Here are all the biggest announcements from Apple’s “Glowtime” event.

Apple Intelligence

Apple’s core artificial intelligence offerings are being packaged and billed as Apple Intelligence — first revealed at the company’s developers conference in June.

These features include the ability to search for images in your library by describing them, creating custom emojis, summarizing emails and prioritizing notifications. Apple Intelligence will also upgrade Apple’s virtual assistant Siri to get it to better understand requests and give it some awareness of on-screen actions taking place on the phone, hopefully making it more useful.

What sets Apple apart from what’s being offered by rivals Samsung and Google? It is trying to preserve its longtime commitment to privacy by tailoring its AI so that most of its functions are processed on the device itself instead of at remote data centers. When a task requires a connection to a data center, Apple promises it will be done in a tightly controlled way that ensures no personal data is stored remotely.

Most of Apple’s AI functions will roll out as part of a free software update to iOS 18, the operating system that will power the iPhone 16 rolling out from October through December. U.S. English will be the featured language at launch but an update enabling other languages will come out next year, according to Apple.

iPhone 16 and the camera button

The iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max will offer slightly bigger displays and feature variants of the powerful A18 chip, which gives Apple the computing power its devices need to run AI functions.

The iPhone 16 “has been designed for Apple Intelligence from the ground up,” CEO Tim Cook said during Monday’s event.

On the other end of the spectrum, the biggest physical change to the iPhone 16 lineup comes in the form of a dedicated camera-control button. The button responds to clicks and gestures, allowing users to quickly snap pictures, preview a shot or start video recording.

The button also allows owners to use something called Visual Intelligence, which will tell the iPhone 16 to automatically search on things you take photos of.

The phones will start shipping Sept. 20. The iPhone 16 will retail for $799, with the Plus model going for $899. The iPhone 16 Pro will cost $999, while the Pro Max will sell for $1,199.

Apple Watch upgrades

The Apple Watch Series 10 features a larger, and brighter, wide-angle OLED display that will allow users to better view the watch at an angle. But Apple focused much of its presentation on the device’s ability to detect signs of sleep apnea.

The new device is also being offered in a titanium finish for the first time, joining a longtime trend in the watch industry of offering a tougher, more lightweight, and perceived higher-quality, alternative to traditional materials.

The Series 10 watch starts at $399 and will be available on Sept. 20.

Airpods lean toward being a listening device

The new AirPods 4 series will come with an upgraded chip for better audio quality, and will feature more active noise cancellation.

If you frequently lose your ear buds, the new AirPods will also play a sound when you locate them through the Find My app.

In a medically focused update to the AirPods Pro 2, Apple said it will upgrade the devices so they can act as an over-the-counter hearing aid. A free software update will provide the upgrade and also include options to help protect hearing and the ability to administer a clinical-grade hearing test.

The AirPod 4 model costs $129, while the version with active noise cancelling will cost $179. They both ship on Sept. 20.

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Dressed in head-to-toe coveralls and fitted with respirators, the crew members toiling in a building without power had no obvious respite from the heat. Instead, they wore armbands that recorded their heart rates, movements and exertion levels for signs of heat stress.

Stephanie Miller, a safety and health manager for a U.S. government contractor doing cleanup work at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, watched a computer screen nearby. A color-coding system with little bubbles showing each worker’s physiological data alerted her if anyone was in danger of overheating.

“Heat is one of the greatest risks that we have in this work, even though we deal with high radiation, hazardous chemicals and heavy metals,” Miller said.

As the world experiences more record high temperatures, employers are exploring wearable technologies to keep workers safe. New devices collect biometric data to estimate core body temperature – an elevated one is a symptom of heat exhaustion – and prompt workers to take cool-down breaks.

The devices, which were originally developed for athletes, firefighters and military personnel, are getting adopted at a time when the Atlantic Council estimates heat-induced losses in labor productivity could cost the U.S. approximately $100 billion annually.

But there are concerns about how the medical information collected on employees will be safeguarded. Some labor groups worry managers could use it to penalize people for taking needed breaks.

“Any time you put any device on a worker, they’re very concerned about tracking, privacy, and how are you going to use this against me,” said Travis Parsons, director of occupational safety and health at the Laborers’ Health and Safety Fund of North America. “There’s a lot of exciting stuff out there, but there’s no guardrails around it.”

Vulernable to heat

At the Tennessee cleanup site, the workers wearing heat stress monitors made by Atlanta company SlateSafety are employed by United Cleanup Oak Ridge. The company is a contractor of the U.S. Department of Energy, which has rules to prevent on-the-job overheating.

But most U.S. workers lack protections from extreme heat because there are no federal regulations requiring them, and many vulnerable workers don’t speak up or seek medical attention. In July, the Biden administration proposed a rule to protect 36 million workers from heat-related illnesses.

