When Bob Lee, a well-known tech executive who co-founded the payment programme Cash App, was stabbed to death in April, many within San Francisco’s close-knit tech community lept to conclusions, with figures like Elon Musk declaring the death another sign of the city’s persistent, if often misunderstood, struggles with random street crime. What actually happened, according to prosecutors and friends of Lee, couldn’t be further from this original narrative. Lee was part of an underground party scene in San Francisco known among participants as “The Lifestyle,” where recreational drugs and casual sex were common, participants and those who knew Lee told The Wall Street Journal. One of the people Lee overlapped with within San Francisco nightlife was Khazar Momeni, sister of Nima Momeni, the man arrested in April for Lee’s murder. He plans to plead not guilty. Lee and Ms Momeni, who is married, were reportedly in a casual relationship. “There are many rumors circulating around this case, many of them untrue,” lawyers for Ms Momeni told the Journal. “Ms. Momeni loves and supports her brother. What happened here is a tragedy, and Ms. Momeni is deeply saddened at the suffering of the Lee family as they deal with their terrible loss.” In the hours before Lee was killed, Mr Momeni confronted Lee about his sister, prosecutors allege, asking if she had done anything inappropriate, which he denied. Later, according to officials, Khazar Momeni sent Lee a text message acknowledging the confrontation: “Just wanted to make sure your doing ok Cause know nima came wayyyyyy down hard on you.” Hours after the alleged confrontation, Lee was seen getting into a white BMW with Mr Momeni, and prosecutors allege he drove the tech executive to a secluded area and stabbed him to death with a kitchen knife. The Independent has contacted Mr Momeni’s lawyer for comment. Lee had been using cocaine and ketamine before his death, an autopsy found. Mr Momeni, an IT executive, will be arraigned later his month. Read More Autopsy: Stab wounds to heart, lungs killed Cash App founder Man accused of stabbing Cash App founder gets new court date A tech CEO has been murdered and Elon Musk blames San Francisco’s ‘horrific’ rise in crime. Is he right?

The U.S. has imposed sanctions on an Iran-based technology firm for its role in facilitating the Iranian government’s censorship of the internet as anti-government protests swept the country

Apple on Thursday confirmed it is endorsing passage of a California law requiring major gadget makers to enable people to fix their devices without...

Players must adjust their settings to turn off NBA 2K24 crossplay on Next Gen platforms, Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5.

SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov 9, 2023--

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 13, 2023--

BERLIN – From folding phones to solar-powered speakers and watches that track your body temperature

Elon Musk said Twitter's cash flow remains negative because of a nearly 50% drop in advertising revenue and

MUNICH China's Leapmotor needs to increase its sales by five times or more to survive a consolidating EV

A new iPhone update brings the first look at one of the key features of Apple’s upcoming Vision Pro headset. iOS 17.2, which is available to developers in an early version now, and is likely to be released later this year for everyone, brings support for spatial video on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. That will allow people to make videos with depth, that can then be viewed later on the augmented reality headset. Those spatial photos and videos were a key part of Apple’s introduction of the Vision Pro earlier this year. Taking a video is done in much the same way as any other video: users choose spatial video, and will be told that they need to turn the video to be landscape, as well as given warnings about potential low light or being too close to the subject. They can then make the video as normal. The videos will also appear as normal on the iPhone itself. Users can watch them in their Photos app, but there is no preview of the three-dimensional aspect, which must be seen on the headset. Apple announced that spatial video would be available in the new iPhones when they were unveiled in September. Until that point, only the Vision Pro had been announced as a way of taking the videos – leading to fears and some mockery that people would have to be wearing the augmented reality headset during important moments they wanted to capture. The new features are in the second beta of iOS 17.2 to be released to developers. It is likely to come to the public in December. iOS 17.2 also brings the journal app, which was first announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June but did not arrive in the full version of iOS 17. It also adds new widgets, Apple Music features including collaborative playlists, more Memoji options and improvements to the security of iMessage. The iPhone 15 Pro also gets another exclusive feature in that update. When it arrives, it will add a new option for the action button on the side, to allow it to open up translate, in addition to the current options that include the camera and torch. Read More Setback for Ireland as EU legal adviser recommends revisit of Apple tax case Apple just released an iPhone update you should download right now Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak rushed to hospital in Mexico after ‘possible stroke’

