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: CRISPR’s climate promises, and protecting forests with tech

November 4, 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. How a breakthrough gene-editing tool will help the world cope with climate change Jennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of the breakthrough gene-editing tool CRISPR, says the technology will help the world grapple…

How a breakthrough gene-editing tool will help the world cope with climate change

November 2, 2024
Jennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of the breakthrough gene-editing tool CRISPR, says the technology will help the world grapple with the growing risks of climate change by delivering crops and animals better suited to hotter, drier, wetter, or weirder conditions. “The potential is huge,” says Doudna, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry…

The Download: OpenAI launches search, and AI-generated video games

November 1, 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. OpenAI has brought a new web search tool to ChatGPT The news: ChatGPT can now search the web for up-to-date answers to a user’s queries. Previously it was restricted to generating answers from…

How exosomes could become more than just an “anti-aging” fad

November 1, 2024
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. Over the past month or so, I’ve been working on a story about exosomes. You might have seen them advertised—they’re being touted as a hot new beauty treatment,…

AI search could break the web

October 31, 2024
In late October, News Corp filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI, a popular AI search engine. At first glance, this might seem unremarkable. After all, the lawsuit joins more than two dozen similar cases seeking credit, consent, or compensation for the use of data by AI developers. Yet this particular dispute is different, and it…

OpenAI brings a new web search tool to ChatGPT

October 31, 2024
ChatGPT can now search the web for up-to-date answers to a user’s queries, OpenAI announced today.  Until now, ChatGPT was mostly restricted to generating answers from its training data, which is current up to October 2023 for GPT-4o, and had limited web search capabilities. Searches about generalized topics will still draw on this information from…

Chasing AI’s value in life sciences

October 31, 2024
Inspired by an unprecedented opportunity, the life sciences sector has gone all in on AI. For example, in 2023, Pfizer introduced an internal generative AI platform expected to deliver $750 million to $1 billion in value. And Moderna partnered with OpenAI in April 2024, scaling its AI efforts to deploy ChatGPT Enterprise, embedding the tool’s…

The Download: US house-building barriers, and a fusion energy facility tour

October 31, 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. Housing is an election issue. But the US sucks at it. Ahead of abortion access, ahead of immigration, and way ahead of climate change, US voters under 30 are most concerned about one…

Inside a fusion energy facility

October 31, 2024
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. On an overcast day in early October, I picked up a rental car and drove to Devens, Massachusetts, to visit a hole in the ground. Commonwealth Fusion Systems has raised over $2…