Tesla is denying that the brake failed in a deadly collision involving a Tesla vehicle in China that killed two people. The incident occurred in Chaozhou, China. Several video footage showed the white Tesla Model Y speeding down the street, seemingly out of control, colliding with a motorcyclist and a student before finally crashing into a store. Tesla has launched an investigation into the matter, and according to Elon Musk, the data recovered from the car did not show that brakes were applied at all. The company also noted that the brake lights never flashed in the video footage. The investigation to find the cause of the incident is still ongoing.
Source: El Pais
Google will pay $391 million in a privacy settlement over its location tracking practices. The charges, laid down by 40 attorneys general, accused the company of misleading users about location tracking activities. They alleged that Google continued to track users’ movements when the location tracking has been turned off. In addition to paying one of the largest privacy fines in U.S. history, Google will also amend its location tracking disclosures starting next year.
Source: Engadget
The chaos at Twitter is fostering the growth of competing platforms. Business Insider reported that while there have been more downloads of the Twitter app on mobile devices, the growth is less impressive than its competitors. Mastodon, for example, saw downloads grow by 657 per cent in the 12 days after Musk Elon Musk took over Twitter. Tumbler also saw a 96 per cent user increase. While these numbers appear impressive, note that Twitter has a huge user base, so even a small percentage of growth is still a massive increase.
Source: Business Insider
Do AI need to sleep? One research team thinks so. According to a new paper published in the PLOS Computational Biology journal, giving AIs some shut-eye may help its sequential learning, or learning one new thing after another. Current AI systems excel at any new task they learn, but their performance in previously learned tasks suffers. The idea of putting AI to sleep may be able to simulate memory consolidation, which helps to reduce “catastrophic forgetting” and improve a neural network’s memory of things learned prior.
Source:Vice
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash briefings or your Google Home daily briefing. Make sure to sign up for our Daily IT Wire newsletter to get all the news that matters directly in your inbox every day. Also, catch the next episode of Hashtag Tendances, our weekly Hashtag Trending episode in French, which drops every Thursday morning. If you have a suggestion or a tip, drop us a line in the comments or via email. Thank you for listening, I’m Ashee Pamma.