Digital transformation has long been a boardroom buzzword—shorthand for ambitious, often abstract visions of modernization. But today, digital technologies are no longer simply concepts in glossy consultancy decks and on corporate campuses; they’re also being embedded directly into factory floors,…
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 latest threat from the rise of Chinese manufacturing In 2013, a trio of academics showed convincing evidence…
The findings a decade ago were, well, shocking. Mainstream economists had long argued that free trade was overall a good thing; though there might be some winners and losers, it would generally bring lower prices and widespread prosperity. Then, in…
Scientists are striving to discover new semiconductor materials that could boost the efficiency of solar cells and other electronics. But the pace of innovation is bottlenecked by the speed at which researchers can manually measure important material properties. A fully…
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. Inside India’s scramble for AI independence Despite its status as a global tech hub, India lags far behind…
In Bengaluru, India, Adithya Kolavi felt a mix of excitement and validation as he watched DeepSeek unleash its disruptive language model on the world earlier this year. The Chinese technology rivaled the best of the West in terms of benchmarks,…
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. Don’t let hype about AI agents get ahead of reality —Yoav Shoham is a professor emeritus at Stanford…
We got two big pieces of energy news from Google this week. The company announced that it’s signed an agreement to purchase electricity from a fusion company’s forthcoming first power plant. Google also released its latest environmental report, which shows…
Google’s recent unveiling of what it calls a “new class of agentic experiences” feels like a turning point. At its I/O 2025 event in May, for example, the company showed off a digital assistant that didn’t just answer questions; it…
The explosive growth of AI-powered computing centers is creating an unprecedented surge in electricity demand that threatens to overwhelm power grids and derail climate goals. At the same time, artificial intelligence technologies could revolutionize energy systems, accelerating the transition to…