February 6, 2025

Superlogic raises $13.7M at a $200M valuation to help consumers use reward points toward cool ‘experiences’

Superlogic, a startup that helps give consumers a way to apply rewards points toward experiences, has raised $13.7 million at a $200 million valuation, the company tells TechCrunch exclusively. Lin Dai, CEO and co-founder of Miami-based Superlogic, said his company’s technology is designed to “enhance the value of rewards points” by giving consumers a broader […]

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Technology

Geoffrey Hinton just won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on machine learning

October 8, 2024
Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist whose pioneering work on deep learning in the 1980s and 90s underpins all of the most powerful AI models in the world today, has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Speaking on the phone to the Academy minutes after the announcement,…

Why artificial intelligence and clean energy need each other

October 8, 2024
We are in the early stages of a geopolitical competition for the future of artificial intelligence. The winners will dominate the global economy in the 21st century. But what’s been too often left out of the conversation is that AI’s huge demand for concentrated and consistent amounts of power represents a chance to scale the…

Forget chat. AI that can hear, see and click is already here

October 8, 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. Chatting with an AI chatbot is so 2022. The latest hot AI toys take advantage of multimodal models, which can handle several things at the same time, such as images, audio, and…

The Download: how to find new music online, and climate friendly food

October 7, 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 to break free of Spotify’s algorithm Since the heyday of radio, records, cassette tapes, and MP3 players, the branding of sound has evolved from broad genres like rock and hip-hop to “paranormal…

The Download: Google’s AI podcasts, and protecting your brain data

October 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. People are using Google study software to make AI podcasts—and they’re weird and amazing Google’s new AI podcasting tool, called Audio Overview, has become a surprise viral hit. The podcasting feature was launched…

A new law in California protects consumers’ brain data. Some think it doesn’t go far enough.

October 4, 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. On September 28, California became the second US state to officially recognize the importance of mental privacy in state law. That pink, jelly-like, throbbing mass under your skull—a.k.a.…

The Download: training robots with gen AI, and the state of climate tech

October 3, 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. AI-generated images can teach robots how to act Generative AI models can produce images in response to prompts within seconds, and they’ve recently been used for everything from highlighting their own inherent bias…

These 15 companies are innovating in climate tech

October 3, 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. It’s finally here! We’ve just unveiled our 2024 list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch. This annual project is one the climate team at MIT Technology Review pours a lot of…

AI-generated images can teach robots how to act

October 3, 2024
Generative AI models can produce images in response to prompts within seconds, and they’ve recently been used for everything from highlighting their own inherent bias to preserving precious memories. Now, researchers from Stephen James’s Robot Learning Lab in London are using image-generating AI models for a new purpose: creating training data for robots. They’ve developed…