From 1992 to 2022, 986 workers died from heat exposure in the U.S., according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Experts suspect the number is higher because a coroner might not list heat as the cause of death if a sweltering roofer takes a fatal fall.

Setting occupational safety standards can be tricky because individuals respond differently to heat. That’s where the makers of wearable devices hope to come in.

How wearable heat wear works

Employers have observed workers for heat-related distress by checking their temperatures with thermometers, sometimes rectally. More recently, firefighters and military personnel swallowed thermometer capsules.

“That just was not going to work in our work environment,” Rob Somers, global environment, health and safety director at consumer product company Perrigo, said.

Instead, more than 100 employees at the company’s infant formula plants were outfitted with SlateSafety armbands. The devices estimate a wearer’s core body temperature, and a reading of 101.3 degrees triggers an alert.

Another SlateSafety customer is a Cardinal Glass factory in Wisconsin, where four masons maintain a furnace that reaches 3000 degrees Fahrenheit.

“They’re right up against the face of the wall. So it’s them and fire,” Jeff Bechel, the company’s safety manager, said.

Cardinal Glass paid $5,000 for five armbands, software and air-monitoring hardware. Bechel thinks the investment will pay off; an employee’s two heat-related emergency room visits cost the company $15,000.

Another wearable, made by Massachusetts company Epicore Biosystems, analyzes sweat to determine when workers are at risk of dehydration and overheating.

“Until a few years ago, you just sort of wiped (sweat) off with a towel,” CEO Rooz Ghaffari said. “Turns out there’s all this information packed away that we’ve been missing.”

Research has shown some devices successfully predict core body temperature in controlled environments, but their accuracy remains unproven in dynamic workplaces, according to experts. A 2022 research review said factors such as age, gender and ambient humidity make it challenging to reliably gauge body temperature with the technology.

The United Cleanup Oak Ridge workers swathed in protective gear can get sweaty even before they begin demolition. Managers see dozens of sensor alerts daily.

Laborer Xavier Allison, 33, was removing heavy pieces of ductwork during a recent heat wave when his device vibrated. Since he was working with radioactive materials and asbestos, he couldn’t walk outside to rest without going through a decontamination process, so he spent about 15 minutes in a nearby room which was just as hot.

“You just sit by yourself and do your best to cool off,” Allison said.

The armband notifies workers when they’ve cooled down enough to resume work.

“Ever since we implemented it, we have seen a significant decrease in the number of people who need to get medical attention,” Miller said.

Collecting personal data

United Cleanup Oak Ridge uses the sensor data and an annual medical exam to determine work assignments, Miller said. After noticing patterns, the company sent a few employees to see their personal physicians, who found heart issues the employees hadn’t known about, she said.

At Perrigo, managers analyze the data to find people with multiple alerts and speak to them to see if there’s “a reason why they’re not able to work in the environment,” Somers said. The information is organized by identification numbers, not names, when it goes into the company’s software system, he said.

Companies keeping years of medical data raises concerns about privacy and whether bosses may use the information to kick an employee off a health plan or fire them, said Adam Schwartz, privacy litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“The device could hurt, frankly, because you could raise your hand and say ‘I need a break,’ and the boss could say, ‘No, your heart rate is not elevated, go back to work,'” Schwartz said.

To minimize such risks, employers should allow workers to opt in or out of wearing monitoring devices, only process strictly necessary data and delete the information within 24 hours, he said.

Wearing such devices also may expose workers to unwanted marketing, Ikusei Misaka, a professor at Tokyo’s Musashino University, said.

A partial solution

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health advises employers to institute a plan to help workers adjust to hot conditions and to train them to recognize signs of heat-related illness and to administer first aid. Wearable devices can be part of efforts to reduce heat stress, but more work needs to be done to determine their accuracy, said Doug Trout, the agency’s medical officer.

The technology also needs to be paired with access to breaks, shade and cool water, since many workers, especially in agriculture, fear retaliation for pausing to cool off or hydrate.

“If they don’t have water to drink, and the time to do it, it doesn’t mean much,” Juanita Constible, senior advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said. “It’s just something extra they have to carry when they’re in the hot fields.”

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Yuri Kageyama in Tokyo contributed to this report.

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Most people are now holding on to smartphones longer instead of regularly upgrading them, and there are many reasons why.

At the dawn of the smartphone age, you might have upgraded to a new device every few years to make sure you had the latest must-have features or because your carrier’s contract subsidized the purchase of the newest model. But that’s no longer the case as smartphone technology has matured and innovations have become more incremental, and carrier pricing models have changed.

There’s also an environmental push to keep old phones out of landfills as electronic waste becomes a larger sustainability issue. Smartphones these days are also just sturdier and better able to survive dunks and shocks.

“As long as you take care of your phone and keep it updated, you’re going to get at least four or five good years of use out of it,” said Chris Hauk, of Pixel Privacy, a tech website. Some device owners boast in online forums that they’ve had phones last more than seven years.

