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

The Download: fighting blackouts with battery-swap networks, and AI surgery monitoring

June 11, 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. How battery-swap networks are preventing emergency blackouts On the morning of April 3, Taiwan was hit by a 7.4 magnitude earthquake. Seconds later, hundreds of battery-swap stations in Taiwan sensed something else: the…

What using artificial intelligence to help monitor surgery can teach us

June 11, 2024
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Every year, some 22,000 Americans a year are killed as a result of serious medical errors in hospitals, many of them on operating tables. There have been cases where surgeons have…

How battery-swap networks are preventing emergency blackouts

June 11, 2024
On the morning of April 3, Taiwan was hit by a 7.4 magnitude earthquake. Seconds later, hundreds of battery-swap stations in Taiwan sensed something else: the power frequency of the electric grid took a sudden drop, a signal that some power plants had been disconnected in the disaster. The grid was now struggling to meet…

Apple brings Apple Intelligence to developers via SiriKit and App Intents

June 10, 2024

Apple Intelligence, Apple’s new generative AI offering, won’t only be a consumer-facing feature — developers will be able to take advantage of the latest technology too. In its keynote address at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, the company announced that developers would be able to integrate the experience powered by Apple Intelligence into their […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The data practitioner for the AI era

June 10, 2024
The rise of generative AI, coupled with the rapid adoption and democratization of AI across industries this decade, has emphasized the singular importance of data. Managing data effectively has become critical to this era of business—making data practitioners, including data engineers, analytics engineers, and ML engineers, key figures in the data and AI revolution. Organizations…

The Download: AI propaganda, and digital twins

June 10, 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. Propagandists are using AI too—and companies need to be open about it —Josh A. Goldstein is a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), where he works on…

Digital twins are helping scientists run the world’s most complex experiments

June 10, 2024
In January 2022, NASA’s $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope was approaching the end of its one-million-mile trip from Earth. But reaching its orbital spot would be just one part of its treacherous journey. To ready itself for observations, the spacecraft had to unfold itself in a complicated choreography that, according to its engineers’ calculations,…

Propagandists are using AI too—and companies need to be open about it

June 8, 2024
At the end of May, OpenAI marked a new “first” in its corporate history. It wasn’t an even more powerful language model or a new data partnership, but a report disclosing that bad actors had misused their products to run influence operations. The company had caught five networks of covert propagandists—including players from Russia, China,…

The Download: making surgery safer, and MDMA therapy has been dealt a blow

June 7, 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. This AI-powered “black box” could make surgery safer The operating room has long been defined by its hush-hush nature because surgeons are notoriously bad at acknowledging their own mistakes. These mistakes kill some…

This AI-powered “black box” could make surgery safer

June 7, 2024
The first time Teodor Grantcharov sat down to watch himself perform surgery, he wanted to throw the VHS tape out the window.   “My perception was that my performance was spectacular,” Grantcharov says, and then pauses—“until the moment I saw the video.” Reflecting on this operation from 25 years ago, he remembers the roughness of…