August 15, 2025

The Download: Taiwan’s silicon shield, and ChatGPT’s personality misstep

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Taiwan’s “silicon shield” could be weakening Taiwanese politics increasingly revolves around one crucial question: Will China invade? China’s ruling party has wanted to seize Taiwan for more than half a century. But in…

August 2025

Trump says Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan must ‘resign immediately’

August 7, 2025
Trump’s post comes after Republican Senator Tom Cotton on Wednesday wrote to Intel’s board of directors, asking about Tan’s ties to China, his investments in the country, and raised concerns about his time leading Cadence Design Systems, which had a Chinese military university as a customer.

The Download: how AI is improving itself, and hidden greenhouse gases

August 7, 2025
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Five ways that AI is learning to improve itself Last week, Mark Zuckerberg declared that Meta aims to achieve smarter-than-human AI. He seems to have a recipe for achieving that goal, and the…

The greenhouse gases we’re not accounting for

August 7, 2025
In the spring of 2021, climate scientists were stumped.  The global economy was just emerging from the covid-19 lockdowns, but for some reason the levels of methane—a greenhouse gas emitted mainly through agriculture and fossil-fuel production—had soared in the atmosphere the previous year, rising at the fastest rate on record. Researchers around the world set…