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The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Sandhini Agarwal: We have a lot of next steps. I definitely think how viral ChatGPT has gotten has made a lot of issues that we knew existed really bubble up and become... Read more »

The Download: three-parent baby issues, and a solar balloon test

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 OpenAI wants to make AI smarter than humansRushing to build such models doesn’t exactly fill ethicists with confidence,... Read more »

Three-parent baby technique could create babies at risk of severe disease

We do know of one case in which it does not seem to have worked. A baby was born from an embryo that PGT revealed to have around 12% of the mother’s... Read more »

Researchers launched a solar geoengineering test flight in the UK last fall

During the second flight in September of 2022, the smaller payload balloon burst about 15 miles above the Earth, as it expanded amid declining atmospheric pressure, releasing around 400 grams of the... Read more »

The 11th Breakthrough Technology of 2023 takes flight

And Universal Hydrogen is joining the race this week. The company has a test flight planned for its Dash 8-300, a regional aircraft with over 40 seats.  The major goal is to... Read more »

The Download: turning garbage into energy, and China’s app anxiety

Some people might look in a grocery store’s dumpster and see garbage. But others are starting to see dollar signs. New facilities are popping up in the US to help tackle food... Read more »

These companies want to tackle food waste with microbes

“We need to handle this waste somehow.” Meltem Urgun Demirtas For companies interested in anaerobic digestion, however, producing methane is the goal. Because these facilities are sealed up, the mixture of methane... Read more »

Why the stress around Chinese apps in the US is overblown

Lotus Ruan, who has conducted technical analyses of Chinese apps like WeChat and is currently a senior research fellow at the Toronto-based research group Citizen Lab, echoes this view: “With the rise... Read more »

The Download: making Bitcoin greener, and Elon Musk’s chatbot plans

Last year, Ethereum went green. The second-most popular crypto platform transitioned to proof of stake, an energy-efficient framework for adding new blocks of transactions, NFTs, and other information to the blockchain.  When... Read more »

Ethereum moved to proof of stake. Why can’t Bitcoin? 

Bitcoin mining, the computationally intensive process by which bitcoin is created and accounted for, has become a global concern. After China cracked down on bitcoin mining in mid-2021, miners sought out other... Read more »