July 3, 2025

The Download: AI agents hype, and Google’s electricity plans

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. Don’t let hype about AI agents get ahead of reality —Yoav Shoham is a professor emeritus at Stanford University and cofounder of AI21 Labs. At Google’s I/O 2025 event in May, the company…

Technology

QuantHealth brings its AI-informed clinical drug trials to the US with $15M round

August 30, 2023
Biotech, pharmaceutical, and life sciences companies all hope AI will streamline drug development and make it more efficient, and 38% have already adopted the technology, according to Deloitte. QuantHealth aims to take part with a model that predicts risks and outcomes for clinical trials. The company’s AI-powered platform for drug discovery claims to reduce potential […]

The Download: how to test AI, and the hidden victims of pig-butchering scams

August 30, 2023
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. Large language models aren’t people. Let’s stop testing them as if they are. In the past few years, multiple researchers claim to have shown that large language models can pass cognitive tests designed…

Large language models aren’t people. Let’s stop testing them like they were.

August 30, 2023
When Taylor Webb played around with GPT-3 in early 2022, he was blown away by what OpenAI’s large language model appeared to be able to do. Here was a neural network trained only to predict the next word in a block of text—a jumped-up autocomplete. And yet it gave correct answers to many of the…

The involuntary criminals behind pig-butchering scams

August 30, 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. There’s something so visceral about the phrase “pig-butchering scam.” The first time I came across it was in my reporting a year ago, when I was looking into how strange LinkedIn…

Gitai closes additional funding in advance of demo mission outside the ISS

August 29, 2023
Space robotics startup Gitai has closed an additional $15 million in funding, a little over three months after announcing a $30 million Series B extension round to advance its technology for the moon. The new funding will enable the company to increase its California-based headcount and grow its relationships with NASA, commercial space companies based […]

Unlocking the value of supply chain data across industries

August 29, 2023
The product shortages and supply-chain delays of the global covid-19 pandemic are still fresh memories. Consumers and industry are concerned that the next geopolitical climate event may have a similar impact. Against a backdrop of evolving regulations, these conditions mean manufacturers want to be prepared against short supplies, concerned customers, and weakened margins. For supply…

The Download: watermarking AI images, and WorldCoin’s backlash

August 29, 2023
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. Google DeepMind has launched a watermarking tool for AI-generated images The news: Google DeepMind has launched a new watermarking tool which labels whether pictures have been generated with AI. The tool, called SynthID,…

Google DeepMind has launched a watermarking tool for AI-generated images

August 29, 2023
Google DeepMind has launched a new watermarking tool that labels whether images have been generated with AI. The tool, called SynthID, will initially be available only to users of Google’s AI image generator Imagen, which is hosted on Google Cloud’s machine learning platform Vertex. Users will be able to generate images using Imagen and then…

Amazon acquires Fig, a startup building autocomplete for the command line

August 29, 2023
Amazon has acquired Fig, a Y Combinator (YC) alum that has been setting out to turbo-charge the command line terminal. In a blog post published yesterday, CEO and cofounder Brendan Falk said that Amazon was acquiring Fig’s technology, while its employees — including two cofounders — would be joining Amazon’s cloud subsidiary AWS. Terms of […]