April 2025

Tesla reportedly delays launch of new low-cost model by months

April 21, 2025
Tesla is pushing back the promised launch of a more affordable EV by months, according to a report from Reuters. The new model, which is supposedly a very stripped-down Model Y, was supposed to debut in the first half of this year but now might not come until late 2025 or early 2026, states the […]

Airbnb will now show users the total cost of their stay right away

April 21, 2025
One of the chief complaints of Airbnb users over the years has been not being able to tell right away how much they would pay for their stay, including charges such as cleaning fees. Airbnb is now fixing that by showing the total cost for a given property, including all charges, automatically. Users across the […]

AI is pushing the limits of the physical world

April 21, 2025
Architecture often assumes a binary between built projects and theoretical ones. What physics allows in actual buildings, after all, is vastly different from what architects can imagine and design (often referred to as “paper architecture”). That imagination has long been supported and enabled by design technology, but the latest advancements in artificial intelligence have prompted…

The quest to build islands with ocean currents in the Maldives

April 21, 2025
In satellite images, the 20-odd coral atolls of the Maldives look something like skeletal remains or chalk lines at a crime scene. But these landforms, which circle the peaks of a mountain range that has vanished under the Indian Ocean, are far from inert. They’re the products of living processes—places where coral has grown toward…

$8 billion of US climate tech projects have been canceled so far in 2025

April 21, 2025
This year has been rough for climate technology: Companies have canceled, downsized, or shut down at least 16 large-scale projects worth $8 billion in total in the first quarter of 2025, according to a new report. That’s far more cancellations than have typically occurred in recent years, according to a new report from E2, a…

Palantir exec defends company’s immigration surveillance work

April 20, 2025
One of the founders of startup accelerator Y Combinator offered unsparing criticism this weekend of the controversial data analytics company Palantir, leading a company executive to offer an extensive defense of Palantir’s work. The back-and-forth came after federal filings showed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — tasked with carrying out the Trump administration’s […]

OpenAI’s o3 AI model scores lower on a benchmark than the company initially implied

April 20, 2025
A discrepancy between first- and third-party benchmark results for OpenAI’s o3 AI model is raising questions about the company’s transparency and model testing practices. When OpenAI unveiled o3 in December, the company claimed the model could answer just over a fourth of questions on FrontierMath, a challenging set of math problems. That score blew the […]

Kids sure love video game movies

April 20, 2025
“A Minecraft Movie” isn’t just a hit — after three weekends in theaters, the film is estimated to have grossed $344 million domestically and $720 million worldwide. That makes it the biggest movie of an admittedly underwhelming year at the box office (so far), and the second biggest video game movie of all time. Coming […]