June 18, 2025

Puzzle Corner

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.

A long-abandoned US nuclear technology is making a comeback in China

May 1, 2025
China has once again beat everyone else to a clean energy milestone—its new nuclear reactor is reportedly one of the first to use thorium instead of uranium as a fuel and the first of its kind that can be refueled while it’s running. It’s an interesting (if decidedly experimental) development out of a country that’s…

WhatsApp now has more than 3 billion users a month

May 1, 2025
WhatsApp now has more than 3 billion people using it every month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted during the company’s Q1 results conference call on Wednesday. Founded in 2009 and acquired by Facebook for $19 billion in 2014, WhatsApp remains free to use and doesn’t serve any ads. The app reached the 2 billion monthly […]

From tech pioneers to ‘extremists’: Belarusian founders face exile and statelessness

May 1, 2025
In 2013, Tatyana Marynich and Anastasiya Khamiankova opened the doors to Imaguru, a startup hub in Minsk, Belarus that would go on to launch some of Eastern Europe’s most prominent tech success stories. A decade later, they’ve been sentenced ‘in absentia’ to a combined 23 years in prison by Belarusian authorities. Their property has been […]

Tesla’s board reportedly sought a successor while Musk wheeled around Washington

May 1, 2025
According to a new, brow-raising WSJ report, Tesla’s board quietly began searching for Elon Musk’s potential successor about a month ago, approaching executive search firms as the carmaker faced protests, plummeting sales, and shrinking profits while Musk waded into Washington to slash government spending. Board members reportedly met with Musk to express concerns about his […]

Microsoft’s most capable new Phi 4 AI model rivals the performance of far larger systems

May 1, 2025
Microsoft launched several new “open” AI models on Wednesday, the most capable of which is competitive with OpenAI’s o3-mini on at least one benchmark. All of the new pemissively licensed models — Phi 4 mini reasoning, Phi 4 reasoning, and Phi 4 reasoning plus — are “reasoning” models, meaning they’re able to spend more time […]

Sam Altman’s World unveils a mobile verification device

May 1, 2025
Tools for Humanity, the startup behind the World human verification project that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman co-founded, plans to unveil Wednesday a mobile device designed to help people determine the difference between a human and an AI agent. The company, which is debuting the device during its its “At Last” event in San Francisco, also […]

World partners with Tinder, Visa to bring its ID-verifying tech to more places

May 1, 2025
World, the biometric ID company best known for its eyeball-scanning Orb devices, at an event late on Wednesday announced several partnerships aimed at driving sign-ups and demonstrating the applications of its tech. World is partnering with Match Group, the dating app conglomerate, to verify the IDs of Tinder users in Japan. Via collaborations with Kalshi […]

Meta forecasted it would make $1.4T in revenue from generative AI by 2035

May 1, 2025
Meta made a prediction last year its generative AI products would rake in $2 billion to $3 billion in revenue in 2025, and between $460 billion and $1.4 trillion by 2035, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday. The documents, submitted by attorneys for book authors suing Meta for what they claim is unauthorized training of […]

Epic Games just scored a win against Apple

May 1, 2025
Epic Games notched a win in an ongoing legal dispute with Apple. The result could be Fortnite returning to the U.S. iOS app store as early as next week. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said in a ruling Wednesday that Apple was in “willful violation” of a 2021 injunction that prohibited the company from anticompetitive pricing. […]

Amazon launches Nova Premier, its most capable AI model yet

May 1, 2025
Amazon on Wednesday released what the company claims is the most capable AI model in its Nova family, Nova Premier. Nova Premier, which can process text, images, and videos (but not audio), is available in Amazon Bedrock, the company’s AI model development platform. Amazon says that Premier excels at “complex tasks” that “require deep understanding […]