July 8, 2025

How scientists are trying to use AI to unlock the human mind 

Today’s AI landscape is defined by the ways in which neural networks are unlike human brains. A toddler learns how to communicate effectively with only a thousand calories a day and regular conversation; meanwhile, tech companies are reopening nuclear power plants, polluting marginalized communities, and pirating terabytes of books in order to train and run…

Technology

The Download: fixing space weather-forecasting, and reopening a nuclear power plant

April 3, 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 race to fix space-weather forecasting before next big solar storm hits As the number of satellites in space grows, and as we rely on them for increasing numbers of vital tasks on…

How to reopen a nuclear power plant

April 3, 2024
A shut-down nuclear power plant in Michigan could get a second life thanks to a $1.52 billion loan from the US Department of Energy. If successful, it will be the first time a shuttered nuclear power plant reopens in the US.   Palisades Power Plant shut down on May 20, 2022, after 50 years of generating…

Threads is giving Taiwanese users a safe space to talk about politics

April 3, 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. Like most reporters, I have accounts on every social media platform you can think of. But for the longest time, I was not on Threads, the rival to X (formerly Twitter) released…

The race to fix space-weather forecasting before next big solar storm hits

April 3, 2024
Tzu-Wei Fang will always remember February 3, 2022. It was a Thursday just after Groundhog Day, and Fang, a physicist born in Taiwan, was analyzing satellite images of a cloud of charged particles that had erupted from the sun. The incoming cloud was a coronal mass ejection, or CME—essentially a massive burst of magnetized plasma…

Purpose-built AI builds better customer experiences

April 2, 2024
In the bygone era of contact centers, the customer experience was tethered to a singular channel—the phone call. The journey began with a pre-recorded message prompting the customer to press a number corresponding to their query. Today’s contact centers have evolved from the confines of just traditional phone calls to multiple channels from emails to…

Yahoo is acquiring Instagram co-founders’ AI-powered news startup Artifact

April 2, 2024

Yahoo is acquiring Artifact, the AI-powered news app from Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the company announced on Tuesday. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Artifact will no longer operate as a standalone app, and its proprietary AI-powered personalization technology will be integrated across Yahoo, including the Yahoo News app […]

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Modal raises $25M to train corporate workers on data and AI

April 2, 2024

A few years ago, Darren Shimkus, ex-president of Udemy, had a conversation with Dennis Yang about skills building. Shimkus was of the belief that building skills in the corporate sector was a difficult, but not intractable, challenge — one that could perhaps be solved with the right technology. He brought it up to Yang, who […]

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

The Download: inside chipmaking giant ASML, and why Taiwan loves Threads

April 2, 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 ASML took over the chipmaking chessboard On a drab Monday February morning in California, at the drab San Jose Convention Center, attendees of the SPIE Advanced Lithography and Patterning Conference gathered to…

Why Threads is suddenly popular in Taiwan

April 2, 2024
For most people around the world, Meta’s text-based social network Threads is a platform that they haven’t thought of for months. But for Liu, a design professional in Taipei, it’s where she’s receiving unprecedented attention.  “My casual posts often receive a large number of reposts now. It used to only happen every few months on…