Technology

The Download: ChatGPT’s origins, and making cement greener

February 9, 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. ChatGPT is everywhere. Here’s where it came from We’ve reached peak ChatGPT. Released in December as a web app by the San Francisco–based firm OpenAI, the chatbot exploded into the mainstream almost overnight. …

Arrcus snaps up $50M for a software-based alternative to costly network router equipment

February 9, 2023

Software may be eating the world, but it’s all still largely running across very physical, and often very expensive, equipment. That is now slowly starting to change, though. Today, a startup called Arrcus — which has built a software alternative for carriers and other major connectivity users looking for more flexible, and cheaper solutions to […]

Arrcus snaps up $50M for a software-based alternative to costly network router equipment by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

The climate solution beneath your feet

February 9, 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. I’ve come across some pretty wild technologies aimed at fighting climate change. Hydrogen-powered planes, underwater mining robots, and nuclear fusion reactors—each could play a role in cutting down on greenhouse-gas emissions.  But there…

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

February 9, 2023
When Kyle Cornforth first walked into IDEO’s San Francisco offices in 2011, she felt she had entered a whole new world. At the time, Cornforth was a director at the Edible Schoolyard Project, a nonprofit that uses gardening and cooking in schools to teach and to provide nutritious food. She was there to meet with…

Egyptian health tech Yodawy raises $16M, backed by Delivery Hero Ventures

February 9, 2023

Without proper government-led public health initiatives, healthcare expenditures, including insurance and pharmaceutical drugs, can burden individuals and households. In recent years, private institutions have played a massive part in the considerable uptake of medical insurance and medicines and also in lowering the costs of getting them across Egypt, the largest producer of pharmaceuticals across the […]

Egyptian health tech Yodawy raises $16M, backed by Delivery Hero Ventures by Tage Kene-Okafor originally published on TechCrunch

AI is eating itself: Bing’s AI quotes COVID disinfo sourced from ChatGPT

February 8, 2023

One of the more interesting, but seemingly academic, concerns of the new era of AI sucking up everything on the web was that AIs will eventually start to absorb other AI-generated content and regurgitate it in a self-reinforcing loop. Not so academic after all, it appears, because Bing just did it! When asked, it produced […]

AI is eating itself: Bing’s AI quotes COVID disinfo sourced from ChatGPT by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch

Hands-on with the new Bing

February 8, 2023

Yesterday, Microsoft launched the new Bing on the web and in its Edge browser, powered by a combination of a next-gen OpenAI GPT model and Microsoft’s own Prometheus model. With this, Microsoft jumped ahead of Google in bringing this kind of search experience to the mainstream, though we’ll likely see the competition heat up in […]

Hands-on with the new Bing by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

ChatGPT is everywhere. Here’s where it came from

February 8, 2023
We’ve reached peak ChatGPT. Released in December as a web app by the San Francisco–based firm OpenAI, the chatbot exploded into the mainstream almost overnight. According to some estimates, it is the fastest-growing internet service ever, reaching 100 million users in January, just two months after launch. Through OpenAI’s $10 billion deal with Microsoft, the…