The Download: a Nobel winner on AI, and the case for fixing everything

May 12, 2026
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. Three things in AI to watch, according to a Nobel-winning economist A few months before he won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2024, Daron Acemoglu published a paper that earned…

Thinking Machines wants to build an AI that actually listens while it talks

May 12, 2026
Right now, every AI model you’ve ever used works the same way. You talk, it listens. It responds, you listen. Thinking Machines is trying to change that by building a model that processes your input and generates a response at the same time, so it’s more like a phone call than a text chain.