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

Oracle is reportedly a top choice for helping run TikTok

March 13, 2025

TikTok has until April to finalize a sale to a U.S.-based buyer, yet uncertainties about the future of the short-form video app remain. However, a new report has emerged, suggesting that Oracle is the leading candidate to serve as the cloud technology partner for managing TikTok in the U.S., according to The Information.  Sources including […]

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Xbox debuts a new AI-powered gaming companion for mobile users

March 13, 2025

Ahead of the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC), Xbox revealed on Thursday that it’s experimenting with an AI-powered gaming sidekick. “Copilot for Gaming,” powered by Microsoft’s AI technology, is a voice-activated assistant designed to enhance the gaming experience and is designed to answer questions, complete tasks, and even criticize if you’re playing poorly.  “It can trash […]

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Gemini Robotics uses Google’s top language model to make robots more useful

March 12, 2025
Google DeepMind has released a new model, Gemini Robotics, that combines its best large language model with robotics. Plugging in the LLM seems to give robots the ability to be more dexterous, work from natural-language commands, and generalize across tasks. All three are things that robots have struggled to do until now. The team hopes…

The Download: testing new AI agent Manus, and Waabi’s virtual robotruck ambitions

March 12, 2025
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. Everyone in AI is talking about Manus. We put it to the test. Since the general AI agent Manus was launched last week, it has spread online like wildfire. And not just in…

This startup just hit a big milestone for green steel production

March 12, 2025
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Green-steel startup Boston Metal just showed that it has all the ingredients needed to make steel without emitting gobs of greenhouse gases. The company successfully ran its largest reactor yet to make…

This artificial leaf makes hydrocarbons out of carbon dioxide

March 12, 2025
For many years, researchers have been working to build devices that can mimic photosynthesis—the process by which plants use sunlight and carbon dioxide to make their fuel. These artificial leaves use sunlight to separate water into oxygen and hydrogen, which could then be used to fuel cars or generate electricity. Now a research team has…

Everyone in AI is talking about Manus. We put it to the test.

March 11, 2025
Since general AI agent Manus was launched last week, it has spread online like wildfire. And not just in China either, where it was developed by Wuhan-based startup Butterfly Effect. It’s made  its way into the global conversation, with influential voices in tech, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Hugging Face product lead Victor Mustar,…

Podcast app Pocket Casts makes its web player free

March 11, 2025

Pocket Casts, the podcast app acquired by Automattic in 2021, is now making its web player free. The company says the move offers an alternative to the big platforms’ closed ecosystems, where algorithmic-driven content is prioritized and podcasts are kept behind paywalls. Podcasts were built on open technology — the open, decentralized standard RSS, which […]

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