Technology

Why is it that so many companies that rely on monetizing the data of their users seem to be extremely hot on AI? If you ask Signal president Meredith Whittaker (and I did), she’ll tell you it’s simply because “AI is a surveillance technology.” On stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, Whittaker explained  her perspective that […]

Computer vision systems are everywhere. They help classify and tag images on social media feeds, detect objects and faces in pictures and videos, and highlight relevant elements of an image. However, they are riddled with biases, and they’re less accurate when the images show Black or brown people and women. And there’s another problem: the…

ChatGPT is evolving into much more than a text-based search engine, with OpenAI announcing today that it’s adding new voice and image-based smarts to the mix. The wildly popular generative AI assistant has been one of the biggest technology success stories of recent times since its debut some nine months ago, allowing anyone to generate […]

Getty Images is so confident its new generative AI model is free of copyrighted content that it will cover any potential intellectual-property disputes for its customers.  The generative AI system, announced today, was built by Nvidia and is trained solely on images in Getty’s image library. It does not include logos or images that have…

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. You can now have a voice conversation with ChatGPT  The news: OpenAI has launched two new ways to interact with its flagship large language model in a major update. You can have a…

In one of the biggest updates to ChatGPT yet, OpenAI has launched two new ways to interact with its viral app.   First, ChatGPT now has a voice. Choose from one of five lifelike synthetic voices and you can have a conversation with the chatbot as if you were making a call, with it responding to…

This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review’s weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. Recently, I wrote a quick guide about what we might expect at Congress’s first AI Insight Forum. Well, now that meeting has happened, and we…

The crypto industry has long been criticized for its disconnection with the real world, but there are players who try to show that the underlying blockchain technology can solve some of our most pressing challenges in today’s society — especially in regions where basic infrastructure is lacking. Akowe, a Nairobi-based startup that is part of […]

Google is constantly under attack. But while hackers have compromised gaming giants, casinos, and other technology giants in recent months, Google has so far remained largely unscathed. Parisa Tabriz, who is responsible for Chrome web browser security and Project Zero, credits much of this to the company’s approach to access control. “We’re evolving Google’s infrastructure […]