February 5, 2025

XOi raises $230M, acquires Specifx to expand its tech for field service technicians

Field service engineers may not be the first group of customers that come to mind when you think about lucrative opportunities in B2B technology. But that same blind spot speaks of the opportunity in the space for those who are stepping up and targeting “the job site.” One of the players in that space, XOi  […]

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Technology

Astronomers are enlisting AI to prepare for a data downpour

May 20, 2024
In deserts across Australia and South Africa, astronomers are planting forests of metallic detectors that will together scour the cosmos for radio signals. When it boots up in five years or so, the Square Kilometer Array Observatory will look for new information about the universe’s first stars and the different stages of galactic evolution.  But…

VCs and the military are fueling self-driving startups that don’t need roads

May 18, 2024

A new crop of early-stage startups — along with some recent VC investments — illustrates a niche emerging in the autonomous vehicle technology sector. Unlike the companies bringing robotaxis to city streets, these startups are taking their tech off-road.  Two recent entrants — Seattle-based Overland AI and New Brunswick-based Potential — are poised to get […]

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GPT-4o’s Chinese token-training data is polluted by spam and porn websites

May 17, 2024
Soon after OpenAI released GPT-4o on Monday, May 13, its newest version of the large-language model chatbot, some Chinese-language speakers started to notice something seemed off: the tokens it uses to parse text were full of spam and porn phrases. On May 14, Tianle Cai, a Ph.D student at Princeton University studying inference efficiency in…

The Download: cuddly robots to help dementia, and what Daedalus taught us

May 17, 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 cuddly robots could change dementia care Companion animals can stave off some of the loneliness, anxiety, and agitation that come with Alzheimer’s disease, according to studies. Sadly, people with Alzheimer’s aren’t always…

How cuddly robots could change dementia care

May 17, 2024
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.  Last week, I scoured the internet in search of a robotic dog. I wanted a belated birthday present for my aunt, who was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.…

Roundtables: Why Thermal Batteries are So Hot Right Now

May 16, 2024
Recorded on May 16, 2024 Why Thermal Batteries are So Hot Right Now Speakers: Casey Crownhart, climate reporter and Amy Nordrum, executive editor Thermal batteries could be a key part of cleaning up heavy industry, and our readers chose them as the 11th breakthrough on MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2024. Learn what…

Unlocking the trillion-dollar potential of generative AI

May 16, 2024
Generative AI is poised to unlock trillions in annual economic value across industries. This rapidly evolving field is changing the way we approach everything from content creation to software development, promising never-before-seen efficiency and productivity gains. In this session, experts from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, discuss the drivers fueling the massive…

Agora raises $34B Series B to keep building the Carta for real estate

May 16, 2024

Since he was very young, Bar Mor knew that he would inevitably do something with real estate. His family was involved in all types of real estate projects, from ground-up construction to managing residential, commercial and retail properties. But unlike his parents, Mor also had a passion for technology. His interest in tech was reinforced […]

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The Download: rapid DNA analysis for disasters, and supercharged AI assistants

May 16, 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 grim but revolutionary DNA technology is changing how we respond to mass disasters Last August, a wildfire tore through the Hawaiian island of Maui. The list of missing residents climbed into the…

Cannabis and gaming payments startup Aeropay is now offering an alternative to Mastercard and Visa

May 16, 2024

The key to taking on legacy players in the financial technology industry may be to go where they have not gone before. That’s what Chicago-based Aeropay is doing. The provider of pay-by-bank solutions for businesses started out helping cannabis retailers and gaming companies with their payments and is now entering into Visa and Mastercard’s territory […]

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