July 4, 2025

Inside India’s scramble for AI independence

In Bengaluru, India, Adithya Kolavi felt a mix of excitement and validation as he watched DeepSeek unleash its disruptive language model on the world earlier this year. The Chinese technology rivaled the best of the West in terms of benchmarks, but it had been built with far less capital in far less time.  “I thought:…

Technology

The Download: canceled climate tech projects, and South Korea’s AI web comics

April 22, 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. $8 billion of US climate tech projects have been canceled so far in 2025 This year has been rough for climate technology: Companies have canceled, downsized, or shut down at least 16 large-scale…

Generative AI is reshaping South Korea’s webcomics industry

April 22, 2025
“My mind is still sharp and my hands work just fine, so I have no interest in getting help from AI to draw or write stories,” says Lee Hyun-se, a legendary South Korean cartoonist best known for his seminal series A Daunting Team, a 1983 manhwa about the coming-of-age of heroic underdog baseball players. “Still,…

AI is pushing the limits of the physical world

April 21, 2025
Architecture often assumes a binary between built projects and theoretical ones. What physics allows in actual buildings, after all, is vastly different from what architects can imagine and design (often referred to as “paper architecture”). That imagination has long been supported and enabled by design technology, but the latest advancements in artificial intelligence have prompted…

The quest to build islands with ocean currents in the Maldives

April 21, 2025
In satellite images, the 20-odd coral atolls of the Maldives look something like skeletal remains or chalk lines at a crime scene. But these landforms, which circle the peaks of a mountain range that has vanished under the Indian Ocean, are far from inert. They’re the products of living processes—places where coral has grown toward…

$8 billion of US climate tech projects have been canceled so far in 2025

April 21, 2025
This year has been rough for climate technology: Companies have canceled, downsized, or shut down at least 16 large-scale projects worth $8 billion in total in the first quarter of 2025, according to a new report. That’s far more cancellations than have typically occurred in recent years, according to a new report from E2, a…

A new kids’ show will come with a crypto wallet when it debuts this fall

April 18, 2025
A new animated kids’ series expected to premiere this year won’t be headed for a TV network. Or a streaming service. Instead, the founders of production studio We Ghosted Media plan to launch on a decentralized web platform that uses blockchain technology. And yes, a crypto wallet will be involved.  We Ghosted Media — founded by […]

How creativity became the reigning value of our time

April 18, 2025
Americans don’t agree on much these days. Yet even at a time when consensus reality seems to be on the verge of collapse, there remains at least one quintessentially modern value we can all still get behind: creativity.  We teach it, measure it, envy it, cultivate it, and endlessly worry about its death. And why…

Longevity clinics around the world are selling unproven treatments

April 18, 2025
The quest for long, healthy life—and even immortality—is probably almost as old as humans are, but it’s never been hotter than it is right now. Today my newsfeed is full of claims about diets, exercise routines, and supplements that will help me live longer. A lot of it is marketing fluff, of course. It should…