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The Download: AI’s coding promises, and OpenAI’s longevity push

Ask people building generative AI what generative AI is good for right now—what they’re really fired up about—and many will tell you: coding. Everyone from established AI giants to buzzy startups is... Read more »

The second wave of AI coding is here

Zencoder has hired a bunch of search engine veterans to help it build a tool that can analyze large codebases and figure out what is and isn’t relevant. This detailed context reduces... Read more »

OpenAI has created an AI model for longevity science

Although genetic engineers have ways to direct evolution of molecules in the lab, they can usually test only so many possibilities. And even a protein of typical length can be changed in... Read more »

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... Read more »

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... Read more »

Deciding the fate of “leftover” embryos

No one knows for sure how many embryos are frozen in storage tanks, but the figure is thought to be somewhere between 1 million and 10 million in the US alone. Some... Read more »

The Download: what’s next for Neuralink, and Meta’s language translation AI

In November, a young man named Noland Arbaugh announced he’d be livestreaming from his home for three days straight. His broadcast was in some ways typical fare: a backyard tour, video games,... Read more »

Interest in nuclear power is surging. Is it enough to build new reactors?

In much of the world (China being a notable exception), building new nuclear capacity has historically been expensive and slow. It’s easy to point at Plant Vogtle in the US: The third... Read more »

What to expect from Neuralink in 2025

We haven’t yet seen what Neuralink’s robotic arm looks like—whether it’s a tabletop research device or something that could be attached to a wheelchair and used at home to complete daily tasks.... Read more »

Meta’s new AI model can translate speech from more than 100 languages

“Meta has done a great job having a breadth of different things they support, like text-to-speech, speech-to-text, even automatic speech recognition,” says Chetan Jaiswal, a professor of computer science at Quinnipiac University,... Read more »