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

How the Pentagon is adapting to China’s technological rise

April 7, 2025
It’s been just over two months since Kathleen Hicks stepped down as US deputy secretary of defense. As the highest-ranking woman in Pentagon history, Hicks shaped US military posture through an era defined by renewed competition between powerful countries and a scramble to modernize defense technology.   She’s currently taking a break before jumping into her…

Want to stay young? Peter Diamandis says survive the next 10 years

April 7, 2025
Peter Diamandis, a futurist with degrees from both MIT and Harvard, has spent much of the past two decades evangelizing a vision of an “abundant future” driven by exponential technologies that will lengthen our lives. The serial entrepreneur and founder of organizations like the XPRIZE Foundation and Singularity University has also cultivated close ties with […]

Meta’s benchmarks for its new AI models are a bit misleading

April 6, 2025
One of the new flagship AI models Meta released on Saturday, Maverick, ranks second on LM Arena, a test that has human raters compare the outputs of models and choose which they prefer. But it seems the version of Maverick that Meta deployed to LM Arena differs from the version that’s widely available to developers. […]

BBC seeks more prominent credit in Apple and Google News

April 6, 2025
The British Broadcasting Corporation has filed a complaint with a UK antitrust regulator complaining that aggregators like Apple News and Google News minimize credit for the stories they feature. Apple Insider reports that the BBC is asking the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority to require Apple and Google to more prominently credit news sources. And […]

White House reportedly blames auto-suggested iPhone contact for Signal scandal

April 6, 2025
How did Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg get added to a Signal group chat with Trump administration officials discussing their plans for an airstrike in Yemen? The simplest explanation: National Security Adviser Mike Waltz had Goldberg saved as a contact in his phone and accidentally added him. Indeed, when Waltz first claimed that Goldberg’s phone number […]

Microsoft releases AI-generated Quake II demo, but admits ‘limitations’

April 6, 2025
Microsoft has released a browser-based, playable level of the classic video game Quake II. This functions as a tech demo for the gaming capabilities of Microsoft’s Copilot AI platform — though by the company’s own admission, the experience isn’t quite the same as playing a well-made game. You can try it out for yourself, using […]

DOGE reportedly planning a hackathon to build ‘mega API’ for IRS data

April 5, 2025
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) plans to host a hackathon next week focused on the creation of a “mega API” that will provide access to taxpayer data, according to Wired. Wired says the hackathon is being organized by two DOGE staffers at the Internal Revenue Service — Gavin Kilger and Sam Corcos, who’s […]

Meta releases Llama 4, a new crop of flagship AI models

April 5, 2025
Meta has released a new collection of AI models, Llama 4, in its Llama family — on a Saturday, no less. There are four new models in total: Llama 4 Scout, Llama 4 Maverick, and Llama 4 Behemoth. All were trained on “large amounts of unlabeled text, image, and video data” to give them “broad […]