Techtonic

On November 4, TechCrunch’s Founder Summit will bring a vital one-day crash course on startup building to Boston’s SoWa Power Station. Founders shouldn’t have to learn the hardest lessons the hardest way, and this event is designed to make the challenges of starting a company easier and the highs that much greater. Instead of months […] More

Qualcomm today announced two flagship smartphone processors, called Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, with a focus on facilitating better AI-focused features. At its annual Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm said that the new chips can aid in improved personalization for AI agents. The chips have new sensing hubs that can […] More

It’s been a busy few months for AI hype, with companies making breathless claims about hacking, mathematical breakthroughs, and the prospect of self-improving superintelligence. In all these cases, massive fanfare from the companies, presented as mea culpas in the hacking incidents, has been accompanied by intense press coverage. But once experts have had time to […] More

Anthropic’s newest model, Opus 5.5, was released on Tuesday, setting a new state-of-the-art in coding and knowledge work performance, according to the company. Notably, the company says, the release outpaces the larger Fable model in many benchmarks, and succeeded in a number of informal tasks that Fable failed to complete. The new model is also […] More

The US has spent billions building a “virtual wall” of surveillance towers along its southern border over the past 25 years, promising they will help detect and apprehend border crossers and save lives. But a groundbreaking investigation by MIT Technology Review has documented over a thousand people who moved through areas watched by these towers […] More

When British neocloud Nscale goes public, it will test public investors’ appetite for a stock whose revenue is tied primarily to two customers. Since it was spun out of Australian cryptocurrency mining company Arkon Energy two years ago, Nscale has amassed over $103 billion worth of contracts, according to its IPO filing. But there’s a […] More

Describing them as “superintelligence” or “rogue models” ascribes agency to products rather than to the companies building them. This framing markets these companies’ products as “superhuman” and, at the same time, helps the companies evade accountability for their actions.  Instead of OpenAI being prosecuted for creating malware that hacked another company, press releases, news outlets, […] More

The Netherlands’ ASML is possibly the biggest name in lithography, using its machines to etch patterns onto silicon wafers inside a computer chip factory known as a fab. Fellow Dutch company Morphotonics is smaller and works in a different corner of the same field: nanoimprint lithography, or NIL, a process used to manufacture the displays […] More

Our 15-month investigation into death and surveillance along the US-Mexico border began with a simple question: Why did so many people die near government surveillance towers meant to help track and apprehend them? This story is part of Dying on Camera, a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego. Journalists in both newsrooms spent the past […] More

On Monday, OpenAI announced a new independent advisory group hosted at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Called the Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, the group is meant to give mathematicians more input into the company’s math-oriented research. “This group will serve as a bridge to the mathematical community and […] More

MIT Technology Review today published our investigation into how many people have died near the “virtual wall” of surveillance towers that the US government has installed along the US-Mexico border. We found cases of people who walked undetected through areas surveilled by advanced, AI-enabled towers and later died nearby, where their bodies remained unnoticed for […] More