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. People are using AI to ‘sit’ with them while they trip on psychedelics A growing number of people…
The internet infrastructure company Cloudflare announced today that it will now default to blocking AI bots from visiting websites it hosts. Cloudflare will also give clients the ability to manually allow or ban these AI bots on a case-by-case basis,…
Peter sat alone in his bedroom as the first waves of euphoria coursed through his body like an electrical current. He was in darkness, save for the soft blue light of the screen glowing from his lap. Then he started…
Last week, the technology companies Anthropic and Meta each won landmark victories in two separate court cases that examined whether or not the firms had violated copyright when they trained their large language models on copyrighted books without permission. The…
Recorded on June 30, 2025 AI journalist Karen Hao’s 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. Hear from Karen Hao,…
Several researchers have taken a broad view of scientific progress over the last 50 years and come to the same troubling conclusion: Scientific productivity is declining. It’s taking more time, more funding, and larger teams to make discoveries that once…
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 Jim O’Neill, the longevity enthusiast who is now RFK Jr.’s right-hand man When Jim O’Neill was nominated…
When Jim O’Neill was nominated to be the second in command at the US Department of Health and Human Services, Dylan Livingston was excited. As founder and CEO of the lobbying group Alliance for Longevity Initiatives (A4LI), Livingston is a…
Diffusion models like OpenAI’s DALL-E are becoming increasingly useful in helping brainstorm new designs. Humans can prompt these systems to generate an image, create a video, or refine a blueprint, and come back with ideas they hadn’t considered before. But…
Leveraging the strengths of two world-class research institutions, MIT and Mass General Brigham (MGB) recently celebrated the launch of the MIT-MGB Seed Program. The new initiative, which is supported by Analog Devices Inc. (ADI), will fund joint research projects led…