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

Inception emerges from stealth with a new type of AI model

February 26, 2025

Inception, a new Palo Alto-based company started by Stanford computer science professor Stefano Ermon, claims to have developed a novel AI model based on “diffusion” technology. Inception calls it a diffusion-based large language model, or a “DLM” for short. The generative AI models receiving the most attention now can be broadly divided into two types: […]

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The Download: Introducing the Relationships issue

February 26, 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. Introducing: the Relationships issue Relationships are the stories of people and systems working together. Sometimes by choice. Sometimes for practicality. Sometimes by force. Too often, for purely transactional reasons. That’s why we’re exploring…

Technology shapes relationships. Relationships shape technology.

February 26, 2025
Greetings from a cold winter day. As I write this letter, we are in the early stages of President Donald Trump’s second term. The inauguration was exactly one week ago, and already an image from that day has become an indelible symbol of presidential power: a photo of the tech industry’s great data barons seated…

Welcome to robot city

February 26, 2025
Tourists to Odense, Denmark, come for the city’s rich history and culture: It’s where King Canute, Denmark’s last Viking king, was murdered during the 11th century, and the renowned fairy tale writer Hans Christian Andersen was born there some 700 years later. But today, Odense (with a population just over 210,000) is also home to…

Studying the uninvited guests

February 25, 2025
Microbes that gobble up or break down environmental toxins can clean up oil spills, waste sites, and contaminated watersheds. But until his faculty mentor asked him for help with a project he was working on with doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital in 2009, Eric Alm had not thought much about their role in a very…

The poetry of data

February 25, 2025
Jane Muschenetz’s poems don’t look like the sonnets you remember studying in high school English. If anything, they’re more likely to call to mind your statistics class. Flip through the pages of her poetry chapbook Power Point and you’ll see charts, graphs, and citations galore. One poem visually documents maternal mortality rates and women’s unpaid…

The man who reinvented the hammer

February 25, 2025
A trip to Walmart. An aging German shepherd. A cheap disposable camera. These are just a few of the seemingly mundane things that have sparked the relentlessly imaginative mind of Kurt Schroder ’90, leading to some of his groundbreaking inventions. “I just can’t stop doing it,” he says, with a chuckle and a tiny trace…

Turning a seaweed crisis into an energy opportunity

February 25, 2025
In 2019, Legena Henry, SM ’10, and the students in her renewable energy course at the University of the West Indies in Barbados wondered how to help their island stop using fossil fuel by 2030. Their first thought was to emulate Brazil—home to the world’s largest fleet of cars that run on sugar-based ethanol. But the small…

Quantum Machines raises $170M, says it’s working with more than half of all quantum computing companies

February 25, 2025

Quantum computing remains a holy grail in the world of technology, but with some important breakthroughs in the last several months, investors are betting on the more promising startups in the space to make the concept of super-efficient particle- and electron-based computing a reality. In the latest development, Quantum Machines, an Israeli startup that provides […]

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