November 21, 2024

How OpenAI stress-tests its large language models

OpenAI is once again lifting the lid (just a crack) on its safety-testing processes. Last month the company shared the results of an investigation that looked at how often ChatGPT produced a harmful gender or racial stereotype based on a user’s name. Now it has put out two papers describing how it stress-tests its powerful…

August 2023

QIA invests $1 billion in Ambani’s Reliance Retail at $100 billion valuation

August 23, 2023
QIA, Qatar’s sovereign fund, will invest $1 billion in Reliance Retail for a 1% stake in India’s largest retail chain, the two firms said Wednesday. The investment values Reliance Retail, part of Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries, at $100 billion. Reliance Retail — which operates 18.500 stores and digital commerce platforms, selling everything from electronics to […]

The fascinating evolution of typing Chinese characters

August 23, 2023
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. The idea of downloading a third-party keyboard to your phone may seem unnecessary to most people, but in China it’s the norm.  Chinese is the only modern language that’s logographic, meaning…

Job titles of the future: Chief heat officer

August 23, 2023
In Miami, extreme heat is a deadly concern. Rising temperatures now kill more people than hurricanes or floods, and do more harm to the region’s economy than rising sea levels. That’s why, in 2021, Florida’s Miami-Dade County hired a chief heat officer, Jane Gilbert—the first position of its kind in the world. Heat has been…

A cell that does it all

August 23, 2023
From “The Troubled Hunt for the Ultimate Cell” (1998), by Antonio Regalado: “If awards were given for the most intriguing, controversial, underfunded and hush-hush of scientific pursuits, the search for the human embryonic stem (ES) cell would likely sweep the categories. It’s a hunt for the tabula rasa of human cells—a cell that has the…

The beautiful complexity of the US radio spectrum

August 23, 2023
Somewhere above you right now, a plane is broadcasting its coordinates on 1090 megahertz. A satellite high above Earth is transmitting weather maps on 1694.1 MHz. On top of all that, every single phone and Wi-Fi router near you blasts internet traffic through the air over radio waves. A carefully regulated radio spectrum is what…

How culture drives foul play on the internet, and how new “upcode” can protect us

August 23, 2023
The world of online misdeeds is an eerie biome, crawling with Bored Apes, Fancy Bears, Shiba Inu coins, self-­replicating viruses, and whales. But the behavior driving fraud, hacks, and scams on the internet has always been familiar and very human. New technologies change little about the fact that illegal operations exist because some people are…

Hackers exploit WinRAR zero-day bug to steal funds from broker accounts

August 23, 2023
Cybercriminals are exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in WinRAR, the venerable shareware archiving tool for Windows, to target traders and steal funds. Cybersecurity company Group-IB discovered the vulnerability, which affects the processing of the ZIP file format by WinRAR, in June. The zero-day flaw — meaning the vendor had no time, or zero days, to fix […]

Crypto lender Maple Finance raises $5M to enter Asia amid regulatory clarity

August 23, 2023
Maple Finance, an on-chain, institutional credit marketplace that’s aspiring to fill a gap left behind by the collapses of crypto lending heavyweights like BlockFi and Celcius, has its sight set on Asia as financial hubs like Hong Kong and Singapore provide more regulatory clarity around digital assets. Maple, which falls under the so-called decentralized finance […]

Jobs platform CakeResume gets $5 million in fresh funding

August 23, 2023
CakeResume, used by tech companies like Google, Nvidia and TSMC to find new talent, announced today it has raised $5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by returning investor Mynavi, one of Japan’s largest human resources companies, and will be used to expand in countries like Indonesia, Vietnam and India. Based in […]

Dice books $65M for its event discovery and ticketing platform

August 23, 2023
Live, in-person activity has come back with force in the wake of years of living with Covid-19, and a London startup that built an events tech business is today announcing funding to capitalise on that. Dice, an events discovery and ticketing platform, has raised $65 million, funding that it will be using to grow in […]