Technology Report - Changing Our World

Maths is particular vulnerable to technological developments because of its theoretical nature

This chart shows the biggest perceived threats to teenagers' mental health from the perspective of parents and teens.

August 12, 2026, 3:00 AM ET The George Washington University inked a $427 million sale of its Virginia campus with Amazon to build data centers. The AI boom is putting a new kind of pressure on American universities. The topic of AI has long been a point of contention within higher education from educators, students, and university administrations discussing the presence and use cases of the technology. But now it’s turned to a much more physical threat. As data centers compete for large parcels

August 12, 2026, 9:35 AM ET Google DeepMind’s Lila Ibrahim had no AI pedigree—she started out with a $1 cornfield job, immigrant parents, and a habit of taking risks others missed. Google DeepMind’s Lila Ibrahim had no formal background in AI or research when she became the company’s first-ever chief operating officer in 2018. Her résumé did, however, include detasseling corn in Indiana as a 14-year-old for “$1-something” an hour—a punishing summer job that left her sweaty, cut up, and sure she

August 12, 2026, 6:04 AM ET Qatar’s Ooredoo Group's Fibre in the Gulf (FIG) subsea cable system, scheduled for completion in late 2027, will be the largest ever built in the GCC. imaginima via Getty As tech behemoths Meta and Google delay subsea cable projects through the Red Sea amid rising security risks, many of the Gulf’s tech players are ramping up investment in the data highways needed to support the region’s rapidly expanding AI and cloud ambitions. While geopolitical tensions are making

August 12, 2026, 4:14 PM ET Canva’s lowered growth outlook and Figma’s shrinking margins show how inference costs are challenging the zero-marginal-cost logic that made software so profitable. Canva has spent years proving that it can do something many high-growth startups struggle to achieve: grow rapidly while making money. Then came generative AI. The design-software company cut its expected revenue growth rate by a third to 20% after the unexpectedly high cost of delivering AI features

August 13, 2026, 7:13 AM ET Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Feb. 19, 2026. Bea Nolan here, filling in for Allie. Google DeepMind has been having a difficult year. Last week, longtime Google DeepMind CEO and company cofounder Demis Hassabis announced he was stepping back from the CEO role and into a new chair role. Hassabis ceded day-to-day control to DeepMind’s chief technology officer Koray Kavukcuoglu—who now reports straight to Sundar Pichai,

August 13, 2026, 4:28 PM ET Welcome to Eye on AI. Emily Forlini here, filling in for Jeremy one last time as his vacation comes to a close. In today’s issue: Juicy details OpenAI doesn’t want you to see in its new report Google pronounces Sam Altman dead—for 41 minutes It really sunk in for me this week just how much money is flowing in the AI industry. I spoke with two former OpenAI employees who made about $10 million in a day by selling shares in an internal tender offer, which Bloomberg

August 15, 2026, 7:00 AM ET MIT economist and Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu. courtesy of MIT Daron Acemoglu is frustrated by the artificial intelligence debate — and not because the MIT economist thinks the technology is dangerous. Although he does think that. With his nearly unique mixture of frustrated nuance, Acemoglu, who has been warning about the dangers of AI for years, argued in an interview with Fortune that giving into fear is the worst kind of response right now. While evaluating the

August 16, 2026, 3:30 AM ET Jimmy Wales. The man behind the world’s largest digital encyclopedia talks to Fortune Greece, republished with permission. There are few digital platforms that have become as quietly indispensable as Wikipedia. With no ads, no subscriptions, and none of the noise that typically accompanies anything “big” on the internet, it has been operating for nearly a quarter of a century as the most stable knowledge infrastructure of the digital world. Behind it stands Jimmy

August 16, 2026, 5:30 PM ET Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive officer of Anthropic, during the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2026. Anthropic cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei pushed back on the notion that he’s responsible for the public’s overall sense of doom around AI, but acknowledged there are trust issues. In a lengthy post on X on Saturday, which is unusual as he generally stays away from social media, he first addressed AI regulation,

August 15, 2026, 6:00 AM ET Quantum computing is coming for your crypto—in who knows how long. Watch out crypto-bros—it might be time to start moving assets. Researchers are making progress toward quantum computers powerful enough to undermine the mathematical assumptions that currently protect cryptocurrency and other blockchain-based assets. Because of this, the industry needs to replace its cryptographic infrastructure before the quantum computers arrive. | Newsletter “The great quantum

August 14, 2026, 3:45 PM ET There are many ways to hide from Zuckerberg's glasses, but not all of them work. There’s an ongoing arms race to protect identities and privacy in the age of facial recognition, biometric scanning and data collection. Now, some of those concerns are coming from the influx of wearables, namely, smart glasses, and how to go about protecting oneself from being filmed in public. Some joke about singing Disney songs, others use software, and some have even resorted to

This time, it feels like Apple is taking stock, measuring twice, and cutting once.

To predict when we’ll have a truly useful quantum computer, we need to know precisely what one is. Columnist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan finds that’s harder to pin down than you might think

Software that is free to use creates many opportunities – not all of which are good

"Applying copious amounts of water to the battery enclosure is wasteful and will not stop thermal runaway." Electric vehicles offer plenty of benefits. There’s the instant torque, savings on fuel — and, of course, they’remuch kinder to mother Earth. Yet compared to vehicles powered by internal combustion engines, EVs come with a key disadvantage drivers hope they never have to experience: they’re much more dangerous when they catch on fire. (An important caveat, though, is that they catch on

OpenAI launched GPT-5.6-Cyber, an "offense-grade" hacking model, days after pausing Astra for nearing "Critical" cyber capability.