Blogs

Apple has a new lineup of iPad Pro and Air models for the first time in well over a year. Most people would probably be hard-pressed to tell the new ones from the old ones just by looking at them, but after hands-on sessions with both sizes of both tablets, the small details (especially for the Pros) all add up to a noticeably refined iPad experience. iPad Airs: Bigger is better But let's begin with the new Airs since there's a bit less to talk about. The 11-inch iPad Air (technically the ...

Our lives are becoming increasingly intertwined with digital displays and AR, but at what cost? While it’s commonly said we live in the information era, I like calling it something else: the screen age. Over the past seventy years, we’ve seen displays seep into almost every aspect of our lives. We had televisions arrive in our homes, reshaping news and entertainment. Hot on their heels came smartphones, which changed communication and how we interact with the world at large. ...

The UK might not follow its pro-innovation, laissez-faire strategy for much longer The boom of artificial intelligence has spurred a regulatory frenzy across the globe — and Europe is at the forefront of the developments. Both the EU and the UK are attempting to find the elusive balance between leveraging AI’s growth and mitigating potential risks — but their approaches differ significantly. ...

PhotonVentures aims to boost Europe's photonics ecosystem PhotonVentures, a Dutch deep tech fund aiming to boost Europe’s photonics industry, has closed its second fundraising round with over €15mn — bringing its total capital to €75mn. The fund targets startups and scaleups developing solutions with photonic chips for a wide range of applications: from data transmission and health diagnostics to smart sensors, AI, AR, and VR. ...

Google's chief AI scientist believes that getting AGI right would lead to "maximal human flourishing" We have all been guilty of falling under the foundation model spell of the past year-and-a-half, initiated by OpenAI’s unveiling of ChatGPT to the public. But it is not only where large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 are concerned that incredible progress has been made in the field of artificial intelligence. And one company has been behind more impressive milestones than most — Deep...

Rigetti and Oxford Instruments NanoScience unveil 32-qubit quantum computer system, say more to come California-based quantum circuitry company Rigetti has brought a commercially available quantum computer to the UK. Only the second in the country, it was installed in collaboration with Oxford Instruments NanoScience — a cryogenics company that provides the cooling needed for superconducting qubits.  The system, supported by grants from the UK government, is Rigetti’s first UK-based quantu...

As machine translation improves, demand for human translators is plummeting AI threatens to decimate the translation profession, according to a new survey by a British union. Almost four in ten translators (36%) said they’ve already lost work due to generative AI. Nearly half of them (43%) said the tech has decreased their income. ...

Western Digital plans to release the first 4TB SD card next year. On Thursday, the storage firm announced plans to demo the product in person next week. Western Digital will launch the SD card, which follows the SD Association's Secure Digital Ultra Capacity (SDUC) standard, under its SanDisk brand and market it toward "complex media and entertainment workflows," such as those involving cameras and laptops that use high-resolution video with high framerates, the announcement said. The spac...

Huawei is still out there making phones, even if it has been shunned by the US government and the US-aligned tech ecosystem. The latest phone has a new name: "Huawei Pura 70." While you wouldn't ever want to deal with the cobbled-together SoC or whatever is going on with Huawei's software, the "Ultra" model does have a cool party trick up its sleeve: a pop-out main camera lens. In the years before the smartphone took over all entry-level photography, there used to be a thing called a "point-a...

Europe has fallen behind Singapore and the US in the cultivated meat race Dutch startup Meatable has hosted the first legally approved tasting of cultivated meat in Europe. On the menu was a lab-grown pork sausage. Meatable says the produce is “indistinguishable” from traditional meat, but causes no harm to animals or the environment. ...

Youth and experience have combined to create an AI superpower Just a decade ago, the world’s biggest tech beast was a relative minnow. Microsoft had become notorious for disappointing product launches, stagnant innovation, and losing top talent. The first true software giant was becoming a big tech dinosaur. Fast forward to 2024 and Microsoft is the planet’s most valuable business. Under the leadership of CEO Satya Nadella, stock has soared by over 1,000% in 10 years. In January, the compa...

The Finnish roaster collaborated with AI consultancy startup Elev to create an unusual combo of four beans I am really into (my friends might say somewhat obsessed with) coffee. Not just for the hits of caffeine that fuel our productivity-enthralled capitalist society, but also for the taste, as well as different styles of brewing (although my Swedish roots make me partial to a pour-over).  Sadly, I do not often get to write about it, as — even though coffee roasting and brewing rely on te...