Europe is on the cusp of a new dawn in commercial space technology. As global political tensions intensify and relationships with the US become increasingly strained, several European companies are now planning to conduct their own launches in an attempt to reduce the continent’s reliance on American rockets. In the coming days, Isar Aerospace, a […]
Where can you find lasers, electric guitars, and racks full of novel batteries, all in the same giant room? This week, the answer was the 2025 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit just outside Washington, DC. Energy innovation can take many forms, and the variety in energy research was on display at the summit. ARPA-E, part of […]
Around 1,400 infants are being infected by HIV every day as a result of the new US administration’s cuts to funding to AIDS organizations, new modeling suggests. In an executive order issued January 20, President Donald Trump paused new foreign aid funding to global health programs, and four days later, US Secretary of State Marco […]
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 […]
Since general AI agent Manus was launched last week, it has spread online like wildfire. And not just in China either, where it was developed by Wuhan-based startup Butterfly Effect. It’s made its way into the global conversation, with influential voices in tech, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Hugging Face product lead Victor Mustar, […]
The Canadian robotruck startup Waabi says its super-realistic virtual simulation is now accurate enough to prove the safety of its driverless big rigs without having to run them for miles on real roads. The company uses a digital twin of its real-world robotruck, loaded up with real sensor data, and measures how the twin’s performance […]
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. The cheapest way to supercharge America’s power grid —Brian Deese is an innovation fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served as director of the White House National Economic Council from 2021 […]
Facing defeat in chess, the latest generation of AI reasoning models sometimes cheat without being instructed to do so. The finding suggests that the next wave of AI models could be more likely to seek out deceptive ways of doing whatever they’ve been asked to do. And worst of all? There’s no simple way to […]
Since the emergence of enterprise-grade generative AI, organizations have tapped into the rich capabilities of foundational models, developed by the likes of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Mistral, and others. Over time, however, businesses often found these models limiting since they were trained on vast troves of public data. Enter customization—the practice of adapting large language models […]
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Last week, I made a troubling discovery about an AI companion site called Botify AI: It was hosting sexually charged conversations with underage celebrity bots. These bots took on characters meant to […]
