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      Oracle’s Role in TikTok’s Future Gets Capitol Hill Scrutiny

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      Top congressional aides met with Oracle on Tuesday to talk about TikTok, which faces a ban in the United States unless it is sold to a non-Chinese owner by early April.As questions continue to swirl around Washington about the future of TikTok, the name of one potential suitor for the popular video app keeps coming up: Oracle.On Tuesday, Oracle met with top aides on Capitol Hill to talk about how the U.S. tech giant, which processes and serves TikTok user data, plans to work with the Chinese-owned video app in the United States in the coming weeks, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting who weren’t authorized to speak publicly.The questions came as TikTok stares down an April 5 deadline from a federal law that prohibits its distribution in the country if it is not sold to a non-Chinese owner. TikTok’s owner is the Chinese internet company ByteDance, and its Chinese ties have raised questions about whether the app poses a national security threat in the United States.At Tuesday’s meeting, the aides also raised the topic of whether Oracle would be involved in running TikTok, after a recent Politico report that the company was in talks with the White House over a deal, one of the people said. The aides sought assurances from Oracle that any deal would comply with the law. The meeting, which was requested by aides, included staff members from the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Speaker Mike Johnson’s office, and the House Energy and Commerce Committee, two people with knowledge of the meeting said.TikTok is facing yet another political scramble over its future. In January, President Trump delayed enforcement of the law that would ban TikTok from the United States, which passed Congress with bipartisan support and was upheld unanimously by the Supreme Court. Mr. Trump has promised to make a deal for the app to protect national security, and tapped Vice President JD Vance in February to find an arrangement to save it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Meta Seeks to Block Further Sales of Ex-Employee’s Scathing Memoir

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      An arbitrator has prevented the employee from promoting her book and disparaging the company until private arbitration concludes.Meta won a legal victory on Wednesday against a former employee who published an explosive, tell-all memoir, as an arbitrator temporarily prohibited the author from promoting or further distributing copies.Sarah Wynn-Williams last week released “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism,” a book that describes a series of incendiary allegations of sexual harassment and other inappropriate behavior by senior executives during her tenure at the company. Meta pursued arbitration, arguing that the book is prohibited under a nondisparagement contract she signed as a global affairs employee.During an emergency hearing on Wednesday, the arbitrator, Nicholas Gowen, found that Meta had provided enough grounds that Ms. Wynn-Williams had potentially violated her contract, according to a legal filing posted by Meta. The two parties will now begin private arbitration.In addition to halting book promotions and sales, Ms. Wynn-Williams must refrain from engaging in or “amplifying any further disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments,” according to the filing. She also must retract all previous disparaging comments “to the extent within her control.”The filing did not appear to limit the publisher, Flatiron Books, or its parent company, Macmillan, from continuing publication of the memoir.“Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism” was released last week.Flatiron, via Associated PressMeta has vehemently denied the allegations in the book.The book is a “mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives,” a Meta spokesman, Andy Stone, said in a statement. Ms. Wynn-Williams was fired for cause, he added, and an investigation at the time determined that “she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment.”A spokeswoman for Flatiron Books did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Ms. Wynn-Williams, who worked at what was then called Facebook from 2011 to 2018, did not comment.The move to publish the arbitration filing is one of Meta’s most forceful public repudiations of a former employee’s tell-all memoir, several of which have been published over the past two decades.Meta executives have also responded online to Ms. Wynn-Williams’s claims, calling most of them wildly exaggerated or flat-out false.It is unclear whether Meta’s attempts to claw back Ms. Wynn-Williams’s book will ultimately be successful. In 2023, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that it is generally illegal for companies to offer severance agreements that prohibit workers from making potentially disparaging statements about former employers, including discussing sexual harassment or sexual assault accusations.In a Meta shareholder report in 2022, the company’s board of directors said that it did not require employees “to remain silent about harassment or discrimination,” and that the company “strictly prohibits retaliation against any personnel” for speaking up on these issues.And in 2018, Meta said it would no longer force employees to settle sexual harassment claims in private arbitration, following a similar stance taken by Google at the time.Sheera Frenkel More

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      Lila Sciences Uses A.I. to Turbocharge Scientific Discovery

