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

Brain-computer interfaces face a critical test

April 1, 2025
Tech companies are always trying out new ways for people to interact with computers—consider efforts like Google Glass, the Apple Watch, and Amazon’s Alexa. You’ve probably used at least one. But the most radical option has been tried by fewer than 100 people on Earth—those who have lived for months or years with implanted brain-computer…

How do you teach an AI model to give therapy?

April 1, 2025
On March 27, the results of the first clinical trial for a generative AI therapy bot were published, and they showed that people in the trial who had depression or anxiety or were at risk for eating disorders benefited from chatting with the bot.  I was surprised by those results, which you can read about…

OpenAI’s new image generator is now available to all users

April 1, 2025
OpenAI’s new image generator, powered by its GPT-4o model, is now available to all users, CEO Sam Altman said in a post on X. The feature was until now available only to paying users of ChatGPT. While it is not clear how many images users on the free tier can generate, Altman last week had […]

Construct Capital raises $300M fund for defense and manufacturing tech

April 1, 2025
Construct Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in startups applying technology to sectors like manufacturing, transportation, and defense, has closed its third fund with $300 million in capital commitments. The Washington D.C.-based firm previously raised a $225 million second fund and a $75 million capital pool for later-stage companies in 2022. While many […]