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

Opera’s iOS web browser gains an AI companion with Aria

August 16, 2023
Opera’s web browser app for iOS is getting an AI assistant. The company announced today that Opera for iOS will now include Aria, its browser AI product built in collaboration with OpenAI, integrated directly into the web browser, and free for all users. The AI solution had previously launched on Opera for desktop and Opera […]

Caden lands $15M to let users monetize their personal data

August 16, 2023
As consumers become more privacy aware, an increasing number of startups are emerging to — in line with the trend — enable people to monetize their data. Datacy, for example, lets users collect their browsing data, aggregate it with data from others and then sell it to the highest bidder. Pogo and Tapestri, similarly, grant […]

Meet Marqo, an open source vector search engine for AI applications

August 16, 2023
Vector databases are the unsung heroes of the modern AI movement, storing unstructured data such as images, videos and text to enable people and systems to search uncategorized content. They are particularly integral to large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 (which powers ChatGPT), owing in large part to the databases’ ability to power real-time […]

Tracking the EV battery factory construction boom across North America

August 16, 2023
The onshoring of battery manufacturing for EVs started as a trickle during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now it’s a tsunami. In 2019, just two battery factories were operating in the United States with another two under construction. Today, there are about 30 battery factories either planned, under construction or operational in the country. U.S. President Joe […]

China’s car companies are turning into tech companies

August 16, 2023
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. This year, car buyers in China are constantly bombarded with claims about how advanced Navigation on Autopilot (NOA) systems are coming to their city. These software systems are not quite fully…

How a half-trillion dollars is transforming climate technology

August 16, 2023
A half-trillion dollars is starting to work its way through the US economy, remaking climate technology along the way.  One year ago, the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law, marking the most significant action on climate change to date from the federal government. The legislation set aside hundreds of billions of dollars to support…

Tech is broken—can collective action fix it?

August 16, 2023
For Silicon Valley venture capitalists and founders, any inconvenience big or small is a problem to be solved—even death itself. And a new genre of products and services known as “death tech,” intended to help the bereaved and comfort the suffering, shows that the tech industry will try to address literally anything with an app. …

Lindus Health, a U.K. clinical trials startup backed by Peter Thiel, raises $18M

August 16, 2023
Clinical trials are the cornerstone of modern medical research, serving the evidence required to prove (or disprove) the safety and efficacy of a new treatment. However, clinical trials are also costly, resource-intensive endeavors that can take many years to reach a stage where a drug or device is deemed ready for a wide-scale rollout. This is […]