June 5, 2026

Zoom and Google Already Had This Product. But He Built It Anyway and Hit $1.5 Billion: ‘Care More About Your Particular Problem’

Chris Pedregal built a $1.5 billion AI app in a market that Zoom and Google already owned. His secret had nothing to do with technology.

Technology

This tool could show how consciousness works

April 21, 2026
How does the physical matter in our brains translate into thoughts, sensations, and emotions? It’s hard to explore that question without neurosurgery. But in a recent paper, MIT philosopher Matthias Michel, Lincoln Lab researcher Daniel Freeman, and colleagues outline a strategy for doing so with an emerging tool called transcranial focused ultrasound. This noninvasive technology…

LLMs+

April 21, 2026
When ChatGPT launched as an experimental prototype in late 2022, OpenAI’s chatbot became an everyday everything app for hundreds of millions of people. LLMs like ChatGPT were the new future: The entire tech industry was consumed by the inferno, with companies racing to spin up rival products. The ashes of the old tech world still…

Supercharged scams

April 21, 2026
When ChatGPT was released to the public in late 2022, it opened people’s eyes to how easily generative AI could churn out vast amounts of human-seeming text from simple prompts. This quickly caught the attention of criminals, who soon began using large language models to produce malicious emails—both the untargeted spam kind and more sophisticated,…

World models

April 21, 2026
AI systems have already gained impressive mastery over the digital world, but the physical world is still humanity’s domain. As it turns out, building an AI system that can compose a novel or code an app is far easier than developing one that can fold laundry or navigate a city street. To get there, many…

Weaponized deepfakes

April 21, 2026
For years, experts have warned that deepfakes—AI-generated videos, images, or audio recordings of people doing or saying things they haven’t actually done in real life—could be deployed in malicious ways.  These dangers are now here. Improvements in deepfake technology, and the widespread availability of easy-to-use and cheap (or free) generative models, have made it easier…

Building agent-first governance and security

April 21, 2026
As AI agents increasingly work alongside humans across organizations, companies could be inadvertently opening a new attack surface. Insecure agents can be manipulated to access sensitive systems and proprietary data, increasing enterprise risk. In some modern enterprises, non-human identities (NHI) are outpacing human identities, and that trend will explode with agentic AI. Solid governance and…

The Download: turning down human noise, and LA’s stunning subway upgrade

April 21, 2026
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 noise we make is hurting animals. Can we learn to shut up? As human society has expanded, animals have started struggling to hear one another. For many birds, the noise…

Digging for clues about the North Pole’s past

April 21, 2026
In the past, even with an icebreaker and during peak melt season, getting to the North Pole wasn’t a sure bet. It took favorable winds to crack the frozen ocean surface, and ships had to fight through ice that had grown many meters thick over several winters. In the summer of 2025, though, Jochen Knies…