Y Combinator deletes posts after a startup’s demo goes viral
YC deleted a controversial demo video from one of its startups, which monitors factory workers with AI cameras.
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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.
Anthropic’s latest flagship AI might not have been incredibly costly to train
Anthropic’s newest flagship AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, cost “a few tens of millions of dollars” to train using less than 10^26 FLOPs of computing power. That’s according to Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, who in an X post on Monday relayed a clarification he’d received from Anthropic’s PR. “I was contacted by Anthropic who told me […]
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Studying the uninvited guests
Microbes that gobble up or break down environmental toxins can clean up oil spills, waste sites, and contaminated watersheds. But until his faculty mentor asked him for help with a project he was working on with doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital in 2009, Eric Alm had not thought much about their role in a very…
The poetry of data
Jane Muschenetz’s poems don’t look like the sonnets you remember studying in high school English. If anything, they’re more likely to call to mind your statistics class. Flip through the pages of her poetry chapbook Power Point and you’ll see charts, graphs, and citations galore. One poem visually documents maternal mortality rates and women’s unpaid…
The man who reinvented the hammer
A trip to Walmart. An aging German shepherd. A cheap disposable camera. These are just a few of the seemingly mundane things that have sparked the relentlessly imaginative mind of Kurt Schroder ’90, leading to some of his groundbreaking inventions. “I just can’t stop doing it,” he says, with a chuckle and a tiny trace…
An environmentally friendly alternative to plastic microbeads
The tiny beads added to some cleansers and cosmetics are one source of the long-lasting microplastics that threaten the environment. But MIT researchers have found a way to address the problem at its source: replacing them with polymers that break down into harmless sugars and amino acids. Particles of this polymer could also be used…
Tiny tubes wrap around brain cells
Wearable devices like smart watches and fitness trackers help us measure and learn from physical functions such as heart rates and sleep stages. Now MIT researchers have developed a tiny equivalent for individual brain cells. These soft, battery-free wireless devices, actuated with light, are designed to wrap around different parts of neurons, such as axons…
Perplexity launches $50M seed and pre-seed VC fund
Perplexity, the developer of an AI-powered search engine, is raising a $50 million seed and pre-seed investment fund, CNBC reported. Although the majority of the capital is coming from limited partners, Perplexity is using some of the capital it raised for the company’s growth to anchor the fund. Perplexity has reportedly raised $500 million at […]
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Starbucks Is Cutting 13 Drinks From Its Menu Next Week. Here’s What to Order While You Still Can.
It’s not great news for Frappuccino lovers.
DOGE has an official ‘acting’ administrator, and it’s not Elon Musk, White House confirms
Amy Gleason is named as the acting administrator of DOGE, amid ambiguity over Elon Musk’s role.
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