The Download: deep diving, and virtual power plants in China

February 21, 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. Meet the divers trying to figure out how deep humans can go Two hundred thirty meters into one of the deepest underwater caves on Earth, Richard “Harry” Harris knew that not far ahead…

Google launches two new open LLMs

February 21, 2024

Barely a week after launching the latest iteration of its Gemini models, Google today announced the launch of Gemma, a new family of lightweight open-weight models. Starting with Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B, these new models were “inspired by Gemini” and are available for commercial and research usage. Google did not provide us with a […]

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India’s PhonePe launches Android app store with Amazon, Meta and Microsoft apps

February 21, 2024

Microsoft, Amazon and Meta are among the top brands whose apps are available on the Indian fintech PhonePe’s Indus Appstore, an app store for the Android mobile operating system, launched Wednesday in challenge to Google’s monopoly in its largest market by users. Indus Appstore supports 12 regional languages and features over 200,000 apps — including […]

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Is 5,000 a Stop Sign for Stocks?

February 21, 2024
We all enjoyed the ride up to 5,000 for the S&P 500 (SPY). But more and more it looks like this will be a near term top for the market….

Loora wants to leverage AI to teach English

February 21, 2024

Of the professions in danger of being replaced by AI, language teacher is certainly up there. That’s not necessarily because it’s a good idea. AI, some employers have decided — including Duolingo, recently — is a reasonable enough stand-in for human experts when it comes to language instruction. Despite the fact that AI-translated text tends […]

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Why China’s EV ambitions need virtual power plants

February 21, 2024
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. The first time I heard the term “virtual power plants,” I was reporting on how extreme heat waves in 2022 had overwhelmed the Chinese grid and led the government to restrict electric-vehicle…

Six things we learned from the LockBit takedown

February 21, 2024

A sweeping law enforcement operation led by the U.K.’s National Crime Agency this week took down LockBit, the notorious Russia-linked ransomware gang that has for years wreaked havoc on businesses, hospitals, and governments around the world. The action saw LockBit’s leak site downed, its servers seized, multiple arrests made, and U.S. government sanctions applied in […]

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Meet the divers trying to figure out how deep humans can go

February 21, 2024
Two hundred thirty meters into one of the deepest underwater caves on Earth, Richard “Harry” Harris knew that not far ahead of him was a 15-meter drop leading to a place no human being had seen before.  Getting there had taken two helicopters, three weeks of test dives, two tons of equipment, and hard work…

Uber Eats is launching a delivery service with Cartken’s sidewalk robots in Japan

February 21, 2024

Uber, along with partners Mitsubishi Electric and autonomous robotics startup Cartken, are launching a service in Japan that will use self-driving sidewalk robots to deliver food to customers. The companies announced that the service offered through the Uber Eats app will launch in a select part of Tokyo by the end of March. An Uber […]

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