And if you’re paying over $1,000 for your smartphone, you’ll probably want to it to last as long as it can. Here are some tips to extend the lifespan of your Apple or Android mobile device:

Battery care

One of the biggest factor in your phone’s lifespan is the battery. A rechargeable battery’s chemical age isn’t related to when it was manufactured. Instead, it’s based on a complex mix of factors including “temperature history and charging pattern,” according to Apple.

“As lithium-ion batteries chemically age, the amount of charge they can hold diminishes, resulting in reduced battery life and reduced peak performance,” the iPhone maker says.

The company says its charging optimization technology is designed to improve battery life, and it’s safe for iPhone users to charge their phones overnight.

Samsung, meanwhile, says its lithium ion batteries do best when kept above 50% charge. It advises against running the battery down.

“Repeatedly allowing the battery to drain fully may shorten its life and decrease its overall capacity,” the company says in an online guide. “If this happens, you’ll need to charge the battery more frequently and it may last only a few hours before needing a charge, for example.”

Avoid extreme temperatures

Apple says that batteries warm up as they charge, which can shorten their lifespan. It warns against using your phone or charging it in very hot temperatures, above 95 degrees (35 Celsius), “which can permanently reduce battery lifespan.”

Samsung also says extreme heat or cold can damage batteries and warns people not to, for example, leave their phones in a car’s glove box when it’s very hot or cold. And don’t put your phone in a freezer either, it’s a myth that it can prolong battery life. “This is not correct and can damage your battery,” Samsung says.

Google, which makes the Android operating system and Pixel phones, says hot batteries drain faster, even when they’re not in use, and that can damage the battery.

Adjust your power options

Tweak your device settings so apps or features use less power, which extends your battery’s daily life and the time between charging cycles.

You can turn down your phone’s screen brightness, turn on the dark theme and reduce the time for the screen to power off. Enable the auto-brightness feature, which adjusts screen brightness according to the level of ambient light. Also check battery usage in your settings to see if there are any power-hungry apps you can switch off or uninstall.

If the power level dips below 10%, iPhone users can turn on low power mode to stretch their battery’s life before it need recharging. Samsung’s Android phones have a similar “power saving mode.” You can also leave it on all the time, but it might affect your phone’s performance.

Samsung says users can switch off Bluetooth or Wi-Fi if they’re not being used, although Apple advises leaving them on because they draw minimal power when not connected.

Use protection

Phones are sleek capsules but the glossy surface means they can slip easily out of your hand. So it goes without saying that you should get a sturdy protective case to help cushion the blow when you accidentally drop it.

Don’t forget a screen protector. Plastic versions are the cheapest option but can scuff easily, according to device repair website iFixit, which recommends ones made with TPU film or tempered glass, which offer better protection against scratches and drops.

Keep your device clean

Keeping your phone in your pocket or purse means its ports and sockets can collect lint and other debris that you’ll need to clean out.

“Take a little toothpick and just kind of get in and get rid of any debris,” said Hauk. “Also the speaker and the microphone grills on phones, they do get dirty,” so use a toothbrush to clean them, he said. Just make sure you’re flicking the debris away from the phone instead of pushing it deeper inside the tiny holes.

Update your device

Software is another important factor in a phone’s lifespan. Experts advise keeping your operating system and apps up to date so they have the latest privacy, security and battery management features.

That will be easier to do as your phone ages because some device makers have been extending the time limit for providing updates.

Google has pledged to provide Pixel 8 and newer phones with seven years of Android and security updates, compared with four to five years for older models. Samsung has also extended its operating system updates to seven years starting with its flagship S24 device launched earlier this year.

Apple doesn’t spell out how long it will support iOS updates for devices, although older devices like the iPhone 6s released in 2014 and the iPhone 8 were still getting security updates this year.

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Is there a tech challenge you need help figuring out? Write to us at onetechtip@ap.org with your questions.

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The company, H3X, was founded by a team of engineers and has grown since its start in 2020 to 33 employees.

“We’re aiming to get to 45 to 50 by end of the year,” said Jason Sylvestre, co-founder and CEO.

The startup’s mission, Sylvestre said, is to help decarbonize the aviation, aerospace, marine, defense and heavy-industry sectors by designing and producing high-density, lightweight electric motors. He said H3X has won about $5 million worth of contracts with NASA and the U.S. Air Force.

In August, H3X announced $20 million in Series A fundraising. The round was led by Infinite Capital, with participation from Hanwha Asset Management, Cubit Capital, Origin Ventures, Industrious Ventures and Venn10 Capital. Other investors included Lockheed Martin Ventures, Metaplanet, Liquid 2 Ventures and TechNexus.

“It’s super exciting. We’ve been looking forward to this day for a while,” Sylvestre said. “The next six months are going to be pretty insane. We’ve got some very large contracts in the pipeline.”

