How Chinese company DeepSeek released a top AI reasoning model despite US sanctions

Tech giants like Alibaba and ByteDance, as well as a handful of startups with deep-pocketed investors, dominate the Chinese AI space, making it challenging for small or medium-sized enterprises to compete. A company like DeepSeek, which has no plans to raise funds, is rare.  Zihan Wang, the former DeepSeek employee, told MIT Technology Review that […]

The Download: OpenAI’s agent, and what to expect from robotics

What’s new: After weeks of buzz, OpenAI has released Operator, its first AI agent. Operator is a web app that can carry out simple online tasks in a browser, such as booking concert tickets or filling an online grocery order. The app is powered by a new model called Computer-Using Agent—CUA for short—built on top […]

Subject: A lose-lose situation Preview: The US withdrawal from the WHO will hurt us all

“Diseases don’t stick to national boundaries, hence this decision is not only concerning for the US, but in fact for every country in the world,” says Pauline Scheelbeek at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.“With the US no longer reporting to the WHO nor funding part of this process, the evidence on which […]

Why the next energy race is for underground hydrogen

I’ve been thinking about underground resources a lot this week, since I’ve been reporting a story about a new startup, Addis Energy. The company is looking to use subsurface rocks, and the conditions down there, to produce another useful chemical: ammonia. In an age of lab-produced breakthroughs, it feels like something of a regression to […]

OpenAI has upped its lobbying efforts nearly seven-fold

OpenAI did not respond to questions about its lobbying efforts. But perhaps more important, the disclosure is a clear signal of the company’s arrival as a political player, as its first year of serious lobbying ends and Republican control of Washington begins. While OpenAI’s lobbying spending is still dwarfed by its peers’—Meta tops the list […]

Why it’s so hard to use AI to diagnose cancer

In theory, artificial intelligence should be great at helping out. “Our job is pattern recognition,” says Andrew Norgan, a pathologist and medical director of the Mayo Clinic’s digital pathology platform. “We look at the slide and we gather pieces of information that have been proven to be important.”  Visual analysis is something that AI has gotten […]

The Download: How to save social media, and “leftover” embryos

—Eli Pariser & Deepti Doshi Last week, when Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta would be ending third-party fact-checking, it was a shocking pivot, but not exactly surprising. It’s just the latest example of a billionaire flip-flop affecting our social lives on the internet.  Zuckerberg isn’t the only social media CEO careening all over the road: Elon […]

We need to protect the protocol that runs Bluesky

At the core of Bluesky’s philosophy is the idea that instead of being centralized in the hands of one person or institution, social media governance should obey the principle of subsidiarity. Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom found, through studying grassroots solutions to local environmental problems around the world, that some problems are best solved locally, […]