July 4, 2025

The Download: India’s AI independence, and predicting future epidemics

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 India’s scramble for AI independence Despite its status as a global tech hub, India lags far behind the likes of the US and China when it comes to homegrown AI. That gap…

Technology

Intuitive Machines sets November launch date for lunar lander mission

August 15, 2023
Lunar technology company Intuitive Machines may well be the first private American company to land a spacecraft on the moon. The company said Monday that it was targeting a six-day slot starting on November 15 to launch its IM-1 lunar lander mission on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Intuitive Machines is one of a trio […]

OpenAI proposes a new way to use GPT-4 for content moderation

August 15, 2023
OpenAI claims that it’s developed a way to use GPT-4, its flagship generative AI model, for content moderation — lightening the burden on human teams. Detailed in a post published to the official OpenAI blog, the technique relies on prompting GPT-4 with a policy that guides the model in making moderation judgements and creating a […]

Worldcoin ignored initial order to stop iris scans in Kenya, records show

August 15, 2023
Months before Kenya finally banned iris scans by Sam Altman’s crypto startup Worldcoin, the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ODPC) had ordered its parent company, Tools for Humanity, to stop collecting personal data. The ODPC had in May this year instructed the crypto startup to stop iris scans and the collection of facial recognition […]

US lawmaker says FBI notified him of email breach linked to Microsoft cloud hack

August 15, 2023
U.S. House lawmaker Rep. Don Bacon said the FBI warned him that China-backed hackers who used a stolen Microsoft key to raid the email accounts of senior U.S. government officials also accessed his email accounts. In a tweet, the Republican congressman from Nebraska said the FBI notified him on Monday that the Chinese government “hacked […]

The Download: China’s autonomous race, and Kiva’s controversial changes

August 15, 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. The race to lead China’s autonomous driving market Chinese car companies all seem fixated on one goal: launching their own autonomous navigation services in more and more cities as quickly as possible. In…

Voiceflow, a platform for building conversational AI experiences, raises $15M

August 15, 2023
The demand for conversational AI — mostly chatbots — has arguably never been higher, riding the publicity wave of systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Last year, Gartner predicted that one in 10 agent-customer exchanges will be automated by 2026, an increase from the estimated 1.6% of chats that were handed off to chatbots in 2022. Unsurprisingly, […]

The rise of the tech ethics congregation

August 15, 2023
Just before Christmas last year, a pastor preached a gospel of morals over money to several hundred members of his flock. Wearing a sport coat, angular glasses, and wired earbuds, he spoke animatedly into his laptop from his tiny glass office inside a co-working space, surrounded by six whiteboards filled with his feverish brainstorming. Sharing…