March 14, 2025

Republican Congressman Jim Jordan asks Big Tech if Biden tried to censor AI

On Thursday, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent letters to 16 American technology firms, including Google and OpenAI, asking for past communications with the Biden Administration that might suggest the former President “coerced or colluded” with companies to “censor lawful speech” in AI products. The Trump Administration’s top technology advisers previously signaled it would pick […]

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The Download: the problem with police bodycams, and how to make useful robots

April 16, 2024
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 AI was supposed to make police bodycams better. What happened? When police departments first started buying and deploying bodycams in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a…

Overture Maps Foundation releases the first beta of its open map dataset

April 16, 2024

The Overture Maps Foundation today launched the first beta of its global open map dataset. With this, the foundation, which is backed by the likes of Amazon, Esri, Meta, Microsoft and TomTom, is getting one step closer to launching a production-ready open dataset for developers who need geospatial data to power their applications. “This Beta […]

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Two Chairs raises $72M Series C in equity and debt to scale its therapist network

April 16, 2024

When Alex Katz founded Two Chairs in 2017, he firmly believed that in-person therapy is the most effective for behavioral health. Two Chairs used technology — a proprietary matching algorithm — to find the best possible therapists for its clients, but treatments took place primarily inside one of the startup’s half a dozen stylishly designed […]

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Three reasons robots are about to become more way useful 

April 16, 2024
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The holy grail of robotics since the field’s beginning has been to build a robot that can do our housework. But for a long time, that has just been a dream.…

Meta’s Oversight Board probes explicit AI-generated images posted on Instagram and Facebook

April 16, 2024

The Oversight Board, Meta’s semi-independent policy council, it turning its attention to how the company’s social platforms are handling explicit, AI-generated images. Tuesday, it announced investigations into two separate cases over how Instagram in India and Facebook in the U.S. handled AI-generated images of public figures after Meta’s systems fell short on detecting and responding […]

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AI was supposed to make police bodycams better. What happened?

April 16, 2024
On July 25 last year, in circuit court in Dane County, Wisconsin, a motion was filed to dismiss a criminal case as a result of what defense attorneys described as “institutional bad-faith actions” by a local police department. The evidence was unearthed, in part, because of artificial intelligence.  Attorney Jessa Nicholson Goetz had been preparing…

Google Wallet appears in India, with local integrations, but Pay will stay

April 16, 2024

Google Wallet will finally launch in India — nearly two years after its relaunch as a digital wallet platform in the U.S. — according to a preview of the app that the company accidentally posted on the Google Play store in the country. After TechCrunch spotted the listing for the app — which will let […]

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