Sylvestre, Max Liben, chief technology officer, and Eric Maciolek, president, formed the company in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. They were working remotely and living in three different states: Minnesota, California and Alabama.

After a round of fundraising, the three decided it was time to move into a building and start testing the hardware. They have a 17,000-square-foot facility in Louisville.

“We looked at a lot of different cities. Denver just had the right mix of everything we were looking for, with a really strong aerospace and defense ecosystem and an emerging startup scene,” Sylvestre said. “We also wanted our headquarters in a place where we wanted to live and that had a very high quality of life and would be easy to recruit people to move to. We need pretty specialized talent.”

H3X makes compact, lightweight electric motors ranging in power from 30 kilowatts to 30 megawatts. “We can power everything from small drones to large ships and airplanes,” Sylvestre said.

The company’s long-term mission is to advance the technology to electrify aviation. Sylvestre said the company’s current focus is on defense but it also has customers in the aerospace and marine industries.

“We’re pretty well into the commercialization process. We shipped our first products to customers last year,” Sylvestre said

The company is converting the contracts into multi-year orders, he added.

Nathan Doctor, founder and managing partner at Infinite Capital, said in a statement that over the past three years working with H3X, he has seen “a phenomenal display of rapid innovation” from the team.

“Bringing technical advancements to market this fast is rare, as they have already commercialized a series of market-leading electric motors,” Doctor said.

H3X is focused on scaling innovative technologies that Lockheed Martin Ventures believes could provide its customers with effective solutions for “electrifying legacy, multi-domain systems,” said Chris Moran, vice president and general manager of the investment company.

Sylvestre said the company’s motors can be used with batteries, hydrogen fuel cells or hydropower plants and can serve as generators without any changes required.

“The power density of our products is about 2 to 3 times higher over anything else that exists on the market,” Sylvestre said.

That means the motor will be roughly three times lighter than the next-best motor, he added. With aviation, one approach might be a hybrid system that reduces the weight of a battery pack. Sylvestre said H3X has some aviation customers who are looking to put electric-powered planes into service in 2028.

“One is working on a 19-seat aircraft and another is working on a 30-seat aircraft,” Sylvestre said. “Within five years, I think you’ll definitely see some aircraft that are operating using electric propulsion. It’s a lot closer than people realize.”

The company’s long-term focus is on aviation because the industry contributes to greenhouse gas emissions that fuel climate change and because it’s one of the most difficult industries to decarbonize.

In 2022, aviation accounted for about 2% of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. In recent decades, air travel has grown faster than rail, road or shipping, the IEA said.

The International Civil Aviation Organization, a U.N. agency, said the demand for air travel is expected to rise by an average of 4.3% per year over the next 20 years.

“In terms of impact, aviation is the largest industry that our technology will impact just in terms of decarbonization,” Sylvestre said.

Boys were using “nudification” apps to turn photos of their female classmates into deepfake pornography, using images of the girls’ faces, from photos in which they were fully clothed, and superimposing them onto images of naked bodies generated by artificial intelligence.

But unlike many parents who worry about the threats posed to their children in a world of ever-changing technology, Meré, the mother of a 16-year-old girl, had the power to do something about it. As the chief deputy city attorney in San Francisco, Meré rallied her co-workers to craft a lawsuit, filed in state court Wednesday night, that seeks to shut down the 16 most popular websites used to create these deepfakes.

The legal team said it appeared to be the first government lawsuit of its kind aimed at quashing the sites that promote the opportunity to digitally “undress” women and girls without their consent.

After reading a New York Times article about the tremendous damage done when such deepfake images are created and shared, Meré texted Sara Eisenberg, the mother of a 9-year-old girl and the head of the unit in the city attorney’s office that identifies major social problems and tries to solve them through legal action. The two of them then reached out to the office’s top lawyer, City Attorney David Chiu.

“The article is flying around our office, and we were like, ‘What can we do about this?’” Chiu recalled in an interview. “No one has tried to hold these companies accountable.”

Several states have enacted measures criminalizing AI-generated sexually explicit depictions of minors, but Chiu said that requires going after the people creating and distributing the images, one by one. The new lawsuit out of San Francisco asks a judge to order the sites used to create the content to shut down altogether.

Chiu acknowledged that this strategy could be viewed as a Whac-a-Mole approach, since more sites could crop up. But the suit proposes to add more sites as the office learns about them.

The 16 sites targeted in the lawsuit were visited a combined 200 million times in the first six months of this year, he said. The entities behind the sites include individuals and companies in California, New Mexico, the United Kingdom and Estonia. Representatives of the websites either could not be reached or did not respond to requests for comment.

One site promotes its services by asking, “Have someone to undress?” Another reads, “Imagine wasting time taking her out on dates,” when users can, it says, use the website “to get her nudes.” Some of the websites allow users to create images for free before charging for more images — usually using cryptocurrency, but sometimes credit cards.

