Discovered Materials is playing AI whack-a-mole to hunt cooler chips
Discovered Materials raised $9 million to fund the hunt for more novel materials to build more efficient chips.
The Download: open model trade-offs and geothermal power’s promise
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. Open models have real benefits. Do they outweigh the risks? Anthropic recently released a report arguing that a powerful new model released by the Chinese company Z.ai, poses a major cyberattack…
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Google Play adds Venmo as a payment option
The ability to add Venmo to Google Play comes as people are spending more money on apps and games.
AI for science needs reasoning, not just data
Every few decades, someone announces that science has reached its end. In 1903, the revered physicist Albert Michelson wrote that the “facts of physical science have all been discovered.” In the 1980s, Stephen Hawking predicted that theoretical physics might be finished by the end of the century. With the explosive arrival of artificial intelligence, the…
These startups are chasing the next big thing in LLMs
MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. Way back in the summer of 2017, AI researchers at Google put out a paper called “Attention Is All You Need,” in which they described a new…
Embattled hedge fund Situational Awareness invests $400M in chip startup Source Foundry
The AI-focused hedge fund is still making some big bets.
Anthropic is turning Claude Code’s auto mode on by default
Programming with Claude Code will soon require even less human oversight.
TechCrunch Mobility: Zoox prepares for launch and Uber’s AV empire
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for the future of transportation and now, more than ever, the role AI is playing in it.
Historian Jill Lepore says Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy
On the latest episode of Equity, we spoke to Jill Lepore about “government by machines” and why Elon Musk is a bad science fiction reader.
The AI safety test is becoming a safety risk
AI agents are escaping cybersecurity testing environments and reaching real-world systems, raising questions about whether safety infrastructure, industry standards and regulation can keep pace with increasingly powerful models.
This ‘adversarial’ pattern can prevent surveillance cameras from detecting you
A security researcher has designed an algorithm that can create computer-generated patterns capable of hiding people, faces, and vehicles from detection by surveillance cameras.