Science and Technology

Ring, a home security camera company owned by Amazon, said that it would stop letting police departments request users’ footage in its app amid longstanding concerns from privacy advocates about the company’s relationship with law enforcement.Eric Kuhn, the general manager of subscriptions and software for the Ring app Neighbors, announced on Wednesday that the company was shutting down a feature that allowed the police to request and receive videos from users of the app, a social platform similar to Nextdoor and Citizen where people can share alerts about crime near their home.Mr. Kuhn did not say why Ring was eliminating…

In September, the Mayo Clinic in Arizona created a first-of-its-kind job at the hospital system: chief artificial intelligence officer.Doctors at the Arizona site, which has facilities in Phoenix and Scottsdale, had experimented with A.I. for years. But after ChatGPT’s release in 2022 and an ensuing frenzy over the technology, the hospital decided it needed to work more with A.I. and find someone to coordinate the efforts.So executives appointed Dr. Bhavik Patel, a radiologist who specializes in A.I., to the new job. Dr. Patel has since piloted a new A.I. model that could help speed up the diagnosis of a rare…

In September, Amazon said it would invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, a San Francisco start-up working on artificial intelligence.Soon after, an Amazon executive sent a private message to an executive at another company. He said Anthropic had won the deal because it agreed to build its A.I. using specialized computer chips designed by Amazon.Amazon, he wrote, wanted to create a viable competitor to the chipmaker Nvidia, a key partner and kingmaker in the all-important field of artificial intelligence.The boom in generative A.I. over the last year exposed just how dependent big tech companies had become on Nvidia. They…