February 7, 2025

These documents are influencing the DOGE-sphere’s agenda

Reports from the US Government Accountability Office on improper federal payments in recent years are circulating on X and elsewhere online, and they seem to be a big influence on Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency and its supporters as the group pursues cost-cutting measures across the federal government.  The payment reports have been…

Technology

China banned exports of a few rare minerals to the US. Things could get messier.

December 12, 2024
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. I’ve thought more about gallium and germanium over the last week than I ever have before (and probably more than anyone ever should). As you may already know, China banned the export…

Google’s new Project Astra could be generative AI’s killer app

December 11, 2024
Google DeepMind has announced an impressive grab bag of new products and prototypes that may just let it seize back its lead in the race to turn generative artificial intelligence into a mass-market concern.  Top billing goes to Gemini 2.0—the latest iteration of Google DeepMind’s family of multimodal large language models, now redesigned around the…

The Download: Bluesky’s impersonators, and shaking up the economy with ChatGPT

December 11, 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. Bluesky has an impersonator problem  —Melissa Heikkilä Like many others, I recently joined Bluesky. On Thanksgiving, I was delighted to see a private message from a fellow AI reporter, Will Knight from Wired.…

Bluesky has an impersonator problem 

December 11, 2024
Like many others, I recently fled social media platform X for Bluesky. In the process, I started following many of the people I followed on X. On Thanksgiving, I was delighted to see a private message from a fellow AI reporter, Will Knight from Wired. Or at least that’s who I thought I was talking…

The Download: Anduril’s new AI system, and how to use Sora

December 10, 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. We saw a demo of the new AI system powering Anduril’s vision for war —James O’Donnell One afternoon in late November, I visited a weapons test site in the foothills east of San…

AI’s hype and antitrust problem is coming under scrutiny

December 10, 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. The AI sector is plagued by a lack of competition and a lot of deceit—or at least that’s one way to interpret the latest flurry of actions taken in Washington.  Last…

We saw a demo of the new AI system powering Anduril’s vision for war

December 10, 2024
One afternoon in late November, I visited a weapons test site in the foothills east of San Clemente, California operated by Anduril, a maker of AI-powered drones and missiles that recently announced a partnership with OpenAI. I went there to witness a new system it’s expanding today, which allows external parties to tap into its…

How to use Sora, OpenAI’s new video generating tool

December 9, 2024
Today, OpenAI released its video generation model Sora to the public. The announcement comes on the fifth day of the company’s “shipmas” event, a twelve-day long marathon of tech releases and demos. Here’s what you should know—and how you can use the video model right now. What is Sora? Sora is a powerful AI video…

December 9, 2024
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