February 7, 2025

These documents are influencing the DOGE-sphere’s agenda

Reports from the US Government Accountability Office on improper federal payments in recent years are circulating on X and elsewhere online, and they seem to be a big influence on Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency and its supporters as the group pursues cost-cutting measures across the federal government.  The payment reports have been…

Technology

Why we need to shoot carbon dioxide thousands of feet underground

June 13, 2024
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. There’s often one overlooked member in a duo. Peanut butter outshines jelly in a PB&J every time (at least in my eyes). For carbon capture and storage technology, the storage part tends…

How gamification took over the world

June 13, 2024
It’s a thought that occurs to every video-game player at some point: What if the weird, hyper-focused state I enter when playing in virtual worlds could somehow be applied to the real one?  Often pondered during especially challenging or tedious tasks in meatspace (writing essays, say, or doing your taxes), it’s an eminently reasonable question…

AccountsIQ takes in $65M to boost its bookkeeping tools with AI

June 13, 2024

The economy remains on shaky ground in Europe, but there is some silver lining for enterprise startups: those building tools to help businesses run their finances in more steady and predictable ways are seeing a boost to their business.  In the latest development, AccountsIQ, a Dublin-founded accounting technology company that has been in business, and […]

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Helen Toner worries ‘not super functional’ Congress will flub AI policy

June 12, 2024

Helen Toner, a former OpenAI board member and the director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, is worried Congress might react in a “knee-jerk” way where it concerns AI policymaking, should the status quo not change. “Congress right now — I don’t know if anyone’s noticed — is not super functional, […]

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The Download: Apple’s AI plans, and a carbon storage boom

June 12, 2024
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. Apple is promising personalized AI in a private cloud. Here’s how that will work. At its Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, Apple for the first time unveiled its vision for supercharging its product…

How Gogoro’s swap-and-go scooter batteries can strengthen the grid

June 12, 2024
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. If you’ve ever been to Taiwan, you’ve likely run into Gogoro’s green-and-white battery-swap stations in one city or another. With 12,500 stations around the island, Gogoro has built a sweeping network that allows…

The world’s on the verge of a carbon storage boom

June 12, 2024
Pump jacks and pipelines clutter the Elk Hills oil field of California, a scrubby stretch of land in the southern Central Valley that rests above one of the nation’s richest deposits of fossil fuels. Oil production has been steadily declining in the state for decades, as tech jobs have boomed and legislators have enacted rigorous…

Germany’s Black Semiconductor raises $273M for graphene-based chip tech

June 12, 2024

Tech sovereignty has become a looming priority for a number of nations these days, and now a startup working in semiconductors has received a major boost in aid of that effort for Germany and Europe.   Black Semiconductor, which is developing a new kind of chip-connecting technology based on graphene, has raised €254.4 million (around $273 […]

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Apple is promising personalized AI in a private cloud. Here’s how that will work.

June 11, 2024
At its Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, Apple for the first time unveiled its vision for supercharging its product lineup with artificial intelligence. The key feature, which will run across virtually all of its product line, is Apple Intelligence, a suite of AI-based capabilities that promises to deliver personalized AI services while keeping sensitive data…