Five years ago, SpaceX launched Starlink, which has since grown into its biggest revenue driver, expanding to over 100 countries. But as Starlink scaled, it faced a major hurdle: accepting payments in developing markets, where traditional banking infrastructure is unreliable, slow, and prone to blocking transactions. Many local banks across Africa, Latin America and Asia…

OpenAI on Friday launched a new AI “reasoning” model, o3-mini, the newest in the company’s o family of reasoning models. OpenAI first previewed the model in December alongside a more capable system called o3, but the launch comes at a pivotal moment for the company, whose ambitions — and challenges — are seemingly growing by…

Investor, former GitHub CEO, and all around Tech Guy™ Nat Friedman has posted a strangely enticing offer on X. His post reads, “Need volunteers to come to my office in Palo Alto today to construct a 5000 piece Lego set. Will provide pizza. Have to sign NDA. Please DM.” Thanks to the investigative reporting of…

The lights dimmed as five actors took their places around a table on a makeshift stage in a New York City art gallery turned theater for the night. Wine and water flowed through the intimate space as the house — packed with media — sat to witness the premiere of “Doomers,” Matthew Gasda’s latest play…

Last year wind and solar energy overtook fossil fuels to provide 30% of the EU’s electricity. With that in the background, startups in the solar space have been riding a generational change in how we get our power. In 2022 we covered how a small B2C European startup planned to bring solar to homes via…

Microsoft says that it’s creating a new unit, the Advanced Planning Unit (APU), within its Microsoft AI business division that will help the company understand the societal, health, and work implications of AI the company hopes to build. Microsoft AI, which encompasses Microsoft’s Copilot, Bing, and Edge products, is becoming core to Microsoft’s growth strategy…

What do you do if a web address you printed on a physical flyer contains a typo, and you send that flyer to more than 100,000 households? Well, if you’re the Swiss canton (“state”) of Basel-Stadt, you buy the domain that contains the typo, and create a redirect to the correct URL. As Swiss news…

A startup called Graze, which lets you build your own feeds for the Bluesky social network, has caught investors’ attention. In addition to offering tools to easily build, customize, publish, and manage Bluesky feeds, Graze will soon allow feed creators to monetize their efforts with advertising, sponsored posts, and subscriptions. In other words, Graze has…

DeepSeek has gone viral. Chinese AI lab DeepSeek broke into the mainstream consciousness this week after its chatbot app rose to the top of the Apple App Store charts (and Google Play, as well). DeepSeek’s AI models, which were trained using compute-efficient techniques, have led Wall Street analysts — and technologists — to question whether the U.S. can maintain its…

WhatsApp says it disrupted a spyware campaign last month that targeted journalists and civil society members, according to reports from The Guardian and Reuters. The campaign originated from an Israeli spyware company called Paragon Solutions and impacted around 90 users. WhatsApp told The Guardian that it has reached out to affected users, saying it had…