Technology Review

• Powering next-gen services with AI in regulated industries 

  Businesses in highly-regulated industries like financial services, insurance, pharmaceuticals, and health care are increasingly turning to AI-powered tools to streamline complex and sensitive tasks. Conversational AI-driven interfaces are helping hospitals to track the location and delivery of a patient’s time-sensitive cancer drugs. Generative AI chatbots are helping insurance customers answer questions and solve problems. And agentic…

• The Download: gambling with humanity’s future, and the FDA under Trump

  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. Tech billionaires are making a risky bet with humanity’s future Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and others may have slightly different goals, but their grand visions for the next decade and beyond…

• Tech billionaires are making a risky bet with humanity’s future

  “The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” the famed computer scientist Alan Kay once said. Uttered more out of exasperation than as inspiration, his remark has nevertheless attained gospel-like status among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, in particular a handful of tech billionaires who fancy themselves the chief architects of humanity’s future.  Sam…

• Here’s what food and drug regulation might look like under the Trump administration

  Earlier this week, two new leaders of the US Food and Drug Administration published a list of priorities for the agency. Both Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad are controversial figures in the science community. They were generally highly respected academics until the covid pandemic, when their contrarian opinions on masking, vaccines, and lockdowns turned many…

• Shoring up global supply chains with generative AI

  The outbreak of covid-19 laid bare the vulnerabilities of global, interconnected supply chains. National lockdowns triggered months-long manufacturing shutdowns. Mass disruption across international trade routes sparked widespread supply shortages. Costs spiralled. And wild fluctuations in demand rendered tried-and-tested inventory planning and forecasting tools useless. “It was the black swan event that nobody had accounted for,…