Devin Coldewey
Writer & Photographer
The Latest from Devin Coldewey
‘AI-powered’ ad ignites creator controversy on Instagram
A new ad from Under Armour featuring boxer Anthony Joshua has come under fire from creatives on Instagram after its director claimed it as the “first Ai-powered sports commercial” — but
Microbiome startups respond as industry is accused of ‘questionable practices’
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 troubl
Google DeepMind trains a video game-playing AI to be your co-op companion
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
AI2 Incubator scores $200M in compute to feed needy AI startups
AI2 Incubator, spun out of the Allen Institute for AI in 2022, has secured a windfall $200 million in compute that startups going through its program can take advantage of to accelerate early developm
Saildrone’s first aluminum Surveyor autonomous vessel splashes down for Navy testing
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 donR
Roku disables TVs and streaming devices until users consent to 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 in order to access their device. The de
Signal’s Meredith Whittaker scorns anti-encryption efforts as ‘parochial, magical thinking’
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 c
Why Signal ‘turned our architecture inside out’ for its latest privacy feature
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 versio
Rabbit’s Jesse Lyu on the nature of startups: ‘Grow faster, or die faster,’ just don’t give up
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 mu
Syrenna’s WaterDrone is the ocean-monitoring ‘underwater weather station’ of the future
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 a
AIs serve up ‘garbage’ to questions about voting and elections
A number of major AI services performed poorly in a test of their ability to address questions and concerns about voting and elections. The study found that no model can be completely trusted, but it
This Week in AI: Addressing racism in AI image generators
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable re
‘Embarrassing and wrong’: Google admits it lost control of image-generating AI
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 h
Stable Diffusion 3 arrives to solidify early lead in AI imagery against Sora and Gemini
Stability AI has announced Stable Diffusion 3, the latest and most powerful version of the company’s image-generating AI model. While details are scant, it’s clearly an attempt to fend off
Hundreds of AI luminaries sign letter calling for anti-deepfake legislation
Hundreds in the artificial intelligence community have signed an open letter calling for strict regulation of AI-generated impersonations, or deepfakes. While this is unlikely to spur real legislation
House punts on AI with directionless new task force
The House of Representatives has founded a Task Force on artificial intelligence that will “ensure America continues leading in this strategic area,” as Speaker Mike Johnson put it. But th
No ‘GPT’ trademark for OpenAI
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has denied OpenAI’s attempt to trademark “GPT,” ruling that the term is “merely descriptive” and therefore unable to be registered. I
Largest text-to-speech AI model yet shows ’emergent abilities’
Researchers at Amazon have trained the largest ever text-to-speech model yet, which they claim exhibits “emergent” qualities improving its ability to speak even complex sentences naturally
SpaceX will de-orbit 100 Starlink satellites with unidentified flaw
SpaceX announced today that it will be sending some 100 Starlink satellites to an early retirement after a flaw was identified that could make them a worry later on. Don’t expect a fiery light s
US Patent Office: AI is all well and good, but only humans can patent things
The question of where AI sits in the legal personhood stack isn’t as simple as it may seem (i.e. “nowhere”) — but the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today declared that, as with