A Town That Became ‘One Giant Airbnb’ Is Now Facing a Reckoning
Before the pandemic, there were about 400 properties for rent in the area. Now, there are 2,400.
The Download: AI replicas, and China’s climate role
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. AI can now create a replica of your personality Imagine sitting down with an AI model for a spoken two-hour interview. A friendly voice guides you through a conversation that ranges from your…
November 2023
Wattpad Premium subscribers now have access to 5 free monthly Wattpad Originals
Wattpad announced today “Premium Picks,” a new offering that gives Premium and Premium+ subscribers monthly access to five free Wattpad Originals—the recently launched freemium model where select authors can choose to monetize chapters. Instead of paying to unlock content, members are now given five Wattpad Originals each month at no additional cost. The selection is […]
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Kyutai is a French AI research lab with a $330 million budget that will make everything open source
This morning at Scaleway’s ai-PULSE conference, French billionaire and Iliad CEO Xavier Niel gave some extra details about his plans for an AI research lab based in Paris. This new lab called Kyutai will be a privately-funded nonprofit working on artificial general intelligence. It will work with PhD students, postdocs and researchers on research papers […]
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The Download: what is death, and jailbreaking generative AI
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. What is death? Just as birth certificates note the time we enter the world, death certificates mark the moment we exit it. This practice reflects traditional notions about life and death as binaries.…
3 Tech Stocks Set for Take off Soon!
The increasing reliance of companies on advanced technology solutions and accelerated digital transformation are expected to drive the tech industry’s growth. Therefore, it could be wise to buy fundamentally strong…
Toku’s AI platform predicts heart conditions by scanning inside your eye
Ehsan Vaghefi, CEO and co-founder of Toku, grew up with a blind father who lost eyesight at the age of four due to congenital glaucoma. As a result of this, his dad was involved with the Blind Foundation in his home country of Iran. Vaghefi says most of his childhood friends were either blind or […]
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Change in X’s terms indicate EU researchers will get API access
After taking over Twitter last year, Elon Musk famously yanked API access from third-party apps and changed API pricing tiers to make it difficult for researchers to access and study the platform’s data. Now the company he’s since renamed X has backtracked in the European Union where legal obligations in the bloc’s Digital Services Act […]
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Signal details costs of keeping its private messaging service alive
What price privacy? End-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging app Signal has put out an interesting overview of the costs required to develop and maintain its pro-privacy systems which shield user data from tracking by default. The blog post, penned by Signal president Meredith Whittaker and developer Joshua Lund, reveals it’s currently spends around $14 million per […]
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Online grocery startup Pricepally to expand in Nigeria backed by $1.3M funding
Pricepally, a Nigerian online grocery store for fresh produce and packaged food, has raised $1.3 million seed funding, backed by Samurai Incubate; a Japanese VC that also participated in the startup’s 2021 pre-seed round, SOSV, ELEA, Hi2 Global, Chui Ventures and ex-Unilever executive David Mureithi. Following the new funding, the startup joins a handful of […]
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The pain is real. The painkillers are virtual reality.
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. I hate needles. I am a grown woman who owns a Buzzy, a vibrating, bee-shaped device you press against your arm to confuse your nerves and…