Relativity Networks raises $22 million to bring a faster kind of fiber to data centers
Relativity Networks deals in hollow-core fiber, a rarely deployed technology that allows data to be transmitted 30% faster than conventional fiber.
Connecting AI agents to enterprise knowledge
For all the data that AI systems continually amass and analyze, enterprise AI agents often suffer from a curious shortcoming: a lack of knowledge. More than data, knowledge is the understanding of what the data means in the context of individual organizations. AI agents need this understanding to reason about situations, make decisions, and ultimately…
Technology
Child-monitoring apps might need a reboot
Pam Wisniewski’s digital adolescence showed her the best and the worst of the internet. At 14, she left an abusive home, where she’d been isolated in a fifth-wheel trailer at the end of a seven-mile dirt road. She moved in with her older sister and taught herself to type on AOL Instant Messenger. Online, she…
The Download: how people really use AI, and Flock’s design choices
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. We still don’t know how people are really using AI AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports on how people are using their products. But they only release the…
We still don’t know how people are really using AI
AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports on how people are using products like Claude and ChatGPT, but they only release the data they want us to see, AI researchers say. “There is no independent source to corroborate it,” says Anka Reuel, a Computer Science PhD candidate at the Stanford Trustworthy AI Research…
The role of the astronaut is in flux
When the four astronauts on board NASA’s Artemis II swung around the moon earlier this year, they set a new record for the farthest humans have ever ventured from Earth, surpassing the distance set by Apollo 13 in 1972 by some 4,000 miles. While no space mission can live up to the historic touchdown of…
What Flock’s defenders are missing
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Flock, the police-tech giant known for its network of some 120,000 automatic license plate readers around the US, announced some changes to its platform last Thursday. The updates are meant to prevent…
The Download: dead robot friends and the “censorship-industrial complex”
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. What happens when a kid’s robot best friend dies? When Xander first met Moxie, she taught him how to calm down when he was anxious or mad. Six years later, she…
How much hydrogen awaits us underground?
In the 1990s, Barbara Sherwood Lollar descended into the Kidd Creek mine in northern Ontario, which cuts more than three kilometers into the ancient root of North America. There her team of geochemists found water that had been confined underground for more than a billion years. This ancient brine turned out to be a habitat…
What happens when a kid’s robot best friend dies?
When Xander first met Moxie, she taught him that when he was anxious, he could calm down by exhaling through his lips so that he buzzed like a bee. They practiced breathing like dragons to manage feeling mad and sniffing like bunnies to boost his energy. But in the six years they’ve known each other,…
The Way We Sell Homes Has Changed. The Debate Hasn’t — But Here’s Why It Should.
The real estate industry has spent years arguing about whether technology will replace agents. Consumer behavior suggests a different future.