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. Your family’s $300 stake in OpenAI Sam Altman’s proposal that Americans should share in the wealth created by AI is back in the spotlight, with reports that he is discussing giving…

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. South Korea’s hottest new bachelors are chip workers Baek, a 35-year-old manager at the South Korean semiconductor titan SK Hynix, was enrolled in a matchmaking company a year ago. In a…

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. The UK’s generational tobacco ban might not work. I’m supporting it anyway. —Jessica Hamzelou As the parent of two little girls, I often think about how their childhood is different from…

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. LLMs are stuck in a groupthink groove. This startup is trying to get them out. Open up your chatbot of choice—Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini—and type “Give me a random number between 1…

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. Claude Science is Anthropic’s newest flagship product At an event for pharmaceutical executives, biotech founders, and researchers yesterday, Anthropic announced Claude Science, a major new product intended to support scientific research…

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. AI agents are not your “coworkers” Imagine coming in to work to learn that a new underling will report to you. The worker is not a person but an AI tool—one…

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. The inevitable weakness of metrics There are plenty of useful things a metric can reveal. There are even more that it can obscure or corrupt. Like a lot of people bitten…

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. Heat waves mess with your brain. Scientists are trying to figure out why. —Jessica Hamzelou It’s been hot in London this week. Really hot. A dangerous heat wave has hit Western…

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. Europe’s extreme heat is shutting down power plants Europe is in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave, and the grid is being pushed to its limits as people turn to…

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. Introducing: the Engineering issue We can’t fix everything, but we can be ambitious. We can take on the challenge of making the world better through human ingenuity. That’s what the new…