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      Across the spectrum of uses for artificial intelligence, one stands out.The big, inspiring A.I. opportunity on the horizon, experts agree, lies in accelerating and transforming scientific discovery and development. Fed by vast troves of scientific data, A.I. promises to generate new drugs to combat disease, new agriculture to feed the world’s population and new materials to unlock green energy — all in a tiny fraction of the time of traditional research.Technology companies like Microsoft and Google are making A.I. tools for science and collaborating with partners in fields like drug discovery. And the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year went to scientists using A.I. to predict and create proteins.This month, Lila Sciences went public with its own ambitions to revolutionize science through A.I. The start-up, which is based in Cambridge, Mass., had worked in secret for two years “to build scientific superintelligence to solve humankind’s greatest challenges.”Relying on an experienced team of scientists and $200 million in initial funding, Lila has been developing an A.I. program trained on published and experimental data, as well as the scientific process and reasoning. The start-up then lets that A.I. software run experiments in automated, physical labs with a few scientists to assist.Already, in projects demonstrating the technology, Lila’s A.I. has generated novel antibodies to fight disease and developed new materials for capturing carbon from the atmosphere. Lila turned those experiments into physical results in its lab within months, a process that most likely would take years with conventional research.Catie Ramnarine, a research assistant at the Lila Sciences lab in Cambridge, Mass., where artificial intelligence is rapidly accelerating the scientific process. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s Call to Scrap ‘Horrible’ Chip Program Spreads Panic

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      The president’s attack on the key tenet of the Biden administration’s industrial policy has set off concerns that he may claw back its funding.As President Trump addressed Congress last week, he veered off script to attack a sensitive topic, the CHIPS Act, a bipartisan law aimed at making the United States less reliant on Asia for semiconductors.Republican lawmakers had sought and received reassurances over the past few months that the Trump administration would support the program Congress created. But halfway through Mr. Trump’s remarks, he called the law a “horrible, horrible thing.”“You should get rid of the CHIP Act,” he told Speaker Mike Johnson as some lawmakers applauded.The CHIPS program was one of the few things to unite much of Washington in recent years, as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle worked with private companies to draft a bill that would funnel $50 billion to rebuild the U.S. semiconductor industry, which makes the foundational technology used to power cars, computers and coffee makers. After President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. signed it into law in 2022, companies found sites in Arizona, New York and Ohio to construct new factories. The Commerce Department vetted those plans and began to dole out billions of dollars in grants.Now, Mr. Trump is threatening to upend years of work. Chip company executives, worried that funding could be clawed back, are calling lawyers to ask what wiggle room the administration has to terminate signed contracts, said eight people familiar with the requests.After the speech, Senator Todd Young, the Indiana Republican who championed CHIPS, said he reached out to the White House to seek clarity about Mr. Trump’s attack because the criticism was “in tension” with the administration’s previous support.Senator Todd Young, the Indiana Republican who championed CHIPS, said he reached out to the White House to seek clarity about Mr. Trump’s attack, which he said was “in tension” with the administration’s previous support.Eric Lee/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Federal Grant Program Opens Door to Elon Musk’s Starlink

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      The Trump administration said on Wednesday that it would overhaul a $42 billion federal grant program aimed at expanding high-speed internet to the nation, including easing some rules that could benefit Elon Musk’s satellite internet service, Starlink.The program will be revamped to “take a tech-neutral approach” in its distribution of funds to states, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in a statement. The program’s rules, which were created during the Biden administration, previously favored broadband lines made of fiber-optic cables attached to homes.“The department is ripping out the Biden administration’s pointless requirements,” Mr. Lutnick said. The Commerce Department will also remove regulatory and other barriers that slow down construction and connection to households, he added.Congress created the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program in 2021 to extend broadband to the most remote areas of the nation. The Commerce Department came up with standards and rules for states and territories applying for the funds — including the preference for fiber-optic broadband, which provides the fastest internet service speeds.Mr. Musk, who is a close adviser to President Trump and helping to lead a government efficiency initiative, is chief executive of SpaceX, the rocket company that makes Starlink. Starlink uses low-altitude satellites to beam internet service to dishes anywhere on the planet and then to devices. It serves nearly five million subscribers worldwide and was used by emergency responders late last year in North Carolina when communications networks shut down after a hurricane.The Commerce Department’s internet program has not yet disbursed any funds, and Republicans have used it as an example of a program that was slowed down by red tape.Some have accused the Biden administration of unfairly blocking Starlink from the grants and say the satellite service can immediately serve some of the most remote areas of the nation.In 2023, the Federal Communications Commission rejected Starlink’s application for almost $900 million in subsidies in a separate rural broadband program, saying the company failed to show it could meet service requirements for the funding.Brendan Carr, then a Republican F.C.C. commissioner and now chairman of the agency, opposed that decision and said the action had put the F.C.C. on a “growing list of administrative agencies that are taking action against Elon Musk’s businesses.”Mr. Musk’s business interests — which also include the electric-car maker Tesla and the social media company X — have prompted concerns about potential conflicts of interest as he makes important decisions in Washington.On Wednesday, some public interest groups expressed concern that Mr. Lutnick’s plans to change the broadband program could directly benefit Mr. Musk.“Fiber broadband is widely understood to be better than other internet options — like Starlink’s satellites — because it delivers significantly faster speeds,” said Drew Garner, a director of policy engagement for the nonprofit Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.The Commerce Department did not immediately respond to requests for details on the plan. Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment. More