The sites’ AI models have been trained using real pornography and images depicting child abuse to create the deepfakes, Chiu said. In mere seconds, the sites can make authentic-looking images of breasts and genitalia under real faces.

The technology has been used to create deepfake nudes of everyone from Taylor Swift to ordinary middle-school girls with few apparent repercussions. The images are sometimes used to extort victims for money or humiliate and harass them. Experts have warned that they can harm the victims’ mental health, reputations and physical safety, and damage their college and job prospects.

Yet it is not a problem that can be tackled simply by having conversations with teenagers about smart technology usage, since any photo of them, including prom and sports photos, can be snatched and manipulated without their consent.

“You can be as internet-savvy and social media-savvy as you want, and you can teach your kids all the ways to protect themselves online, but none of that can protect them from somebody using these sites to do really awful, harmful things,” Eisenberg said.

Once the images are circulating, it is nearly impossible to determine which website created them, making it very difficult for the women to successfully sue the companies, Chiu said.

Instead, the lawsuit seeks to shutter the sites and permanently restrain those operating them from creating deepfake pornography in the future, and assess civil penalties and attorneys’ fees. On the question of jurisdiction, the suit argues that the sites violate state and federal revenge-pornography laws; state and federal child-pornography laws; and the California Unfair Competition Law, which prohibits unlawful and unfair business practices.

San Francisco is a fitting venue, the lawyers argued, as it is ground zero for the growing artificial intelligence industry. Already, people in the city can order driverless vehicles from their phones to whisk them around town, and the industry’s leaders, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are based there.

Chiu says he thinks the industry has largely had a positive effect on society, but the issue of deepfake pornography has highlighted one of its “dark sides.”

Keeping pace with the rapidly changing industry as a government lawyer is daunting, he said. “But that doesn’t meant we shouldn’t try.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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Laying in a hospital bed after multiple surgeries, de Lagarde, who just a month earlier had hiked Mount Kilimanjaro with her husband, Jeremy, wondered what the rest of her life would be like.

“I had thought I was invincible,” de Lagarde, a public relations executive at an investment firm in London, said in an interview.

She began thinking about what she could do. “I said, ‘OK, I lost this, I need a replacement, and it’s not going to be like some dud that has no function,’” she said.

Eighteen months later, de Lagarde, now 44, has regained some sense of normalcy thanks to major advancements in prosthetics that incorporate artificial intelligence. She has a new arm and hand, which she uses confidently to open containers, make morning coffee, water plants and put her clothes on hangers. Her 9-year-old daughter, Daphne, will sometimes hold the hand as they walk down the street.

The prosthetic hand, the most important and intricate piece, is powered by machine learning, a form of AI that excels at pattern recognition and making predictions based on past behavior. TikTok uses machine learning for its recommendation algorithm.

The advancements show how AI is seeping further into fields like health care. While many have raised alarms about AI’s risks, researchers said those concerns must be weighed against the technology’s potential to improve lives.

“When we get the opportunity to show people AI that is truly assistive for helping somebody, that’s positive,” said Blair Lock, co-founder and chief executive of Coapt, which made the machine learning software used in de Lagarde’s arm. “Health care is a good place to look for the sunny side of AI.”

Before being fitted with her prosthetic last year, de Lagarde spent months regularly visiting a London clinic to help train the software that would eventually power her arm. With electrodes attached to the end of her remaining limb, which was amputated at her biceps, technicians told her to think about making basic movements like picking up a glass or turning a door handle. The process triggered her muscles as if her arm was still there and provided data to teach her prosthetic how to react when she made certain actions or gestures.

Now when de Lagarde moves, sensors embedded in the arm send a signal to her hand to perform the job. The more she uses the arm, the better the software gets at predicting what she’s trying to accomplish.

“It would take me like 10 seconds and a lot of brain power to complete a movement like opening my hand,” she said. “Now I just open up the hand, and I realize I didn’t even think about it.”

The technology is not perfect. The arm weighs a lot, causing de Lagarde’s shoulder and back to hurt, and it has to be charged at least once a day. When the weather is hot, it is uncomfortable.

There is also no tactile function so that de Lagarde can feel what she touches. She has dropped her phone several times after forgetting that she held it in her right hand. Any hardware or software glitches can affect her.

“Every day, there is a moment where I think, oh my gosh, I miss my arm so much,” she said. “It makes you realize, as sophisticated as this is, our bodies are incredible.”

Cost is also an issue. The arm, elbow, hand and AI software are made by separate companies, driving up the expense. A full prosthetic arm like de Lagarde’s can cost more than 100,000 pounds, or about $125,000.

She paid for it in part by raising more than 30,000 pounds, or about $38,000, through a crowdfunding website. Covvi, the British maker of her hand, donated that portion of her new limb for free after reading about her accident.

