July 9, 2025

The Download: a conversation with Karen Hao, and how did life begin?

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. Inside OpenAI’s empire: A conversation with Karen Hao In a wide-ranging Roundtables conversation for MIT Technology Review subscribers, journalist and author Karen Hao recently spoke about her new book, Empire of AI: Dreams…

Technology

Now we know what OpenAI’s superalignment team has been up to

December 14, 2023
OpenAI has announced the first results from its superalignment team, the firm’s in-house initiative dedicated to preventing a superintelligence—a hypothetical future computer that can outsmart humans—from going rogue. Unlike many of the company’s announcements, this heralds no big breakthrough. In a low-key research paper, the team describes a technique that lets a less powerful large…

Spotify confirms test of prompt-based AI playlists feature

December 14, 2023

Earlier this fall, Spotify was found to be developing a new feature that would allow its streaming app users to create playlists using AI technology and prompts. Now, that “AI playlists” feature has been spotted in the wild, as part of a test that to see how users will respond to AI-driven playlist creation. The […]

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Google DeepMind used a large language model to solve an unsolvable math problem

December 14, 2023
Google DeepMind has used a large language model to crack a famous unsolved problem in pure mathematics. In a paper published in Nature today, the researchers say it is the first time a large language model has been used to discover a solution to a long-standing scientific puzzle—producing verifiable and valuable new information that did…

Amazon’s Project Kuiper confirms its super-fast satellite communication tech works in space

December 14, 2023

Amazon’s Project Kuiper successfully validated key technology that will increase throughput and reduce latency for customers using its satellite internet service, the company said Thursday. That technology is called “optical inter-satellite links” (OISL), a type of optical communication that uses infrared lasers to send data between spacecraft on orbit. OISL has been around for a […]

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

The Download: what we learned from COP28, and an advance for household robots

December 14, 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. The two words that pushed international climate talks into overtime The annual UN climate negotiations at COP28 in Dubai have officially come to a close. Delegates scrambled to get a deal together in…

This new system can teach a robot a simple household task within 20 minutes

December 14, 2023
A new system that teaches robots a domestic task in around 20 minutes could help the field of robotics overcome one of its biggest challenges: a lack of training data.  The open-source system, called Dobb-E, was trained using data collected from real homes. It can help to teach a robot how to open an air…

The two words that pushed international climate talks into overtime

December 14, 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. The annual UN climate negotiations at COP28 in Dubai have officially come to a close. Delegates scrambled to get a deal together in the early morning hours, and the meetings ended a…

How to Create Generational Wealth With AI

December 14, 2023
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the world, and it’s no secret that those who master and harness this technology can create immense wealth for themselves and their clients. The rapid…

Vertex will pay tens of millions to license a controversial CRISPR patent

December 13, 2023
Vertex Pharmaceuticals has agreed to buy rights to use a dominant CRISPR patent owned by the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, avoiding a potential lawsuit over its new gene-editing treatment for sickle-cell disease. The agreement allows Vertex to start selling its treatment, approved last Friday, without fear of patent infringement claims. The one-time treatment…

The Download: carbon removal concerns, and Yahoo’s China controversy 

December 13, 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. Two former Department of Energy staffers warn we’re doing carbon removal all wrong The carbon removal industry is just starting to take off, but some experts are warning that it’s already headed in…