July 9, 2025

The Download: a conversation with Karen Hao, and how did life begin?

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. Inside OpenAI’s empire: A conversation with Karen Hao In a wide-ranging Roundtables conversation for MIT Technology Review subscribers, journalist and author Karen Hao recently spoke about her new book, Empire of AI: Dreams…

Technology

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 […]

Survey finds relatively few Americans actually use (or fear) ChatGPT

August 28, 2023
From its prominence in the tech world, you might think that everyone on the planet is using ChatGPT or some other AI tool for everything from automating their job to planning their garden. But recent Pew polling suggests the language model isn’t quite as popular or threatening as some would have you think. Ongoing polling […]

Free dating app Cosmic uses personality quizzes to make a profile for you

August 28, 2023
A new dating app called Cosmic wants to shake up the market by not charging for basic features like seeing who likes you or undoing your last swipe, while also making it easier for users to build profiles that better reflect their personalities using a combination of personality quizzes and machine learning technology. Now available […]

We don’t have to reinvent the wheel to regulate AI responsibly

August 28, 2023
Daniel Marcous Contributor Share on Twitter Daniel Marcous is the co-founder and CTO of april, an AI-driven tax platform. Daniel was previously the CTO of AI-driven navigation platform Waze, which was acquired by Google in 2013. We are living through one of the most transformative tech revolutions of the past century. For the first time […]