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

The Download: handling extreme heat, and replicating superconductor results

August 3, 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. How hot is too hot for the human body? There’s no other way to say it: it’s hot. Temperatures this summer have yet again broken records, and around the world, climate change is…

Here’s how much heat your body can take

August 3, 2023
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. I think I’m running out of ways to say it: it’s hot.  Saturday’s heat was crushing in New York, with temperatures topping 90 °F (32 °C) and air that was absolutely sticky…

Emtech to advance its regtech and CBDC stack solutions with $4M led by Matrix Partners India

August 3, 2023
Emtech, an African provider of central banking infrastructure, introduced its Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Innovation kit last month. The kit caters to fintechs and financial service providers interested in experimenting with solutions and business models based on digital currencies pioneered by central banks. The New York-based business is today announcing a $4 million seed […]

Xpeng’s head of autonomous driving quits, rumored to join Nvidia

August 3, 2023
Xpeng, a prominent Chinese electric vehicle maker and a competitor to Tesla, has announced the resignation of its vice president of autonomous driving, Xinzhou Wu, over personal and family reasons. Wu, formerly a senior director of engineering at Qualcomm where he spent over a decade, was effectively the head of Xpeng’s autonomous driving business and […]

SettleMint’s AI assistant aims to help web3 developers write better smart contracts

August 3, 2023
The way artificial intelligence can write software has already prompted many companies to introduce code-generating products, so it’s no surprise that SettleMint, a low-code blockchain programming tool for enterprises, recently added an AI assistant to its platform. The AI assistant, which arrived about nine months after SettleMint announced its 16 million euro Series A funding […]

Meta starts blocking the news in Canada — its latest standoff with publishers

August 2, 2023
Canadians using Facebook and Instagram should expect to see some gaps in their feeds, starting now. This week, Meta began blocking Canadian access to links and stories from news publishers — the company’s response to a bill that would require the tech giant to pay outlets for the right to distribute and profit from their […]

X, formerly Twitter, streamlines its crowdsourced fact-checking system Community Notes

August 2, 2023
Elon Musk-owned X, the company formerly known as Twitter, is streamlining its crowdsourced fact-checking feature Community Notes. The feature historically has provided information to users about why they were seeing a fact check appended to a tweet, er, post. Now, after three years of development, the company says this extra context will be removed for […]

Transformation requires companywide engagement

August 2, 2023
Enterprises are shifting operations from on-premises to the cloud, and industry momentum for digital transformation continues to push forward. Gartner estimates that 80% of CEOs are increasing investment in digital technologies in 2023 to achieve greater efficiency and productivity. Cloud and digitization are becoming a necessity across industries to ensure competitiveness. But as companies make…