December 2023

The Download: Big Tech’s AI stranglehold, and gene-editing treatments

December 5, 2023
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. Make no mistake—AI is owned by Big Tech —By Amba Kak, Sarah Myers West and Meredith Whittaker, members of the AI Now Institute Until late November, when the epic saga of OpenAI’s board…

EnCharge raises $22.6M to commercialize its AI-accerating chips

December 5, 2023

Around a year ago, TechCrunch wrote about a little-known company developing AI-accelerating chips to face off against hardware from titans of industry — e.g. Nvidia, AMD, Microsoft, Meta, AWS and Intel. Its mission at the time sounded a little ambitious — and still does. But to its credit, the startup, EnCharge AI, is alive and […]

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Vancouver’s Fantuan raises $40M to deliver real Chinese food at your doorstep

December 5, 2023

For those who move abroad from China, one thing they miss dearly is the convenience of food delivery apps. Fantuan, a Vancouver-based company, has been working on replicating the experience of Chinese food delivery platforms in the West for the past nine years. Recently, it raised some fresh capital to further advance its goal — […]

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Foretellix raises $85M to build and test scenarios for self-driving systems

December 5, 2023

On their way to building fully-autonomous vehicles, self-driving car makers are facing a tall task: training their AIs to be able to respond reliably to any and all scenarios that a car, truck or bus might encounter as well as, or hopefully better, than a human would. Today, a startup with a platform to help […]

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AI’s carbon footprint is bigger than you think

December 5, 2023
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. World leaders are currently in Dubai for the UN COP28 climate talks. As 2023 is set to become the hottest year on record, this year’s meeting is a moment of reckoning for oil…

Used by only a few nerds, Facebook kills PGP-encrypted emails

December 5, 2023

In 2015, as part of the wave of encrypting all the things on the internet, encouraged by the Edward Snowden revelations, Facebook announced that it would allow users to receive encrypted emails from the company. Even at the time, this was a feature for the paranoid users. By turning on the feature, all emails sent […]

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