Technology

The Download: why 2025 has been the year of AI hype correction, and fighting GPS jamming

December 16, 2025
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 great AI hype correction of 2025 Some disillusionment was inevitable. When OpenAI released a free web app called ChatGPT in late 2022, it changed the course of an entire industry—and several world…

Why it’s time to reset our expectations for AI

December 16, 2025
Can I ask you a question: How do you feel about AI right now? Are you still excited? When you hear that OpenAI or Google just dropped a new model, do you still get that buzz? Or has the shine come off it, maybe just a teeny bit? Come on, you can be honest with…

Quantum navigation could solve the military’s GPS jamming problem

December 16, 2025
In late September, a Spanish military plane carrying the country’s defense minister to a base in Lithuania was reportedly the subject of a kind of attack—not by a rocket or anti-aircraft rounds, but by radio transmissions that jammed its GPS system.  The flight landed safely, but it was one of thousands that have been affected…

The fast and the future-focused are revolutionizing motorsport

December 15, 2025
When the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship launched its first race through Beijing’s Olympic Park in 2014, the idea of all-electric motorsport still bordered on experimental. Batteries couldn’t yet last a full race, and drivers had to switch cars mid-competition. Just over a decade later, Formula E has evolved into a global entertainment brand…

The Download: introducing the AI Hype Correction package

December 15, 2025
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. Introducing: the AI Hype Correction package AI is going to reproduce human intelligence. AI will eliminate disease. AI is the single biggest, most important invention in human history. You’ve likely heard it all—but…

AI coding is now everywhere. But not everyone is convinced.

December 15, 2025
Depending who you ask, AI-powered coding is either giving software developers an unprecedented productivity boost or churning out masses of poorly designed code that saps their attention and sets software projects up for serious long term-maintenance problems. The problem is right now, it’s not easy to know which is true. As tech giants pour billions…

A brief history of Sam Altman’s hype

December 15, 2025
Each time you’ve heard a borderline outlandish idea of what AI will be capable of, it often turns out that Sam Altman was, if not the first to articulate it, at least the most persuasive and influential voice behind it.  For more than a decade he has been known in Silicon Valley as a world-class…

The AI doomers feel undeterred

December 15, 2025
It’s a weird time to be an AI doomer. This small but influential community of researchers, scientists, and policy experts believes, in the simplest terms, that AI could get so good it could be bad—very, very bad—for humanity. Though many of these people would be more likely to describe themselves as advocates for AI safety…

The great AI hype correction of 2025

December 15, 2025
Some disillusionment was inevitable. When OpenAI released a free web app called ChatGPT in late 2022, it changed the course of an entire industry—and several world economies. Millions of people started talking to their computers, and their computers started talking back. We were enchanted, and we expected more. We got it. Technology companies scrambled to…

Generative AI hype distracts us from AI’s more important breakthroughs

December 15, 2025
On April 28, 2022, at a highly anticipated concert in Spokane, Washington, the musician Paul McCartney astonished his audience with a groundbreaking application of AI: He began to perform with a lifelike depiction of his long-deceased musical partner, John Lennon.  Using recent advances in audio and video processing, engineers had taken the pair’s final performance…