February 5, 2025

XOi raises $230M, acquires Specifx to expand its tech for field service technicians

Field service engineers may not be the first group of customers that come to mind when you think about lucrative opportunities in B2B technology. But that same blind spot speaks of the opportunity in the space for those who are stepping up and targeting “the job site.” One of the players in that space, XOi  […]

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Technology

The Download: the lab fighting exploitative AI, and plant engineering

November 13, 2024
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. The AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI Back in 2022, the tech community was buzzing over image-generating AI models, such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, which could…

The AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI

November 13, 2024
Ben Zhao remembers well the moment he officially jumped into the fight between artists and generative AI: when one artist asked for AI bananas.  A computer security researcher at the University of Chicago, Zhao had made a name for himself by building tools to protect images from facial recognition technology. It was this work that…

The Download: parkour for robot dogs, and Africa’s AI ambitions

November 12, 2024
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. Generative AI taught a robot dog to scramble around a new environment Teaching robots to navigate new environments is tough. You can train them on physical, real-world data taken from recordings made by…

Africa’s AI researchers are ready for takeoff

November 12, 2024
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. When we talk about the global race for AI dominance, the conversation often focuses on tensions between the US and China, and European efforts at regulating the technology.  But it’s high…

Generative AI taught a robot dog to scramble around a new environment

November 12, 2024
Teaching robots to navigate new environments is tough. You can train them on physical, real-world data taken from recordings made by humans, but that’s scarce, and expensive to collect. Digital simulations are a rapid, scalable way to teach them to do new things, but the robots often fail when they’re pulled out of virtual worlds…

The Download: AI in Africa, and reporting in the age of Trump

November 11, 2024
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. What Africa needs to do to become a major AI player Africa is still early in the process of adopting AI technologies. But researchers say the continent is uniquely hospitable to it for…

Science and technology stories in the age of Trump

November 11, 2024
Rather than analyzing the news this week, I thought I’d lift the hood a bit on how we make it.  I’ve spent most of this year being pretty convinced that Donald Trump would be the 47th president of the United States. Even so, like most people, I was completely surprised by the scope of his…

A bold AI movement is underway in Africa—but it is being held up

November 11, 2024
Kessel Okinga-Koumu paced around a crowded hallway. It was her first time presenting at the Deep Learning Indaba, she told the crowd gathered to hear her, filled with researchers from Africa’s machine-learning community. The annual weeklong conference (‘Indaba’ is a Zulu word for gathering), was held most recently in September at Amadou Mahtar Mbow University…

The Download: AI vs quantum, and the future of reproductive rights in the US

November 8, 2024
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. Why AI could eat quantum computing’s lunch Tech companies have been funneling billions of dollars into quantum computers for years. The hope is that they’ll be a game changer for fields as diverse…