September 2025

The Download: unnerving AI avatars, and Trump’s climate gift to China

September 4, 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. Synthesia’s AI clones are more expressive than ever. Soon they’ll be able to talk back. —Rhiannon Williams Earlier this summer, I visited the AI company Synthesia to give it what it needed to…

Transforming CX with embedded real-time analytics 

September 4, 2025
During Black Friday in 2024, Stripe processed more than $31 billion in transactions, with processing rates peaking at 137,000 transactions per minute, the highest in the company’s history. The financial-services firm had to analyze every transaction in real time to prevent nearly 21 million fraud attempts that could have siphoned more than $910 million from its…

How Trump is helping China extend its massive lead in clean energy 

September 4, 2025
On a spring day in 1954, Bell Labs researchers showed off the first practical solar panels at a press conference in Murray Hill, New Jersey, using sunlight to spin a toy Ferris wheel before a stunned crowd. The solar future looked bright. But in the race to commercialize the technology it invented, the US would…