Genetic sharing site openSNP to shut down, citing concerns of data privacy and ‘rise in authoritarian governments’
The open source repository of genetic data will delete its banks of data on April 30, its co-founder confirms.
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
ChatGPT Creator OpenAI Just Closed the Largest Private Tech Deal Ever, Raising $40 Billion: ‘Make AI More Useful in Everyday Life’
OpenAI is now valued at $300 billion, joining the ranks of the most valuable private companies in the world.
Someone is trying to recruit security researchers in bizarre hacking campaign
An obscure wannabe hacker’s tantalizing (and clearly sketchy) job offer has some security researchers asking, why?
Sam Altman says that OpenAI’s capacity issues will cause product delays
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
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
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
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 […]
The Upcoming Real ID Deadline Is Bringing Long Lines to the DMV — and Scalpers Charging Up to $300 for an Appointment
The deadline to have Real ID-compliant identification for domestic travel is May 7.
I Built Two Companies, Then Got an MBA — Here’s What I Learned
An MBA seemed like the perfect way to level up my business skills — and spoiler: it absolutely was.
Meet Ponte Labor, a startup matching Hispanic immigrants to jobs using WhatsApp
While working on their MBAs at Harvard Business School, Colombian immigrants Stephanie Murra and Lorenza Vélez noticed that most of the workers in the cafeteria were Hispanic. In conversations with them, a common theme kept coming up: how difficult it was for people who legally moved to the U.S. from Spanish-speaking countries to find their […]