February 9, 2025

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admits that AI’s benefits may not be widely distributed

In a new essay on his personal blog, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company is open to a “compute budget,” among other “strange-sounding” ideas, to “enable everyone on Earth to use a lot of AI” and ensure the benefits of the technology are widely distributed. “The historical impact of technological progress suggests that most […]

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Technology

Unlocking the power of sustainability

February 7, 2024
According to UN climate experts, 2023 was the warmest year on record. This puts the heat squarely on companies to accelerate their sustainability efforts. “It’s quite clear that the sense of urgency is increasing,” says Jonas Bohlin, chief product officer for environmental, social, and governance (ESG) platform provider Position Green. That pressure is coming from…

How virtual power plants are shaping tomorrow’s energy system

February 7, 2024
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. For more than a century, the prevalent image of power plants has been characterized by towering smokestacks, endless coal trains, and loud spinning turbines. But the…

The Download: China’s chiplets, and OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 watermarking

February 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. Why China is betting big on chiplets For the past couple of years, US sanctions have had the Chinese semiconductor industry locked in a stranglehold. Chinese companies can still manufacture chips for today’s…

This Chinese city wants to be the Silicon Valley of chiplets

February 7, 2024
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Last month, MIT Technology Review unveiled our pick for 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2024. These are the technological advancements that we believe will change our lives today or sometime in the future.…

EU proposes criminalizing AI-generated child sexual abuse and deepfakes

February 6, 2024

AI generated imagery and other forms of deepfakes depicting child sexual abuse (CSA) could be criminialized in the European Union under plans to update existing legislation to keep pace with technology developments, the Commission announced today. It’s also proposing to create a new criminal offence of livestreaming child sexual abuse. The possession and exchange of […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Why China is betting big on chiplets

February 6, 2024
For the past couple of years, US sanctions have had the Chinese semiconductor industry locked in a stranglehold. While Chinese companies can still manufacture chips for today’s uses, they are not allowed to import certain chipmaking technologies, making it almost impossible for them to produce more advanced products. There is a workaround, however. A relatively…

Building innovation with blockchain

February 6, 2024
In 2015, JPMorgan Chase embarked on a journey to build a more secure and open wholesale banking. For chief technology officer at Onyx by J.P.Morgan, Suresh Shetty, investing in blockchain, a distributed ledger technology in its early days, was about ubiquity. “We actually weighted ubiquity in terms of who can use the technology, who was…

The Download: using AI to access mental health services, and the natural gas debate

February 6, 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. A chatbot helped more people access mental-health services The news: An AI chatbot helped increase the number of patients referred for mental-health services through England’s National Health Service (NHS), particularly among underrepresented groups…

What babies can teach AI

February 6, 2024
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Human babies are fascinating creatures. Despite being completely dependent on their parents for a long time, they can do some amazing stuff. Babies have an innate understanding of the physics of…

A chatbot helped more people access mental-health services

February 5, 2024
An AI chatbot helped increase the number of patients referred for mental-health services through England’s National Health Service (NHS), particularly among underrepresented groups who are less likely to seek help, new research has found. Demand for mental-health services in England is on the rise, particularly since the covid-19 pandemic. Mental-health services received 4.6 million patient…