July 8, 2025

Why the US and Europe could lose the race for fusion energy

Fusion energy holds the potential to shift a geopolitical landscape that is currently configured around fossil fuels. Harnessing fusion will deliver the energy resilience, security, and abundance needed for all modern industrial and service sectors. But these benefits will be controlled by the nation that leads in both developing the complex supply chains required and…

Technology

The Download: how to test AI, and treating paralysis

May 21, 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. AI models can outperform humans in tests to identify mental states Humans are complicated beings. The ways we communicate are multilayered, and psychologists have devised many kinds of tests to measure our ability…

Join me at EmTech Digital this week!

May 21, 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. I’m excited to spend this week in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’m visiting the mothership for MIT Technology Review’s annual flagship AI conference, EmTech Digital, on May 22-23.  Between the world leaders gathering in Seoul…

AI models can outperform humans in tests to identify mental states

May 20, 2024
Humans are complicated beings. The ways we communicate are multilayered, and psychologists have devised many kinds of tests to measure our ability to infer meaning and understanding from interactions with each other.  AI models are getting better at these tests. New research published today in Nature Human Behavior found that some large language models (LLMs)…

A device that zaps the spinal cord gave paralyzed people better control of their hands

May 20, 2024
Fourteen years ago, a journalist named Melanie Reid attempted a jump on horseback and fell. The accident left her mostly paralyzed from the chest down. Eventually she regained control of her right hand, but her left remained “useless,” she told reporters at a press conference last week.  Now, thanks to a new noninvasive device that…

ChatGPT’s mobile app revenue saw biggest spike yet following GPT-4o launch

May 20, 2024

Consumer demand for the latest AI technology is heating up. The launch of OpenAI’s latest flagship model, GPT-4o, has now driven the company’s biggest-ever spike in revenue on mobile, despite the model being freely available on the web. GPT-4o, launched last Monday, can handle text, speech, and video, and delivers real-time responsiveness and a range […]

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The Download: GPT-4o’s polluted Chinese training data, and astronomy’s AI challenge

May 20, 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. GPT-4o’s Chinese token-training data is polluted by spam and porn websites Soon after OpenAI released GPT-4o last Monday, some Chinese speakers started to notice that something seemed off about this newest version of…

Astronomers are enlisting AI to prepare for a data downpour

May 20, 2024
In deserts across Australia and South Africa, astronomers are planting forests of metallic detectors that will together scour the cosmos for radio signals. When it boots up in five years or so, the Square Kilometer Array Observatory will look for new information about the universe’s first stars and the different stages of galactic evolution.  But…

VCs and the military are fueling self-driving startups that don’t need roads

May 18, 2024

A new crop of early-stage startups — along with some recent VC investments — illustrates a niche emerging in the autonomous vehicle technology sector. Unlike the companies bringing robotaxis to city streets, these startups are taking their tech off-road.  Two recent entrants — Seattle-based Overland AI and New Brunswick-based Potential — are poised to get […]

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

GPT-4o’s Chinese token-training data is polluted by spam and porn websites

May 17, 2024
Soon after OpenAI released GPT-4o on Monday, May 13, its newest version of the large-language model chatbot, some Chinese-language speakers started to notice something seemed off: the tokens it uses to parse text were full of spam and porn phrases. On May 14, Tianle Cai, a Ph.D student at Princeton University studying inference efficiency in…

The Download: cuddly robots to help dementia, and what Daedalus taught us

May 17, 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. How cuddly robots could change dementia care Companion animals can stave off some of the loneliness, anxiety, and agitation that come with Alzheimer’s disease, according to studies. Sadly, people with Alzheimer’s aren’t always…