Simon Pollard, chief executive of Covvi, said de Lagarde’s arm points to further advancements to come, which will affect people coming out of conflict zones, diabetes patients and victims of tragic accidents. Researchers are examining how to embed micro sensors directly into a person’s arm to provide even richer data for the AI systems to improve.

De Lagarde is closely watching the latest advances in hopes that she can be among those who benefit. “This technology is the silver lining for what happened to me,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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The song has been used in more than 8,500 TikTok videos since two independent music producers created it in July. Supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris have seized on it, wagging their fingers and swinging their arms to it, some hoping to create its official dance. It was also reposted by @KamalaHQ, the campaign’s official TikTok account. Videos with the sound have racked up more than 40 million views overall, according to Zelf, a social video analytics company focused on TikTok.

It’s a marquee example of a new genre of political memes finding an audience on the short-form video app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.

Politically minded Americans are increasingly embracing TikTok to make videos and trends out of snippets of songs and speeches in this election cycle. The app — a pandemic-fueled curiosity during the last presidential election — has since exploded its user base to 170 million Americans. About half of users younger than 30 say they use TikTok to help them keep up with politics and political issues, according to new data from the Pew Research Center.

“People are still doing dances to random songs, but now people are doing dances to remixes of rap with Kamala Harris speeches over it,” said Emma Mont, a digital creator and administrator of @OrganizerMemes, a liberal meme account.

While TikTok prohibits political advertising, unpaid political content is thriving on the platform — Vance, Trump, Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, each had verified accounts there as of last week. Users have also flocked to a remix of Harris quoting her mother in a speech last year, saying, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” and laughing, and to a clip that starts with Harris speaking and ends with a hip-hop song repeating, “Trump 2024.”

Seth Schuster, a Harris campaign spokesperson, said the team was tapping into viral trends both to “bring the conversation about the stakes of this election to the places a lot of our voters are getting their news from” and to expand its supporter network.

In response to the TikTok video, Taylor Van Kirk, a spokesperson for Vance, said: “Cringe.”

Song snippets and catchphrases from pop culture are a core part of using TikTok. Users can select from a library of popular sounds when they make TikToks and search for songs and sounds related to topics that they’re interested in. Searching “Trump” or “Kamala” in the app’s sounds yields dozens of results, which have been used in tens of thousands of videos.

If users like a particular sound, TikTok is likely to serve them additional videos that include it — which is how it can seem that the entire internet is suddenly using a phrase like “very demure, very mindful.” (That meme sprang from a TikTok creator’s playful descriptions of how to behave in a variety of places, from work to drag shows.)

The “never Trump guy” song was created by Carl Dixon and Steve Terrell, two 34-year-old music producers with a company called House of Evo. They regularly make sounds on TikTok, including a popular remix of an evangelical sermon about margaritas last year, but they hadn’t dabbled much in politics until now.

Dixon, also known as Casa Di, and Terrell saw the footage of Vance’s comments in a post on the Harris campaign’s TikTok account that compared them with newer footage of him expressing support for Trump.

The two found Vance’s manner of speech “sort of melodic in a sense,” Terrell said. Dixon said, “We were like, what if we put this to a catchy beat or something?” The process took the pair under three hours, they said.

Their video started with footage of a member of the Harris campaign staff saying, “So this is really who Donald Trump chose as his running mate?” A different voice then says, “Drop the beat,” after which a sample of Petey Pablo’s “Freek-a-Leek” plays, remixed with Vance saying, “I’m a never Trump guy” and “I never liked him.”

“When Kamala decided to start running, me and Steve were figuring out ways to encourage people to vote or be aware of what’s going on,” Dixon said. “This is our first time doing something as politically charged,” he added.

Sounds like this one allow people to profess their political opinions, or share what they view as the stakes of the election, without having to formally expound on their beliefs, Terrell said.

TikTok is one of the few social media sites showing a sharp increase “in the percent of adults getting news there and an increase in just the newsiness of the platform,” said Elisa Shearer, a senior researcher at Pew. “A lot of that is opinion- and humor-based,” she added.

Sasha Khatami, a 24-year-old digital marketing coordinator from Alexandria, Virginia, said she had come across the song while browsing popular sounds on TikTok in July, soon after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.

“Sounds are the number-one way to express your opinions,” Khatami said. “I don’t think people are sharing their feelings anymore. I think they’re making TikTok sounds and TikTok dances.”

Khatami, who said her earlier videos on TikTok typically received between 300 and 1,000 views, made up a dance to the “never Trump guy” song — and was startled and thrilled to see her post rack up hundreds of thousands of views as TikTok’s algorithm served it to other users.

Since then, she has performed the dance in front of iconic locations in the nation’s capital, including the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, and has been tickled to see other TikTok users perform their own version of her shimmy.

