Technology

We got two big pieces of energy news from Google this week. The company announced that it’s signed an agreement to purchase electricity from a fusion company’s forthcoming first power plant. Google also released its latest environmental report, which shows that its energy use from data centers has doubled since 2020. Taken together, these two…

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. How generative AI could help make construction sites safer More than 1,000 construction workers die on the job each year in the US, making it the most dangerous industry for fatal slips, trips,…

Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer at OpenAI, launched her secretive startup in February — and is paying top dollar for technical talent, according to new filings.

Venture capital firm Catalio Capital Management announced today the closing of its more than $400 million Fund IV, as first reported by Bloomberg. The fund will continue the firm’s thesis of backing healthcare and biotechnology companies.  The firm was founded in 2020 and has made more than 100 investments, according to Pitchbook. Catalio’s Fund IV, […]

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. People are using AI to ‘sit’ with them while they trip on psychedelics A growing number of people are using AI chatbots as “trip sitters”—a phrase that traditionally refers to a sober person…

The internet infrastructure company Cloudflare announced today that it will now default to blocking AI bots from visiting websites it hosts. Cloudflare will also give clients the ability to manually allow or ban these AI bots on a case-by-case basis, and it will introduce a so-called “pay-per-crawl” service that clients can use to receive compensation…

Peter sat alone in his bedroom as the first waves of euphoria coursed through his body like an electrical current. He was in darkness, save for the soft blue light of the screen glowing from his lap. Then he started to feel pangs of panic. He picked up his phone and typed a message to…

Last week, the technology companies Anthropic and Meta each won landmark victories in two separate court cases that examined whether or not the firms had violated copyright when they trained their large language models on copyrighted books without permission. The rulings are the first we’ve seen to come out of copyright cases of this kind.…

Tinder is requiring new users in California to use facial recognition technology to verify their profiles.