February 6, 2025

The Download: AI companion dangers, and supersonic planes

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 AI chatbot told a user how to kill himself—but the company doesn’t want to “censor” it For the past five months, Al Nowatzki has been talking to an AI girlfriend, “Erin,” on…

Technology

The pain is real. The painkillers are virtual reality.

November 17, 2023
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. I hate needles. I am a grown woman who owns a Buzzy, a vibrating, bee-shaped device you press against your arm to confuse your nerves and…

Text-to-image AI models can be tricked into generating disturbing images

November 17, 2023
Popular text-to-image AI models can be prompted to ignore their safety filters and generate disturbing images. A group of researchers managed to get both Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2’s text-to-image models to disregard their policies and create images of naked people, dismembered bodies, and other violent and sexual scenarios.  Their work, which…

The Biggest Questions: What is death?

November 17, 2023
Just as birth certificates note the time we enter the world, death certificates mark the moment we exit it. This practice reflects traditional notions about life and death as binaries. We are here until, suddenly, like a light switched off, we are gone.  But while this idea of death is pervasive, evidence is building that…

Despite setbacks, ispace to launch second moon mission in Q4 2024

November 16, 2023

Japanese lunar technology company ispace will make its second attempt at putting a lander on the moon in the fourth quarter of 2024, just about two years after it launched its first failed mission, executives said Thursday. ispace launched its first lunar lander mission in on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in December 2022. The lander, […]

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The Wild West of robotaxis: Will Texas be a regulatory haven or chaos unleashed?

November 16, 2023

All eyes might be on the California robotaxi market, but Texas is the one shaping up to be the next hot testbed of the technology — and regulatory fights that could follow. The Lone Star State has been home to autonomous vehicle testing, particularly with trucks, for years now. However, Texas, a state with negligible […]

© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Aave Companies rebrands to Avara and acquires crypto wallet Family to expand its web3 reach

November 16, 2023

Web3-focused software technology company Aave Companies is rebranding to Avara, its founder Stani Kulechov told TechCrunch exclusively. The crypto parent entity best known for supporting Aave Labs, Aave Protocol, its native stablecoin GHO and decentralized social network protocol Lens, among others. About $8.66 billion of liquidity is locked in Aave across eight networks and over […]

© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The Download: defining AGI, and making sense of the complicated universe

November 16, 2023
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. Google DeepMind wants to define what counts as artificial general intelligence AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is one of the hottest topics in tech today. It’s also one of the most controversial. A…

2023 global cloud ecosystem

November 16, 2023
The cloud, fundamentally a tool for cost and resource efficiency, has long enabled companies and countries to organize around digital-first principles. It is an established capability that improves the bottom line for enterprises. However, maturity lags, and global standards are sorely needed. Cloud capabilities play a crucial role in accelerating the global economy’s next stage…

What’s coming next for fusion research

November 16, 2023
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. We’ve covered the dream of fusion before in this newsletter: the power source could provide consistent energy from widely available fuel without producing radioactive waste.  But making a fusion power plant a…

Google DeepMind wants to define what counts as artificial general intelligence

November 16, 2023
AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is one of the hottest topics in tech today. It’s also one of the most controversial. A big part of the problem is that few people agree on what the term even means. Now a team of Google DeepMind researchers has put out a paper that cuts through the cross…