While Khatami has been enjoying her newfound success on TikTok, she has been surprised by the volume of angry comments from supporters of Trump and Vance on many of her videos. She said she had sought to “turn that backlash into motivation,” like when a commenter declared, “Can we find this ladies dad so he can teach her about what the consequences are for what she’s doing?”

She put text from that comment onto a separate TikTok featuring her father and boyfriend, who had also learned the dance, posting it with the caption: “My dad is a never Trump guy.”

Khatami, who recently made her first political donation to Harris, said she planned to canvas soon, too.

“I feel so inspired by her campaign and what her being president could mean that I feel like I have to get more involved,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Nvidia may have exceeded Wall Street estimates as its profit jumped — buffeted by the chipmaking dominance that has cemented Nvidia’s place as the poster child of the artificial intelligence boom — but investors seemed less than impressed.

The company reported a net income of to $16.6 billion. Adjusted for one-time items, net income was $16.95 billion. Revenue rose to $30 billion, up 122% from a year ago and 15% from the previous quarter.

By comparison, S&P 500 companies overall are expected to deliver just 5% growth in revenue for the quarter, according to FactSet. Still, Nvidia shares slipped nearly 4% in after-hours trading.

Ryan Detrick, chief market strategist at Carson Group, said that despite growing revenue “it appears the bar was just set a tad too high this earnings season.”

“Death, taxes, and NVDA beats on earnings are three things you can bank on,” Detrick said. “Here’s the issue. The size of the beat this time was much smaller than we’ve been seeing. Even future guidance was raised, but again not by the tune from previous quarters.”

The company reported second-quarter adjusted earnings per share of 68 cents per share, up from 27 cents a year ago. Nvidia said it expects third quarter revenue to grow to $32.5 billion, plus or minus 2%.

Nvidia has led the artificial intelligence sector to become one of the stock market’s biggest companies, as tech giants continue to spend heavily on the company’s chips and data centers needed to train and operate their AI systems.

“The people who are investing in Nvidia infrastructure are getting returns on it right away,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, said on a call with analysts. “It’s the best ROI infrastructure, computing infrastructure investment you can make today.”

Demand for generative AI products that can compose documents, make images and serve as personal assistants has fueled sales of Nvidia’s specialized chips over the last year. In June, Nvidia briefly rose to become the most valuable company in the S&P 500. The company is now worth over $3 trillion.

Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said during the analyst call that the company is planning to increase production of its Blackwell AI chips beginning in the fourth quarter and continuing through fiscal 2026. Kress said Nvidia expects several billion dollars in Blackwell revenue in the fourth quarter, with shipments of its Hopper graphics processor unit, or GPU, expected to increase in the second half of fiscal 2025.

In an interview with Bloomberg Television, Huang said the company will “have a great next year as well.”

Through the year’s first six months, Nvidia’s stock price soared nearly 150%. At that point, it was trading at a little more than 100 times the company’s earnings over the prior 12 months. That’s much more expensive than it’s been historically and than the S&P 500 in general. That’s why analysts warn of a selloff if Wall Street sees any indication that AI demand is waning.

Dan Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities, called the earnings part of a “historic, meteoric rise from Nvidia and the godfather of AI, Jensen (Huang).” Investors, Ives added, are picking apart “robust numbers” and trying to find holes in them. Although Nvidia said it estimates about $32.5 billion in revenue in the third fiscal quarter, some analysts expected a slightly higher figure, he said.

“I view it as kind of like splitting hairs,” Ives said. The demand for AI technology is only accelerating, he added, echoing Huang’s previous statements that the world is in the midst of the next industrial revolution.

“This is the most watched earnings — not just in tech, but in the market, in many years,” he said. “Investors will initially overreact to any sort of short-lived weakness. But I believe this actually put more fuel into the tank of the bull market.”

Making sure the two don’t mix has become a fraught exercise in the growing, and often unpredictable, influencer industry.

With the presidential election looming, some marketing agencies have started to pitch advertisers on new tools that grade the so-called brand safety of social media personalities. Some of the tools even use artificial intelligence to predict the likelihood that a particular influencer will discuss politics in the future.

A tool recently introduced by Captiv8, a marketing firm that helps advertisers such as Walmart and Kraft Heinz connect with influencers, uses AI to analyze mentions of social media stars in online articles and then determines whether they are likely to discuss elections or “political hot topics.” The firm also assigns letter grades to creators based on their posts, comments and media coverage, where an “A” means very safe and a “C” signals caution. The grades incorporate categories such as “sensitive social issues,” death and war, hate speech or explicit content.

Viral Nation, another influencer agency, also offers marketers a product that makes “risk profiles” for creators. The tool, which the company has been using for more than year, assesses years of posts — including hours of dialogue from videos — and can detect whether people are holding weapons or protest signs in their content, even if those elements aren’t mentioned in captions or audio.

