Science and Technology

Bitcoin hit a record high of about $68,800 on Tuesday, capping a remarkable comeback for the volatile cryptocurrency after its value plunged in 2022 amid a market meltdown.Bitcoin’s price has risen more than 300 percent since November 2022, a resurgence that few predicted when the price dropped below $20,000 in 2022. Its previous record was just under $68,790 in November 2021, as crypto markets boomed and amateur investors poured savings into experimental digital coins.“This is just the beginning of this bull market,” said Nathan McCauley, the chief executive of the crypto company Anchorage Digital. “The best is yet to come.”Bitcoin’s…

Since introducing the App Store in 2008, Apple has run it largely the same way across 175 countries, right down to the 30 percent commission it has collected on every app sold.The company calls the result an economic miracle. The store has generated more than $1 trillion in sales, helped create more than seven million jobs and delivered Apple billions of dollars in annual profits.But as the App Store approaches its 16th anniversary, a patchwork of local rules are upending Apple’s authority over it.On Thursday, European Union regulators will begin enforcing the Digital Markets Act, a 2022 law that requires…

When Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, for breach of contract on Thursday, he turned claims by the start-up’s closest partner, Microsoft, into a weapon.He repeatedly cited a contentious but highly influential paper written by researchers and top executives at Microsoft about the power of GPT-4, the breakthrough artificial intelligence system OpenAI released last March.In the “Sparks of A.G.I.” paper, Microsoft’s research lab said that — though it didn’t understand how — GPT-4 had shown “sparks” of “artificial general intelligence,” or A.G.I., a machine that can do everything the human brain can do.It was a bold…

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.kevin rooseHave you — I’m obsessed with this story about the Willy Wonka event. Have you seen this?casey newtonIs it the Fyre Festival of candy-related children’s theater?kevin rooseYes. So this was an event called Willy’s Chocolate Experience that was scheduled in Glasgow, Scotland this past weekend. And it appears to have been a total AI-generated event. All of the art on the website appears to…