Several AI-based study tools are capitalizing on a “PDF to Brainrot” trend, which will read the text of a document you upload over “oddly satisfying” videos, like ASMR clips of mixing paint and cutting soap, or gameplay footage from Minecraft and Subway Surfers. Then, students can listen to an automated voice read their textbooks to them while they watch these vertical videos, which people on TikTok often refer to as “brainrot” material.
As the world races to add more power plants to satiate AI’s thirst for electricity, investors have been plowing money into nuclear fusion, the pie-in-the-sky technology that appears to be inching its way toward commercial viability.
Social media platform Reddit is experiencing an outage this afternoon, resulting in thousands of users being unable to access its website and app. Reddit confirmed that it’s currently investigating the issue, according to its status page.
The attorney general for the District of Columbia is suing instant payday loan fintech Earnin for “deceptively marketing and providing illegal high-interest loans,” the AG alleges.
The U.S. government announced charges against five individuals accused of carrying out a multi-year hacking spree targeting tech giants and cryptocurrency owners, which security researchers dubbed 0ktapus.
Shiva Suri gained a unique perspective into how radiologists work when he quarantined and shared a home office with his mom, a well-regarded radiologist.
May Mobility is slowly advancing its driverless capabilities. The startup this week launched a small-scale deployment of autonomous shuttles, which will drive themselves along a fixed route without a human safety driver present. May will initially deploy one to two autonomous Toyota Sienna minivans to ferry employees and “invited guests” across a 2-square-mile area of the city.
Defense tech funding just reached a new high. Defense tech startups have raised almost $3 billion so far in 2024, according to Crunchbase. This surpassed the previous record from 2022 of $2.6 billion.
H, the Paris startup founded by Google alums, made a big splash last summer when, out of the blue, it announced a seed round of $220 million before releasing a single product. Three months later, still without a product, that splash started to look like a catastrophic flood when three of the company’s five co-founders left over “operational and business disagreements.”