James Farrell

James Farrell is the former editor-in-chief of Chiang Mai CityNews, where he wrote and managed daily news, features, op-eds and blogs on a diverse range of topics. Prior to this, in the same city of Northern Thailand where he lives, he was the longstanding deputy editor of the monthly magazine Citylife. He has written on culture, politics, travel, tech, business, human rights, for local, national, and international news services and magazines. He has a keen interest in the role technology is playing in the transformation of society, culture and politics, especially in developing nations. This is reflected in his not-so-successful first novel.

Latest from James Farrell

Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal’s Al startup Parallel raises $100M

Former Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Parag Agrawal today announced that his startup, Parallel Web Systems, has raised $100 million in an early-stage round to build web search infrastructure designed specifically for artificial intelligence agents. The Series A round values the company at $740 million and was co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures, with Spark ...

Yann LeCun’s exit highlights tensions in Meta’s shifting AI strategy

Meta Platforms Inc. Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun is leaving the company to launch his own startup, according to the Financial Times. A Turing Award winner who worked under “the Godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, in the 1980s, LeCun (pictured) is one of the leading figures in artificial intelligence. After moving from France to the ...

EU set to relax data protection rules to boost AI growth

The European Union is looking at loosening the shackles of its strict regulations around privacy to boost the development of artificial intelligence, according to documents obtained by Politico. The bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, touted as a global benchmark for data privacy, was created to protect citizens from tech industries that may exploit ...

Elon Musk to receive $1T Tesla pay package if ambitious targets are met

Tesla Inc. shareholders today approved a $1 trillion compensation plan for Chief Executive Elon Musk, which would considerably increase the wealth of the world’s richest person if he meets shareholders’ expectations. During Tesla’s annual general meeting today, when it was announced that 75% of investors had given the thumbs up to the future paycheck for ...

Google to make major changes to its app store to settle Epic Games lawsuit

“Fortnite” video game maker Epic Games Inc. has reached a “comprehensive settlement” with Google LLC that ends a five-year-old legal battle and will lead to reforms to Android and the Google Play Store. In 2020, Epic filed lawsuits against both Google and Apple Inc., claiming that the 15% to 30% commission fee to download apps ...

Amazon blocks Perplexity from sending its AI agents to purchase goods

Amazon.com Inc. has sent a cease-and-desist letter to AI startup Perplexity, asking that the company refrain from using its Comet browser’s AI agents to make purchases on Amazon’s marketplace, a move Perplexity has called “bullying.” Amazon argued that agents taking the place of human shoppers would degrade the customer experience. The company explicitly prohibits “any ...

Trump claims not to know the crypto king he just pardoned

In a CBS “60 Minutes” interview aired on Sunday, President Trump said he didn’t know who Changpeng Zhao is, even though he’s the crypto billionaire with ties to the Trump family’s own crypto venture. Zhao was the co-founder of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of trading volume. In 2023, Zhao, also known ...

After a death and lawsuits, Character.AI will ban teens from speaking to its chatbots

Character.AI today said today that it soon will no longer allow minors to communicate with its chatbots in a move to address complaints about child safety. The Silicon Valley Google LLC-funded chatbot startup, which lets users create character-based avatars, has been the focus of scrutiny for some time now, recently at the center of a ...

OpenAI says more than a million people a week show severe mental distress when talking to ChatGPT

In a report released by OpenAI today, the company illustrated just how many of its users are struggling with mental health issues and what it’s doing to mitigate the problem. Working with 170 mental health experts, OpenAI analyzed responses from its 800 million weekly users to better understand how many were experiencing emotional distress at ...

Trump calls off National Guard operation in San Francisco after speaking with mayor and tech CEOs

President Donald Trump today announced that he no longer plans to deploy federal troops to San Francisco after having spoken to the mayor and two major tech figures. “The Federal Government was preparing to ‘surge’ San Francisco, California, on Saturday, but friends of mine who live in the area called last night to ask me ...