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

The people paid to train AI are outsourcing their work… to AI

June 22, 2023
A significant proportion of people paid to train AI models may be themselves outsourcing that work to AI, a new study has found.  It takes an incredible amount of data to train AI systems to perform specific tasks accurately and reliably. Many companies pay gig workers on platforms like Mechanical Turk to complete tasks that…

DuckDuckGo’s Windows browser is now available in open beta

June 22, 2023

DuckDuckGo’s privacy-focused browser is now available for Windows users. The Windows rollout comes nine months after the browser launched publically for Mac users. The Windows browser, which is now in public beta, includes many of the privacy protections featured in the browser’s iOS, Mac and Android versions. Users can import their passwords and bookmarks from […]

DuckDuckGo’s Windows browser is now available in open beta by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

Avatar startup Genies launches $1M fund for developers building AR experiences

June 22, 2023

Genies, the Bob Iger-backed avatar tech company, announced Thursday the launch of its Developer Engagement Fund to reward developers that build AR experiences via Genies’ recently announced developer kit. The total fund size is $1 million. Genies will reward certain developers based on the level of traction, such as how many users are participating in […]

Avatar startup Genies launches $1M fund for developers building AR experiences by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

The Download: lab-grown chicken, and rewilding the world

June 22, 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. Two companies can now sell lab-grown chicken in the US The news: The first cultivated, or lab-grown, meat has been approved for sale in the US. Two companies, Upside Foods and Eat Just,…

The hope and hype of seaweed farming for carbon removal

June 22, 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. Say, theoretically, that a pipe in your bathroom springs a leak. Bad situation, right? The good news is that there are pretty much only two things you need to do: turn the…

Adtech giant Criteo hit with revised €40M fine by French data privacy body over GDPR breaches

June 22, 2023

French advertising technology giant Criteo has been issued with a revised fine of €40 million ($44 million) over failings to garner users’ consent around targeted advertising. The case in question dates back to 2018 when Privacy International filed a formal complaint with the Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL), France’s data privacy watchdog, using […]

Adtech giant Criteo hit with revised €40M fine by French data privacy body over GDPR breaches by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch

What “rewilding” means—and what’s missing from this new movement

June 22, 2023
In Colombia, there’s a national debate about what to do with Pablo Escobar’s feral “cocaine hippos.” To many, the 160 hippos—descendants of four illegally imported African hippopotamuses that escaped from the drug kingpin’s private zoo after his death in 1993—are agents of destruction. Each night, they collectively chomp through half a ton of vegetation, and…

The Catholic cartographer who wants to help the church fight climate change

June 22, 2023
When Molly Burhans first started trying to map the Catholic Church’s global property holdings so the land could be put to work fighting climate change, the idea seemed so obvious to her that she was sure someone else must be doing it already. Burhans, a cartographer, was then an ecological-design grad student who had recently…

Plastic upcycling startup Kubik closes $3.34M seed to scale production in Ethiopia

June 22, 2023

The amount of plastic waste produced globally is on track to triple to over 1,000 million tonnes by 2060. The OECD report predicts that developed countries will continue to produce the most plastic waste per person, although emerging regions like Africa and Asia are expected to experience the fastest growth owing to rapid population growth, and […]

Plastic upcycling startup Kubik closes $3.34M seed to scale production in Ethiopia by Annie Njanja originally published on TechCrunch

Sequoia debuts Atlas, an interactive guide to the European tech talent landscape

June 22, 2023

There is an estimated 3 million software engineers in Europe, depending on what report you want to believe, but finding the rights engineers for the job in hand isn’t all that straight forward. London or Paris might well have the highest concentration of software engineers, but knowing what locales offer the best access to specific […]

Sequoia debuts Atlas, an interactive guide to the European tech talent landscape by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch