Ashley Madison Is Still Around, a Powerful Chatbot Disappeared, Elon Musk Lays Off More Workers and More

This week saw a blast from the past as we told the tales of numerous fraud victims who were targeted by scammers on the cheating site, Ashley Madison. A new chatbot came and went leaving so many people with questions. And then there’s Elon Musk who went “hardcore” with layoffs he even got rid of those pesky interns that really hit a company’s bottom line with those big salaries given to college students. Here are the top tech stories of the week.

Ashley Madison promotes itself as a dating site that helps people cheat on their partners. But newly released consumer complaints filed with the FTC, obtained exclusively by Gizmodo, should probably give any potential cheaters pause. The site is lousy with extortion attempts, to put it mildly. - Matt Novak Read More

A mysterious new AI chatbot called “gpt2-chatbot” turned heads this week after it became available on a major large language model benchmarking site, LMSYS Org. No one knows where it came from, but many consider it to have roughly the same capabilities as OpenAI’s GPT-4. This put gpt2-chatbot in a rare class of AI models that only a handful of developers worldwide have been able to achieve. - Maxwell Zeff Read More

Millions of Americans pay for streaming services, doling out anywhere from $5 to $75 a month. It’s a common belief that you can get out of recurring charges like this by switching your credit card. The streamers won’t be able to find you, and your account will just go away, right? You wouldn’t be crazy for believing it, but it’s a myth that switching a credit card will definitely stop your recurring charges. - Maxwell Zeff Read More

At first glance, Marc Andreessen would appear to have all sorts of contradictory beliefs. From a distance, the venture capitalist spouts your standard brand of right-wing libertarianism, but he’s also somehow a huge fan of the Pentagon. He’s a big fan of “America” but doesn’t seem to like most Americans very much. His VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has claimed that the U.S. government is being strangled by special interests and lobbying but, last year, he spent an ungodly amount of money lobbying that same government. - Lucas Ropek Read More

Tesla announced Tuesday that it will lay off everyone who works on both the new vehicle and Supercharger teams. At this point, no one has any idea what CEO Elon Musk was thinking or what’s going to happen going forward. Including other automakers that recently switched to NACS. Maybe Musk is just looking to get out of the charging game? If that’s the case, then it must be a recent development because, as Politico reports, Tesla is also the single biggest benefactor of federal EV charging grants from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. - Collin Woodard, Jalopnik Read More

Elon Musk said he wanted to be “absolutely hardcore” about reducing Tesla’s headcount earlier this week, and it looks like he’s entered full “demon mode,” as his biographer calls it. Now, an unlikely cohort is feeling his wrath: Tesla’s summer interns. College students shared how Musk’s cost-cutting efforts imploded their summer plans, first reported by Bloomberg Wednesday. - Maxwell Zeff Read More

T-Mobile officially finalized the $1.35 billion deal to acquire Mint Mobile, according to a press release from the telecom company. The deal was first announced in March 2023 but had to clear regulatory approval. - Matt Novak Read More

The reviews for Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin are here, and they’re bad. These AI-enabled devices promised to reduce our dependency on smartphones, but now everyone is wondering why they’re not apps to begin with. I have no idea if we’ll be using Rabbits and AI Pins five years from now (if so, I hope they can set alarms by then), but much of the technology we use today received terrible initial reviews. - Maxwell Zeff Read More