“Brands are definitely asking for this,” Krishna Subramanian, a founder of Captiv8, said. “We noticed from the election before, people wanted to know — have creators talked about the election and talked about the president? Because they don’t want to be in that conversation.”

The way marketers gauge suitability online directs billions of dollars in spending and helps shape discourse on the internet. After many major brands faced consumer boycotts during Donald Trump’s presidency for inadvertently running digital ads alongside conspiracy theories and terrorist propaganda, companies created new industry guidelines to help them avoid funding harmful content on social media. Since then, many advertisers have also stopped running messages in news outlets in the name of brand safety.

Some conservatives say the industrywide definitions have unfairly dinged right-wing sites.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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“Let’s not go overboard on this,” he said during a media briefing on the sidelines of an event he was hosting in London.

AI data centers represent a relatively small additional load on the grid, Gates said. What’s more, he predicted that insights gleaned from AI would deliver gains in efficiency that would more than make up for that additional demand.

In short, Gates said, the stunning rise of AI will not stand in the way of combating climate change. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, no, we can’t do it because we’re addicted to doing chat sessions,’” he said.

That’s an upbeat assessment from a billionaire with a vested interest in the matter. Gates is a big-time climate investor, and is the former head of Microsoft and remains a major stockholder in the company, which is at the center of the AI revolution.

And while it’s too early to draw a definitive conclusion on the issue, a few things are already clear: AI is having a profound impact on energy demand around the world, it’s often leading to an uptick in planet-warming emissions, and there’s no end in sight.

AI data centers have a big appetite for electricity. The so-called graphic processing units, or GPUs, used to train large language models and respond to ChatGPT queries, require more energy than your average microchip and give off more heat.

With more data centers coming online almost every week, projections about how much energy will be required to power the AI boom are soaring.

One peer-reviewed study suggested AI could make up 0.5% of worldwide electricity use by 2027, or roughly what Argentina uses in a year. Analysts at Wells Fargo suggested that U.S. electricity demand could jump 20% by 2030, driven in part to AI.

And Goldman Sachs predicted that data centers would account for 8% of U.S. energy usage in 2030, up from just 3% today.

“It’s truly astronomical potential load growth,” said Ben Inskeep, the program director at Citizens Action Coalition, a consumer watchdog group based in Indiana that is tracking the energy impact of data centers.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta have all recently announced plans to build new data centers in Indiana, developments that Inskeep said would strain the grid.

“We don’t have enough power to meet the projected needs of data centers over the next five to 10 years,” he said. “We would need a massive build-out of additional resources.”

Tech giants are scrambling to get a grip on their energy usage. For a decade now, those same four companies have been at the forefront of corporate efforts to embrace sustainability.

But in a matter of months, the energy demands from AI have complicated that narrative. Google’s emissions last year were 50% higher than in 2019, largely because of data centers and the rise of AI. Microsoft’s emissions also jumped for the same reasons, up 29% last year from 2020. And Meta’s emissions jumped 66% from 2021 to 2023.

In statements, Google and Microsoft both said that AI would ultimately prove crucial to addressing the climate crisis, and that they were working to reduce their carbon footprints and bring more clean energy online. Amazon pointed to a statement detailing its sustainability efforts.

There are two ways for tech companies to meet the demand: tap the existing grid, or build new power plants. Each poses its own challenges.

In West Virginia, coal-fired power plants that had been scheduled to retire are being kept online to meet the energy needs of new data centers across the border in Virginia.

And across the country, utilities are building new natural-gas infrastructure to support data centers. Goldman Sachs anticipates that “incremental data center power consumption in the U.S. will drive around 3.3 billion cubic feet per day of new natural gas demand by 2030, which will require new pipeline capacity to be built.”

At the same time, the tech giants are working to secure a lot more power to fuel the growth of AI.

Microsoft is working on a $10 billion plan to develop renewable energy to power data centers. Amazon has said it used 100% clean energy last year, though experts have questioned whether the company’s accounting was too lenient.

All that new low carbon power is great. But when the tech companies themselves are consuming all that electricity to power new AI data centers, pushing up energy demand, it isn’t making the grid overall any cleaner.

The energy demands from AI are only getting more intense. Microsoft and OpenAI are planning on building a $100 billion data center, according to reports. Initial reporting suggests it may require 5 gigawatts of power, or roughly the equivalent of five nuclear reactors.

And at the same time that companies are building more data centers, many of the chips at the heart of the AI revolution are getting more and more power hungry. Nvidia, the leader in AI chips, recently unveiled new products that would draw exponentially more energy from the grid.

The AI boom is generating big profits for some companies. And it may yet deliver breakthroughs that help reduce emissions. But, at least for now, data centers are doing more harm than good for the climate.

“It’s definitely very concerning as we’re trying to transition our current grid to renewable energy,” Inskeep said. “Adding a massive amount of new load on top of that poses a grave threat to that transition.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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