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      Apple to Invest $500 Billion in U.S. as Trump Tariffs Loom

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      The company pledged the multibillion-dollar investment over the next four years and said it would create 20,000 jobs. The Texas facility is set to open in 2026.Days after Apple’s chief executive met with President Trump, the company said on Monday that it planned to spend $500 billion and hire 20,000 people in the United States over the next four years and open a factory in Texas to make the machines that power the company’s push into artificial intelligence.“We are bullish on the future of American innovation, and we’re proud to build on our longstanding U.S. investments,” Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said in a statement. The company made similar, smaller pledges during the Biden administration and President Trump’s first term. It hasn’t fulfilled all its previous promises.Mr. Cook met with Mr. Trump last week. After that meeting, Mr. Trump said that the company would shift production to the United States: “They’re going to build here instead because they don’t want to pay the tariffs,” Mr. Trump said in a speech to a gathering of governors.Most iPhones are manufactured in China by the Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn, which will be involved in Apple’s new Houston facility. Earlier this month, U.S. tariffs of 10 percent on all Chinese products took effect. Levies on imports from Canada, Mexico and other major trading partners could be imposed in the coming weeks.Foxconn has spent millions of dollars over the past two years building up its operations outside of China, including in Texas, and in Mexico, where the company already assembles A.I. servers. The company’s chairman previously said that this expanded footprint would help insulate Foxconn against U.S. tariffs.Last year, Foxconn purchased a tract of land north of Houston, next to one of its warehouses, which it said would be used for its artificial intelligence business.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A.I. Is Changing How Silicon Valley Builds Start-Ups

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      Tech start-ups typically raised huge sums to hire armies of workers and grow fast. Now artificial intelligence tools are making workers more productive and spurring tales of “tiny team” success.Almost every day, Grant Lee, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, hears from investors who try to persuade him to take their money. Some have even sent him and his co-founders personalized gift baskets.Mr. Lee, 41, would normally be flattered. In the past, a fast-growing start-up like Gamma, the artificial intelligence start-up he helped establish in 2020, would have constantly looked out for more funding.But like many young start-ups in Silicon Valley today, Gamma is pursuing a different strategy. It is using artificial intelligence tools to increase its employees’ productivity in everything from customer service and marketing to coding and customer research.That means Gamma, which makes software that lets people create presentations and websites, has no need for more cash, Mr. Lee said. His company has hired only 28 people to get “tens of millions” in annual recurring revenue and nearly 50 million users. Gamma is also profitable.“If we were from the generation before, we would easily be at 200 employees,” Mr. Lee said. “We get a chance to rethink that, basically rewrite the playbook.”The old Silicon Valley model dictated that start-ups should raise a huge sum of money from venture capital investors and spend it hiring an army of employees to scale up fast. Profits would come much later. Until then, head count and fund-raising were badges of honor among founders, who philosophized that bigger was better.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A.I. Is Prompting an Evolution, Not an Extinction, for Coders

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      A.I. tools from Microsoft and other companies are helping write code, placing software engineers at the forefront of the technology’s potential to disrupt the work force.John Giorgi uses artificial intelligence to make artificial intelligence.The 29-year-old computer scientist creates software for a health care start-up that records and summarizes patient visits for doctors, freeing them from hours spent typing up clinical notes.To do so, Mr. Giorgi has his own timesaving helper: an A.I. coding assistant. He taps a few keys and the software tool suggests the rest of the line of code. It can also recommend changes, fetch data, identify bugs and run basic tests. Even though the A.I. makes some mistakes, it saves him up to an hour many days.“I can’t imagine working without it now,” Mr. Giorgi said.That sentiment is increasingly common among software developers, who are at the forefront of adopting A.I. agents, assistant programs tailored to help employees do their jobs in fields including customer service and manufacturing. The rapid improvement of the technology has been accompanied by dire warnings that A.I. could soon automate away millions of jobs — and software developers have been singled out as prime targets.But the outlook for software developers is more likely evolution than extinction, according to experienced software engineers, industry analysts and academics. For decades, better tools have automated some coding tasks, but the demand for software and the people who make it has only increased.A.I., they say, will accelerate that trend and level up the art and craft of software design.“The skills software developers need will change significantly, but A.I. will not eliminate the need for them,” said Arnal Dayaratna, an analyst at IDC, a technology research firm. “Not anytime soon anyway.”The outlook for software engineers offers a window into the impact that generative A.I. — the kind behind chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT — is likely to have on knowledge workers across the economy, from doctors and lawyers to marketing managers and financial analysts. Predictions about the technology’s consequences vary widely, from wiping out whole swaths of the work force to hyper-charging productivity as an elixir for economic growth.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More