Technology

In the spring of 2021, climate scientists were stumped.  The global economy was just emerging from the covid-19 lockdowns, but for some reason the levels of methane—a greenhouse gas emitted mainly through agriculture and fossil-fuel production—had soared in the atmosphere the previous year, rising at the fastest rate on record. Researchers around the world set…

GSA Federal Acquisition Service Commissioner Josh Gruenbaum in a statement encouraged “other American AI technology companies to follow OpenAI’s lead and work with us.”

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg declared that Meta is aiming to achieve smarter-than-human AI. He seems to have a recipe for achieving that goal, and the first ingredient is human talent: Zuckerberg has reportedly tried to lure top researchers to Meta Superintelligence Labs with nine-figure offers. The second ingredient is AI itself.  Zuckerberg recently said on…

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. OpenAI has finally released open-weight language models The news: OpenAI has finally released its first open-weight large language models since 2019’s GPT-2. Unlike the models available through OpenAI’s web interface, these new open…

OpenAI has finally released its first open-weight large language models since 2019’s GPT-2. These new “gpt-oss” models are available in two different sizes and score similarly to the company’s o3-mini and o4-mini models on several benchmarks. Unlike the models available through OpenAI’s web interface, these new open models can be freely downloaded, run, and even…

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. These protocols will help AI agents navigate our messy lives A growing number of companies are launching AI agents that can do things on your behalf—actions like sending an email, making a document,…

OpenAI has given itself a dual mandate. On the one hand, it’s a tech giant rooted in products, including of course ChatGPT, which people around the world reportedly send 2.5 billion requests to each day. But its original mission is to serve as a research lab that will not only create “artificial general intelligence” but…

A growing number of companies are launching AI agents that can do things on your behalf—actions like sending an email, making a document, or editing a database. Initial reviews for these agents have been mixed at best, though, because they struggle to interact with all the different components of our digital lives. Part of the…

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. Forcing LLMs to be evil during training can make them nicer in the long run Large language models have recently acquired a reputation for behaving badly. In April, ChatGPT suddenly became an aggressive…

OpenAI developed the first AI reasoning model less than a year ago, but the technology has shifted Silicon Valley’s focus to agents.