The Download: the story of OpenAI, and making magnesium

May 28, 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. OpenAI: The power and the pride OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT 3.5 set in motion an AI arms race that has changed the world. How that turns out for humanity is something we are…

Elon Musk’s Neuralink raises $600M at $9B valuation

May 28, 2025
Elon Musk’s brain implant startup, Neuralink, has raised $600 million in a funding round that values the company at $9 billion pre-money, Semafor reported, citing anonymous sources. Semafor did not mention the investors involved in the round. Neuralink last raised $43 million in venture capital, in November 2023, and was valued at about $5 billion […]

OpenAI: The power and the pride

May 28, 2025
In April, Paul Graham, the founder of the tech startup accelerator Y Combinator, sent a tweet in response to former YC president and current OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Altman had just bid a public goodbye to GPT-4 on X, and Graham had a follow-up question.  “If you had [GPT-4’s model weights ] etched on a…

This startup wants to make more climate-friendly metal in the US

May 28, 2025
A California-based company called Magrathea just turned on a new electrolyzer that can make magnesium metal from seawater. The technology has the potential to produce the material, which is used in vehicles and defense applications, with net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions. Magnesium is an incredibly light metal, and it’s used for parts in cars and planes, as…

Litehaus raises €1.46M pre-seed to build home-building platform

May 28, 2025
All Thibault Launay and his wife Simi wanted nearly five years ago was to build a dream home in Portugal, where they both now live.  But what they encountered instead was a broken system. “Fourteen months of delays, 20% budget overruns, and endless stress managing over 10 subcontractors,” Thibault recalled. They bought the land in […]

SpaceX’s ninth test flight of Starship launches into space, ends in a spin

May 28, 2025
SpaceX’s Starship successfully separated from its Super Heavy rocket booster and reached orbit Tuesday evening, but later began spinning and made an uncontrolled re-entry into the Indian Ocean. SpaceX had cleared the surrounding airspace where Starship was coming down, according to the company. The ninth test flight provided a mix of successes and failures for […]