Technology

The Download: rise of the multimodal robots, and the SEC’s new climate rules

March 11, 2024
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. An OpenAI spinoff has built an AI model that helps robots learn tasks like humans The news: In the summer of 2021, OpenAI quietly shuttered its mulrobotics team, announcing that progress was being…

An OpenAI spinoff has built an AI model that helps robots learn tasks like humans

March 11, 2024
In the summer of 2021, OpenAI quietly shuttered its robotics team, announcing that progress was being stifled by a lack of data necessary to train robots in how to move and reason using artificial intelligence.  Now three of OpenAI’s early research scientists say the startup they spun off in 2017, called Covariant, has solved that…

The Download: organoid uses, and open source voting machines

March 8, 2024
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. The many uses of mini-organs This week, we reported on a team of researchers who managed to grow lung, kidney, and intestinal organoids from fetal cells. Because these tiny 3D cell clusters mimic…

A plan to bring down drug prices could threaten America’s technology boom

March 8, 2024
Forty years ago, Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was full of deserted warehouses and dying low-tech factories. Today, it is arguably the center of the global biotech industry.  During my 30 years in MIT’s Technology Licensing Office, I witnessed this transformation firsthand, and I know it was no accident. Much of it was the direct…

The many uses of mini-organs

March 8, 2024
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. This week I wrote about a team of researchers who managed to grow lung, kidney, and intestinal organoids from fetal cells floating around in the amniotic…

How open source voting machines could boost trust in US elections

March 7, 2024
While the vendors pitched their latest voting machines in Concord, New Hampshire, this past August, the election officials in the room g­­asped. They whispered, “No way.” They nodded their heads and filled out the scorecards in their laps. Interrupting if they had to, they asked every kind of question: How much does the new scanner…

The Download: hydropower’s rocky path ahead, and how to reverse falling birth rates

March 7, 2024
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. Emissions hit a record high in 2023. Blame hydropower. Hydropower is one of the world’s largest sources of renewable electricity. But last year, weather conditions caused hydropower to fall short in a major…

Sequoia’s Jess Lee will demystify product-market fit at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024

March 7, 2024

Build something people want. It’s a simple concept — and one that Y Combinator loves to repeat — but one that can be hard to get right when building a startup. How strongly a technology good or service resonates with potential customers is often called “product-market fit,” or PMF. The more product-market fit you have, […]

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