Less than eight months after discouraging companies from developing advanced artificial intelligence, Elon Musk has unveiled his answer to “woke” AI chatbots like ChatGPT. The tech billionaire claims his new Grok AI is both smarter and funnier than its rivals, offering paid users of X (formerly Twitter) the chance to ask it “spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems”. The X boss offered an example of how it will answer “almost anything”, sharing a screenshot of a user asking it how to make cocaine. “Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak,” a blog post announcing its launch noted. “Please don’t use it if you hate humour!” What differentiates it from OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard is that it has access to real-time data from X, which Mr Musk took over almost exactly a year ago. Before the takeover, AI firms were using Twitter as a data set to train its models, however the tech billionaire shut this down following the release of ChatGPT last November. Initially labelled “TruthGPT”, Grok takes its name from Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Stranger in a Strange Land, meaning understanding something thoroughly and intuitively, while the tone of its responses are modelled on the same writing style as Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But with X as its training set, Grok risks mimicking the same misinformation and toxic discourse that has plagued the platform since before Musk’s takeover. Not only does it adopt a more informal tone to its rivals, Grok also appears to have less safety filters preventing it from answering questions about sensitive topics. Despite claiming that Grok outperforms ChatGPT, which is freely available, xAI did acknowledge that it does not yet match the capabilities of OpenAI’s more powerful GPT-4 model – which carries a similar monthly fee to Grok. In its own in-house tests, xAI graded Grok against GPT-4 on the 2023 Hungarian national high school finals in mathematics. Grok passed the exam with a mark of 59 per cent, while GPT-4 scored 68 per cent. In March this year, Mr Musk was among hundreds of leading tech figures to add their name to an open letter calling on all AI labs to pause the training of AI systems. The letter warned that artificial intelligence with “human-competitive intelligence” could pose “profound risks to society and humanity”, potentially leading to the loss of control of human civilisation and even its extinction. This letter of discouragement looks increasingly like a plea to allow his own companies – which include the newly formed xAI – to catch up. Just weeks before signing it, Mr Musk was approaching AI researchers to form xAI, with the explicit intention of taking on ChatGPT. The world’s richest person had been instrumental in the formation of OpenAI in 2015 but cut ties after it became a for-profit endeavour. His team included researchers from OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind, who had experience in developing large language models (LLMs) that power AI chatbots. The reason he cited for creating his own chatbot was due to apparent fears that these tech companies were creating “woke” AI systems. “The danger of training AI to be woke – in other words, lie – is deadly,” he tweeted last December in reply to a post by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman. The new chatbot fits in with Musk’s broader goals that he is hoping to achieve with his other companies, including SpaceX’s mission to transform humanity into a multi-planetary species “Unless the woke mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-human in general, is stopped, civilisation will never become multiplanetary,” Mr Musk said. In justifying why it built Grok, xAI said its goal was to create a tool that “maximally benefits all of humanity”. The blog post explained: “We believe that it is important to design AI tools that are useful to people of all backgrounds and political views.” Read More How Elon Musk’s ‘spicy’ Grok compares to ‘woke’ ChatGPT Musk shares cocaine recipe in effort to prove Grok AI is ‘rebellious’ Elon Musk unveils new sarcasm-loving AI chatbot for premium X subscribers 10 ways AI will change the world – from curing cancer to wiping out humanity Musk shares cocaine recipe in effort to prove Grok AI is ‘rebellious’

Today’s Google Doodle is a reminder that some human beings are truly extraordinary. The design, which you’ll see if you head to the search engine’s homepage, is a celebration of Dr Mohamed “Mod” Helmy – a man who risked his life to save Jewish people during the Second World War. Dr Helmy was born in Khartoum, Sudan, on 25 July, 1901, to an Egyptian father and a German mother. At the age of 21, he moved to Germany to study medicine, swiftly proving his skills as a talented physician and becoming head of urology at Berlin’s Robert Koch Hospital (now known as Krankenhaus Moabit). Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter However, Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 was to turn his happy life upside down. Dr Helmy was forced to watch, powerless, as his Jewish colleagues were all fired from the hospital. And whilst he was initially kept on, he was soon subjected to discrimination and persecution for being a North African, and lost his job, too. He was also banned from marrying his German fiancée Annie Ernst (although, we’re pleased to say, he was able to do so some years later). In 1939 and again in 1940, the doctor was arrested along with other Egyptian nationals. And although the Nazis released him when he became gravely ill, he was under strict instruction to report to the police twice a day as proof he was unfit for internment. Despite being targeted by the regime himself, Dr Helmy continued to speak out against Nazi policies and, after being demoted to the role of doctor’s assistant, he made the most of his limited position by writing sick notes to help innocent people escape hard labour. He also repeatedly risked his life to help his Jewish friends. When Berlin’s deportation of the Jews began and his family friend Anna Boros was in need of a hiding place, Dr Helmy brought her to a cabin he owned in the neighbourhood of Buch. This became her safe haven until the end of the war, as Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Center, notes in its biography of the doctor. At times of danger, when he was under police investigation, Dr Helmy would arrange for Boros to hide elsewhere. “A good friend of our family, Dr Helmy…hid me in his cabin in Berlin-Buch from 10 March until the end of the war,” she wrote after the war. “As of 1942 I no longer had any contact [with] the outside world. The Gestapo knew that Dr Helmy was our family physician, and they knew that he owned a cabin in Berlin-Buch. “He managed to evade all their interrogations. In such cases he would bring me to friends where I would stay for several days, introducing me as his cousin from Dresden. When the danger would pass, I would return to his cabin. “Dr Helmy did everything for me out of the generosity of his heart and I will be grateful to him for eternity”. Dr Helmy also helped protect Boros’ mother, Julianna, her stepfather, Georg Wehr, and her grandmother, Cecilie Rudnik. Thanks to his courage and resourcefulness, all four of them survived the Holocaust. He remained in Berlin until his death in 1982. In 2013, Yad Vashem posthumously bestowed its Righteous Among the Nations award on Dr Helmy. He was the first Arab rescuer to be awarded the prestigious title. The Google Doodle artwork was created by Berlin-based artist Noa Snir to honour his Egyptian and German background and capture his open-hearted nature. Speaking about her work on the project, Snir told a Google Q&A: ": I found the story of Mod Helmy very moving. I come from a Jewish background, and the thought of individuals outside of the Jewish community risking their lives to help others during WW2 is something that personally gives me hope about humanity. "I think Helmy's case is an especially interesting one as he himself suffered persecution due to his background and ethnicity, and that still didn't stop him from helping as many people as he could. It's unfathomable to me, this type of courage and integrity." She added that she hoped people would view her Doodle and reflect on the fact that "even in one of the darkest moments in world history, there were truly remarkable people who made acts of extreme courage and solidarity". "I think we should all aspire to be the Mod Helmy's of the world, or ask ourselves how we can take example from him in whatever small way we can," she said. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.