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

TikTok is shutting down its Instagram competitor TikTok Notes

April 1, 2025
TikTok is shutting down its Instagram competitor, TikTok Notes, on May 8. The photo-sharing app launched in testing in Canada, Australia, and Vietnam last year. The company is notifying TikTok Notes users of its decision to retire the app and is directing them to ByteDance-owned Lemon8, which isn’t surprising given that the apps are quite […]

Sam Altman says that OpenAI’s capacity issues will cause product delays

April 1, 2025
In a series of posts on X on Monday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that the popularity of the company’s new image-generation tool in ChatGPT will cause unspecified product delays. “We are getting things under control, but you should expect new releases from OpenAI to be delayed, stuff to break, and for service to sometimes […]

Roblox partners with Google on ads

April 1, 2025
Google on Tuesday announced a new partnership with gaming company Roblox, which will allow advertisers to purchase and scale Roblox’s Rewarded Video and other immersive ad formats. That means marketers who want to reach the younger Gen Z audience that dominates the platform will be able to use Google Ad Manager to place their video […]

NaNoWriMo shut down after AI, content moderation scandals

April 1, 2025
NaNoWriMo, a twenty-five-year-old online writing community-turned-nonprofit, announced on Monday evening that it is shutting down. NaNoWriMo — an abbreviation of National Novel Writing Month — is an annual challenge for writers to complete a rough draft of a novel during the month of November. After starting as a Yahoo! mailing list in 1999, the project […]

Qualcomm acquires generative AI division of Vietnamese startup VinAI

April 1, 2025
Qualcomm has acquired the generative AI division of VinAI, an AI research company headquartered in Hanoi, for an undisclosed amount, the companies announced on Monday. The move marks Qualcomm’s continued expansion into the AI tooling sector. VinAI, which was founded by former DeepMind research scientist Hung Bui, develops a range of generative AI technologies, including […]