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. Inside India’s scramble for AI independence Despite its status as a global tech hub, India lags far behind the likes of the US and China when it comes to homegrown AI. That gap…

4 July 2025

In Bengaluru, India, Adithya Kolavi felt a mix of excitement and validation as he watched DeepSeek unleash its disruptive language model on the world earlier this year. The Chinese technology rivaled the best of the West in terms of benchmarks, but it had been built with far less capital in far less time.  “I thought:…

4 July 2025

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. Don’t let hype about AI agents get ahead of reality —Yoav Shoham is a professor emeritus at Stanford University and cofounder of AI21 Labs. At Google’s I/O 2025 event in May, the company…

3 July 2025

We got two big pieces of energy news from Google this week. The company announced that it’s signed an agreement to purchase electricity from a fusion company’s forthcoming first power plant. Google also released its latest environmental report, which shows that its energy use from data centers has doubled since 2020. Taken together, these two…

3 July 2025

Google’s recent unveiling of what it calls a “new class of agentic experiences” feels like a turning point. At its I/O 2025 event in May, for example, the company showed off a digital assistant that didn’t just answer questions; it helped work on a bicycle repair by finding a matching user manual, locating a YouTube…

3 July 2025

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. How generative AI could help make construction sites safer More than 1,000 construction workers die on the job each year in the US, making it the most dangerous industry for fatal slips, trips,…

2 July 2025

Last winter, during the construction of an affordable housing project on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, a 32-year-old worker named Jose Luis Collaguazo Crespo slipped off a ladder on the second floor and plunged to his death in the basement. He was one of more than 1,000 construction workers who die on the job each year in the US, making…

2 July 2025

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 are using AI chatbots as “trip sitters”—a phrase that traditionally refers to a sober person…

1 July 2025

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, and it will introduce a so-called “pay-per-crawl” service that clients can use to receive compensation…

1 July 2025

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 to feel pangs of panic. He picked up his phone and typed a message to…

1 July 2025