April 23, 2025

Roundtables: Brain-Computer Interfaces: From Promise to Product

Recorded on April 23, 2025 Brain-Computer Interfaces: From Promise to Product Speakers: David Rotman, editor at large, and Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have been crowned the 11th Breakthrough Technology of 2025 by MIT Technology Review‘s readers. BCIs are electrodes implanted into the brain to send neural commands to computers, primarily to assist…

April 2025

Canoo CEO can buy bankrupt EV startup’s assets, judge rules

April 9, 2025
The sale of bankrupt EV startup Canoo’s assets to its CEO has been okayed by the judge overseeing the case. After evaluating a number of limited objections to the sale, Judge Brendan Shannon said in a hearing Wednesday he believes the process was fair, and that no one else but Canoo CEO Anthony Aquila made […]

More good news for New York startups: Lerer Hippeau raised another $200M

April 9, 2025
New York’s A-list venture capital seed fund, Lerer Hippeau, announced it closed a ninth $200 million fund on Wednesday. That’s a step up from its eighth fund, which closed at $140 million, it said. With the new fund, Lerer Hippeau has $1.4 billion of assets under management. Since its inception in 2010, Lerer Hippeau has […]

OpenAI launches program to design new ‘domain-specific’ AI benchmarks

April 9, 2025
OpenAI, like many AI labs, thinks benchmarks are broken. It says it wants to fix them through a new program. Called the OpenAI Pioneers Program, the effort will focus on creating evaluations for AI models that “set the bar for what good looks like,” as OpenAI phrased it in a blog post. “As the pace […]

Anthropic rolls out a $200-per-month Claude subscription

April 9, 2025
Anthropic announced on Wednesday that it’s launching a new, very expensive subscription plan for its AI chatbot Claude: Max. An answer to OpenAI’s $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro tier, Max comes with higher usage limits than Anthropic’s $20-per-month Claude Pro subscription as well as priority access to the company’s newest AI models and features. A bit confusingly, […]

Kalshi CEO: ‘State law doesn’t really apply’ to us

April 9, 2025
Last week, prediction market startup Kalshi sued New Jersey and Nevada after they tried to shut down its recently launched sports trading operation. In the lawsuit, Kalshi claimed that, since they’re a federally regulated platform, state gaming commissions don’t have the authority to set rules for them. “We’re not necessarily very concerned [because] we are […]

MIT study finds that AI doesn’t, in fact, have values

April 9, 2025
A study went viral several months ago for implying that, as AI becomes increasingly sophisticated, it develops “value systems” — systems that lead it to, for example, prioritize its own well-being over humans. A more recent paper out of MIT pours cold water on that hyperbolic notion, drawing the conclusion that AI doesn’t, in fact, […]