June 26, 2025

The Download: Google DeepMind’s DNA AI, and heatwaves’ impact on the grid

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. Google’s new AI will help researchers understand how our genes work When scientists first sequenced the human genome in 2003, they revealed the full set of DNA instructions that make a person. But…

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An intelligent, practical path to reindustrialization

June 24, 2025
This past spring, we launched a brand-new manufacturing initiative—building on ideas that are as old as MIT. Since William Barton Rogers created a school to help accelerate America’s industrialization, manufacturing has been an essential part of our mission—a particularly MIT brand of manufacturing, informed and improved by scientific principles and advanced by the kind of…

Art rhymes

June 24, 2025
As an MIT visiting scholar, rap legend Lupe Fiasco decided to go fishing for ideas on campus. In an approach he calls “ghotiing” (pronounced “fishing”), he composed nine raps inspired by works in MIT’s public art collection, writing and recording them on site. On May 2, he and the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble debuted six…

India’s GoKwik raised a small $13M round for a hefty leap in valuation

June 24, 2025
GoKwik, an Indian startup that offers a suite of integrated e-commerce products, has raised a small round of $13 million, which it calls a “growth” round, that has boosted its valuation to $450 million pre-money. While the new funding round, led by RTP Global, is 63% smaller than its Series B of $35 million, announced […]

New data highlights the race to build more empathetic language models

June 24, 2025
Measuring AI progress has usually meant testing scientific knowledge or logical reasoning – but while the major benchmarks still focus on left-brain logic skills, there’s been a quiet push within AI companies to make models more emotionally intelligent. As foundation models compete on soft measures like user preference and “feeling the AGI,” having a good […]

Facebook Group admins complain of mass bans; Meta says it’s fixing the problem

June 24, 2025
After a wave of mass bans affecting Instagram and Facebook users alike, Meta users are now complaining that Facebook Groups are also being impacted by mass suspensions. According to individual complaints and organized efforts on sites like Reddit to share information, the bans have affected thousands of groups both in the U.S. and abroad and […]