Category: 3. Tech

Very little in this life is truly random. A coin flip is influenced by the…

Monday, June 30, 2025

AI journalist Karen Hao’s newly released book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, tells the story of OpenAI’s rise to power and its far-reaching impact all over the world. Hao, former MIT…

In recent months, a new class of agents has arrived on the scene: ones built using large language models. Any action that can be captured by text—from playing a video game using written commands to running a social media account—is…

One researcher I spoke with at the time suggested that sodium-ion batteries might not compete directly with lithium-ion batteries but could instead find specialized uses where the chemistry made sense. Two years later, I think we’re starting to…

The flash crash is probably the most well-known example of the dangers raised by agents—automated systems that have the power to take actions in the real world, without human oversight. That power is the source of their value; the agents that…

Imagine you’re a copper miner in southeastern Europe in the year 3900 BCE. Day after day you haul copper ore through the mine’s sweltering tunnels.

You’ve resigned yourself to the grueling monotony of mining life. Then one afternoon, you…

In October 2012, one of the largest and most destructive storms to emerge from the Atlantic devastated the US and Caribbean.

Hurricane Sandy left deep scars in affected communities, including the loss of more than 250 lives, tens of billions…

If your name gets picked for jury duty, it’s because a computer used a random number generator to select it. The same goes for tax audits or when you opt for a quick pick lottery ticket. But how can you trust that the draw was truly…

Apple doesn’t deviate much from its schedule each year. At its WWDC…

Many frontline antibiotics are no longer useful against some bacterial infections, which are increasingly gaining resistance to drugs and sharing that resistance with other bacteria. Experts have warned that…