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

Puzzle Corner

June 18, 2025
Ready for a fresh set of puzzles? Click here for the July/August 2025 Puzzle Corner, brought to you by guest editor Ed Faulkner ’03. Send problems, solutions (by August 1), and comments to puzzlecorner@technologyreview.com. Editor emeritus Allan Gottlieb ’67 launched Puzzle Corner in 1966. Find back issues through 2022 at cs.nyu.edu/~gottlieb/tr and more recent back issues at technologyreview.com/puzzle-corner.

Puzzle Corner

June 18, 2025
Ready for a fresh set of puzzles? Click here for the September/October 2024 Puzzle Corner, brought to you by guest editor Edward Faulkner ’03.

The Download: tackling tech-facilitated abuse, and opening up AI hardware

June 18, 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. Why it’s so hard to stop tech-facilitated abuse After Gioia had her first child with her then husband, he installed baby monitors throughout their home—to “watch what we were doing,” she says, while…

The quest to defend against tech in intimate partner violence

June 18, 2025
After Gioia had her first child with her then husband, he installed baby monitors throughout their Massachusetts home—to “watch what we were doing,” she says, while he went to work. She’d turn them off; he’d get angry. By the time their third child turned seven, Gioia and her husband had divorced, but he still found…

Why AI hardware needs to be open

June 18, 2025
When OpenAI acquired Io to create “the coolest piece of tech that the world will have ever seen,” it confirmed what industry experts have long been saying: Hardware is the new frontier for AI. AI will no longer just be an abstract thing in the cloud far away. It’s coming for our homes, our rooms,…

The Download: power in Puerto Rico, and the pitfalls of AI agents

June 17, 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. Puerto Rico’s power struggles On the southeastern coast of Puerto Rico lies the country’s only coal-fired power station, flanked by a mountain of toxic ash. The plant, owned by the utility giant AES,…

Puerto Rico’s power struggles

June 17, 2025
At first glance, it seems as if life teems around Carmen Suárez Vázquez’s little teal-painted house in the municipality of Guayama, on Puerto Rico’s southeastern coast. The edge of the Aguirre State Forest, home to manatees, reptiles, as many as 184 species of birds, and at least three types of mangrove trees, is just a…

AI copyright anxiety will hold back creativity

June 17, 2025
Last fall, while attending a board meeting in Amsterdam, I had a few free hours and made an impromptu visit to the Van Gogh Museum. I often steal time for visits like this—a perk of global business travel for which I am grateful. Wandering the galleries, I found myself before The Courtesan (after Eisen), painted…