Sources: e-commerce marketing platform Klaviyo confidentially files for a US IPO; source: the firm seeks to raise $750M+; Klaviyo was valued at ~$9.5B in 2021 (Echo Wang/Reuters)

Echo Wang / Reuters: Sources: e-commerce marketing platform Klaviyo confidentially files for a US IPO; source: the firm seeks to raise $750M+; Klaviyo was valued at ~$9.5B in 2021  —  Data and marketing automation firm Klaviyo Inc confidentially submitted paperwork on Friday with U.S. regulators for an initial public offering …

Autonomous delivery startup Nuro will lay off 30% of its workforce, or ~340 people, as part of a restructuring; Nuro laid off 20% of its staff in November 2022 (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch)

Kirsten Korosec / TechCrunch: Autonomous delivery startup Nuro will lay off 30% of its workforce, or ~340 people, as part of a restructuring; Nuro laid off 20% of its staff in November 2022  —  Autonomous delivery robot startup Nuro will lay off 30%, or about 340 employees, across the company as part of a restructuring […]

Current and former employees say Foxconn has hired ~10K contract workers in Chennai, India, since November 2022, paying between ~$190 and ~$225 per month (Nilesh Christopher/Rest of World)

Nilesh Christopher / Rest of World: Current and former employees say Foxconn has hired ~10K contract workers in Chennai, India, since November 2022, paying between ~$190 and ~$225 per month  —  Every Saturday, a clutch of engineering colleges in south India turn into venues for walk-in interviews for Apple contract manufacturers.

Putting the STING into cancer immunotherapy

Immune checkpoint blockade therapies have been revolutionary in the treatment of some cancer types, emerging as one of the most promising treatments for diseases such as melanoma, colon cancer, and non-small cell lung cancer.   While in some cases checkpoint blockade therapies elicit a strong immune response that clears tumors, checkpoint inhibitors do not work for […]

Local media: a Montenegro court plans to release Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon from jail after accepting a €400,000 bail, pending a trial (Andrew Rummer/The Block)

Andrew Rummer / The Block: Local media: a Montenegro court plans to release Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon from jail after accepting a €400,000 bail, pending a trial  —  – Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon is set to be freed from jail pending trial after a court agreed to a €400,000 ($436,000) bail …

Toyota says the vehicle data of 2.15M users in Japan, or almost all of its cloud service customers, has been public since November 2013 due to a human error (Reuters)

Reuters: Toyota says the vehicle data of 2.15M users in Japan, or almost all of its cloud service customers, has been public since November 2013 due to a human error  —  Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) said on Friday the vehicle data of 2.15 million users in Japan, or almost the entire customer base …

A symbol with a story

Most people don’t grasp every reference in the MIT Press publisher logo, or “colophon,” at first glance. The symbol’s vertical lines are straightforward enough, but understanding what they represent requires the mind to fill in some gaps. The lines create a lowercase m-i-t-p. They are made to look like book spines on a shelf. But […]

Riot Games names its global president A. Dylan Jadeja as the company’s new CEO starting later in 2023, succeeding Nicolo Laurent, who will stay on as an advisor (Ryan Dinsdale/IGN)

Ryan Dinsdale / IGN: Riot Games names its global president A. Dylan Jadeja as the company’s new CEO starting later in 2023, succeeding Nicolo Laurent, who will stay on as an advisor  —  Succeeding Nicolo Laurent.  —  IGN can reveal that Riot Games global president A. Dylan Jadeja will succeed Nicolo Laurent as the company’s […]

Anthropic expands Claude’s context window from 9K to 100K tokens, or ~75K words it can digest and analyze; OpenAI’s GPT-4 has a context window of ~32K tokens (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Anthropic expands Claude’s context window from 9K to 100K tokens, or ~75K words it can digest and analyze; OpenAI’s GPT-4 has a context window of ~32K tokens  —  Historically and even today, poor memory has been an impediment to the usefulness of text-generating AI.

Five MIT faculty elected to the National Academy of Sciences for 2023

The National Academy of Sciences has elected 120 members and 23 international members, including five faculty members from MIT. Joshua Angrist, Gang Chen, Catherine Drennan, Dina Katabi, and Gregory Stephanopoulos were elected in recognition of their “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.” Membership to the National Academy of Sciences is one of the highest […]

Laying the foundation to diversify the economics field and center racial equity in economics research

J-PAL North America is embarking on a year-long planning period to advance racial equity in its work. Throughout this year, J-PAL North America will develop a strategic vision for how to effectively and intentionally prioritize research that addresses racial equity. This includes developing guidance to determine when and how randomized evaluations can advance research related […]

3 Questions: Jacob Andreas on large language models

Words, data, and algorithms combine, An article about LLMs, so divine.  A glimpse into a linguistic world,  Where language machines are unfurled. It was a natural inclination to task a large language model (LLM) like CHATGPT with creating a poem that delves into the topic of large language models, and subsequently utilize said poem as […]

EU lawmakers agree to ban facial recognition in public, limit predictive policing, and impose transparency on generative AI; EU Commission will finalize details (Reuters)

Reuters: EU lawmakers agree to ban facial recognition in public, limit predictive policing, and impose transparency on generative AI; EU Commission will finalize details  —  European lawmakers came a step closer to passing new rules regulating artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT …

Australian edtech startup Go1 acquires Berlin-based Blinkist, which offers 15-minute non-fiction book summaries, and raised $30M from Insight Partners (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Australian edtech startup Go1 acquires Berlin-based Blinkist, which offers 15-minute non-fiction book summaries, and raised $30M from Insight Partners  —  After raising $100 million at a valuation of over $2 billion last year, the Australian ed-tech startup Go1 is making an acquisition …

Disney Q2: Disney+ subscribers were down 2% QoQ to 157.8M, vs. 163.17M est., its second consecutive quarterly drop; ESPN+ rose 2% QoQ to 25.3M, Hulu hit 48.2M (Jennifer Maas/Variety)

Jennifer Maas / Variety: Disney Q2: Disney+ subscribers were down 2% QoQ to 157.8M, vs. 163.17M est., its second consecutive quarterly drop; ESPN+ rose 2% QoQ to 25.3M, Hulu hit 48.2M  —  On the bright side, the Mouse House also managed to narrow its streaming business losses by $400 million, down 26% year over year.

Filings: the US Internal Revenue Service filed claims worth nearly $44B against FTX companies, including a $20.4B claim against Alameda in partnership taxes (Tracy Wang/CoinDesk)

Tracy Wang / CoinDesk: Filings: the US Internal Revenue Service filed claims worth nearly $44B against FTX companies, including a $20.4B claim against Alameda in partnership taxes  —  The largest of the claims includes a $20.4 billion claim against Alameda Research LLC, which details nearly $20 billion in unpaid partnership taxes.

Google Pixel 7a review: the best midrange Android phone, with wireless charging and good performance, camera, and screen, but a slow fingerprint scanner (Allison Johnson/The Verge)

Allison Johnson / The Verge: Google Pixel 7a review: the best midrange Android phone, with wireless charging and good performance, camera, and screen, but a slow fingerprint scanner  —  It’s $50 more than the Pixel 6A, but some key upgrades keep Google’s A-series at the top of the midrange class.

Inaugural J-WAFS Grand Challenge aims to develop enhanced crop variants and move them from lab to land

According to MIT’s charter, established in 1861, part of the Institute’s mission is to advance the “development and practical application of science in connection with arts, agriculture, manufactures, and commerce.” Today, the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) is one of the driving forces behind water and food-related research on campus, much […]