March 12, 2025

Gemini Robotics uses Google’s top language model to make robots more useful

Google DeepMind has released a new model, Gemini Robotics, that combines its best large language model with robotics. Plugging in the LLM seems to give robots the ability to be more dexterous, work from natural-language commands, and generalize across tasks. All three are things that robots have struggled to do until now. The team hopes…

The Download: underage celebrity chatbots, and OpenAI’s latest model

February 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. An AI companion site is hosting sexually charged conversations with underage celebrity bots Botify AI, a site for chatting with AI companions that’s backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, hosts bots…

An ancient man’s remains were hacked apart and kept in a garage

February 28, 2025
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. This week I’ve been working on a story about a brain of glass. About five years ago, archaeologists found shiny black glass fragments inside the skull of a…

OpenAI’s Sora is now available in the EU, UK

February 28, 2025

OpenAI is finally making its video generation model, Sora, available to users in the European Union, the U.K., Switzerland, Norway, Liechtenstein and Iceland. The company said on Friday that ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers in these regions will be able to create videos using the model. The AI startup first unveiled Sora in February 2024, […]

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Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia takes wraps off his first assignment for DOGE

February 28, 2025

Almost two weeks after The New York Times reported that Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia had joined Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” Gebbia clarified his role on Thursday, announcing on X that as a starting point, he’ll be leveraging his design expertise as part of a broader effort to overhaul the government’s notoriously slow, paper-heavy […]

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SEC says meme coins are not securities

February 28, 2025

The Securities and Exchange Commission issued guidance on Thursday saying it does not view most meme coins, which are crypto tokens that originated from memes, as securities under United States federal law. As a result, the SEC says it does not believe people who purchase or hold meme coins are protected by federal securities law, […]

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Meta is reportedly planning a standalone AI chatbot app

February 27, 2025

Meta reportedly plans to release a standalone app for its AI assistant, Meta AI, in a bid to better compete with AI-powered chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. According to CNBC, Meta could launch a standalone Meta AI app as soon as the company’s next fiscal quarter (April-June). Meta AI is currently only available […]

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