July 25, 2025

The Download: saving the US climate programs, and America’s AI protections are under threat

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 nonprofits and academia are stepping up to salvage US climate programs Nonprofits are trying to preserve a US effort to modernize greenhouse-gas measurements, amid growing fears that the Trump administration’s dismantling of…

Technology

Finding value with AI automation

July 15, 2025
In June 2023, technology leaders and IT services executives had a lightning bolt headed their way when McKinsey published the “The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier” report. It echoed a moment from the 2010s when Amazon Web Services launched an advertising campaign aimed at Main Street’s C-suite: Why would any fiscally…

Shaping the future with adaptive production

July 15, 2025
Adaptive production is more than a technological upgrade: it is a paradigm shift. This new frontier enables the integration of cutting-edge technologies to create an increasingly autonomous environment, where interconnected manufacturing plants go beyond the limits of traditional automation. Artificial intelligence, digital twins, and robotics are among the powerful tools manufacturers are using to create…

Google’s generative video model Veo 3 has a subtitles problem

July 15, 2025
As soon as Google launched its latest video-generating AI model at the end of May, creatives rushed to put it through its paces. Released just months after its predecessor, Veo 3 allows users to generate sounds and dialogue for the first time, sparking a flurry of hyperrealistic eight-second clips stitched together into ads, ASMR videos,…

Building community and clean air solutions

July 15, 2025
When Darren Riley moved to Detroit seven years ago, he didn’t expect the city’s air to change his life—literally. Developing asthma as an adult opened his eyes to a much larger problem: the invisible but pervasive impact of air pollution on the health of marginalized communities. “I was fascinated about why we don’t have the…

The Download: combating audio deepfakes, and AI in the classroom

July 15, 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. AI text-to-speech programs could one day “unlearn” how to imitate certain people The news: A new technique known as “machine unlearning” could be used to teach AI models to forget specific voices. How…

AI text-to-speech programs could “unlearn” how to imitate certain people

July 15, 2025
A technique known as “machine unlearning” could teach AI models to forget specific voices—an important step in stopping the rise of audio deepfakes, where someone’s voice is copied to carry out fraud or scams. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have revolutionized the quality of text-to-speech technology so that people can convincingly re-create a piece of…

AI’s giants want to take over the classroom

July 15, 2025
School’s out and it’s high summer, but a bunch of teachers are plotting how they’re going to use AI this upcoming school year. God help them.  On July 8, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic announced a $23 million partnership with one of the largest teachers’ unions in the United States to bring more AI into K–12…