Devin Coldewey
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Every week seems to bring with it a new AI model, and the technology has unfortunately outpaced anyone’s ability to evaluate it comprehensively. Here’s why it’s pretty much impossible to review something like ChatGPT or Gemini, why it’s important to try anyway, and our (constantly evolving) approach to doing...
The biotech sector has embraced the microbiome in recent years, a green field market powered by cheap genome sequencing and venture dollars, promising bespoke treatments for everything from gut troubles to skin problems. But a report in Science alleges that these companies lack scientific rigor and meaningful regulation, offering...
AI models that play games go back decades, but they generally specialize in one game and always play to win. Google Deepmind researchers have a different goal with their latest creation: a model that learned to play multiple 3D games like a human, but also does its best to...
Saildrone’s first aluminum Surveyor autonomous vessel splashes down for Navy testing
Devin Coldewey - 0
Ocean intelligence company Saildrone has just put the first of a new generation of Surveyor autonomous vessels in the water: an aluminum version that the Navy is keen to take advantage of. But don’t worry – they aren’t putting guns on them.
Founder and CEO Richard Jenkins told TechCrunch that...
Update: My mistake, arbitration terms were already in place. But the devices were in fact inaccessible until users agreed to the new terms.
Roku users around the country turned on their TVs this week to find an unpleasant surprise: the company required them to consent to new dispute resolution terms...
Signal’s Meredith Whittaker scorns anti-encryption efforts as ‘parochial, magical thinking’
Devin Coldewey - 0
AI is “not open in any sense,” the battle over encryption is far from won, and Signal’s principled (and uncompromising) approach may complicate interoperability efforts, warned the company’s president, Meredith Whittaker. But it’s not all bad news.
(Actually, it is all bad news, because I wrote up the good news...
Adding usernames to a messaging app may seem like a standard feature, but for Signal, such identifiers were anathema to its mission of total privacy and security — until now. The upcoming 7.0 version adds usernames, but the company’s president, Meredith Whittaker, explained that this was nowhere near as...
Rabbit’s Jesse Lyu on the nature of startups: ‘Grow faster, or die faster,’ just don’t give up
Devin Coldewey - 0
Rabbit co-founder and CEO Jesse Lyu isn’t afraid of death… the death of the company, at least. He told TechCrunch that the company is a startup whose fortunes may be swayed by the whims of multi-billion-dollar rivals — but that’s no reason to give up and go home.
Appearing on...
Syrenna’s WaterDrone is the ocean-monitoring ‘underwater weather station’ of the future
Devin Coldewey - 0
As crucial as the ocean is to countless industries, we lack the kind of systematic knowledge of it that we have of the surface. Syrenna has built a versatile robotic platform that you might think of as a mobile weather station for the sea, and is ready to emerge...
Google has apologized (or come very close to apologizing) for another embarrassing AI blunder this week, an image-generating model that injected diversity into pictures with a farcical disregard for historical context. While the underlying issue is perfectly understandable, Google blames the model for “becoming” oversensitive. But the model didn’t...