Technology

In late October, News Corp filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI, a popular AI search engine. At first glance, this might seem unremarkable. After all, the lawsuit joins more than two dozen similar cases seeking credit, consent, or compensation for the use of data by AI developers. Yet this particular dispute is different, and it…

ChatGPT can now search the web for up-to-date answers to a user’s queries, OpenAI announced today.  Until now, ChatGPT was mostly restricted to generating answers from its training data, which is current up to October 2023 for GPT-4o, and had limited web search capabilities. Searches about generalized topics will still draw on this information from…

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. Housing is an election issue. But the US sucks at it. Ahead of abortion access, ahead of immigration, and way ahead of climate change, US voters under 30 are most concerned about one…

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. The arrhythmia of our current age   Arrhythmia means the heart beats, but not in proper time—a critical rhythm of life suddenly going rogue and unpredictable. It’s frightening to experience, but what if it’s…

It turns out that you don’t need to be a scientist to encode data in DNA. Researchers have been working on DNA-based data storage for decades, but a new template-based method inspired by our cells’ chemical processes is easy enough for even nonscientists to practice. The technique could pave the way for an unusual but…

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. Exosomes are touted as a trendy cure-all. We don’t know if they work. There’s a trendy new cure-all in town—you might have seen ads pop up on social media or read rave reviews…