Devin Coldewey

Devin Coldewey

Writer & Photographer

Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He first wrote for TechCrunch in 2007. He has also written for MSNBC.com, NBC News, DPReview, The Economist/GE’s Look Ahead, and others.

His personal website is coldewey.cc.

The Latest from Devin Coldewey

Why Elon Musk’s AI company ‘open-sourcing’ Grok matters — and why it doesn’t

Elon Musk’s xAI released its Grok large language model as “open source” over the weekend. The billionaire clearly hopes to set his company at odds with rival OpenAI, which, despite i

This Week in AI: Midjourney bets it can beat the copyright police

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable re

‘AI-powered’ ad ignites creator controversy on Instagram

A new ad from Under Armour featuring boxer Anthony Joshua has come under fire from creatives on Instagram after its director claimed it as the “first Ai-powered sports commercial” — but

Microbiome startups respond as industry is accused of ‘questionable practices’

The biotech sector has embraced the microbiome in recent years, a green field market powered by cheap genome sequencing and venture dollars, promising bespoke treatments for everything from gut troubl

Google DeepMind trains a video game-playing AI to be your co-op companion

AI models that play games go back decades, but they generally specialize in one game and always play to win. Google DeepMind researchers have a different goal with their latest creation: a model that

AI2 Incubator scores $200M in compute to feed needy AI startups

AI2 Incubator, spun out of the Allen Institute for AI in 2022, has secured a windfall $200 million in compute that startups going through its program can take advantage of to accelerate early developm

Saildrone’s first aluminum Surveyor autonomous vessel splashes down for Navy testing

Ocean intelligence company Saildrone has just put the first of a new generation of Surveyor autonomous vessels in the water: an aluminum version that the Navy is keen to take advantage of. But don&#82

Roku disables TVs and streaming devices until users consent to new terms

Roku users around the country turned on their TVs this week to find an unpleasant surprise: The company required them to consent to new dispute resolution terms in order to access their device. The de

Signal’s Meredith Whittaker scorns anti-encryption efforts as ‘parochial, magical thinking’

AI is “not open in any sense,” the battle over encryption is far from won, and Signal’s principled (and uncompromising) approach may complicate interoperability efforts, warned the c

Why Signal ‘turned our architecture inside out’ for its latest privacy feature

Adding usernames to a messaging app may seem like a standard feature, but for Signal, such identifiers were anathema to its mission of total privacy and security — until now. The upcoming 7.0 versio

Rabbit’s Jesse Lyu on the nature of startups: ‘Grow faster, or die faster,’ just don’t give up

Rabbit co-founder and CEO Jesse Lyu isn’t afraid of death … the death of the company, at least. He told TechCrunch that the company is a startup whose fortunes may be swayed by the whims of mu

Syrenna’s WaterDrone is the ocean-monitoring ‘underwater weather station’ of the future

As crucial as the ocean is to countless industries, we lack the kind of systematic knowledge of it that we have of the surface. Syrenna has built a versatile robotic platform that you might think of a

AIs serve up ‘garbage’ to questions about voting and elections

A number of major AI services performed poorly in a test of their ability to address questions and concerns about voting and elections. The study found that no model can be completely trusted, but it

This Week in AI: Addressing racism in AI image generators

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable re

‘Embarrassing and wrong’: Google admits it lost control of image-generating AI

Google has apologized (or come very close to apologizing) for another embarrassing AI blunder this week, an image-generating model that injected diversity into pictures with a farcical disregard for h

Stable Diffusion 3 arrives to solidify early lead in AI imagery against Sora and Gemini

Stability AI has announced Stable Diffusion 3, the latest and most powerful version of the company’s image-generating AI model. While details are scant, it’s clearly an attempt to fend off

Hundreds of AI luminaries sign letter calling for anti-deepfake legislation

Hundreds in the artificial intelligence community have signed an open letter calling for strict regulation of AI-generated impersonations, or deepfakes. While this is unlikely to spur real legislation

House punts on AI with directionless new task force

The House of Representatives has founded a Task Force on artificial intelligence that will “ensure America continues leading in this strategic area,” as Speaker Mike Johnson put it. But th

No ‘GPT’ trademark for OpenAI

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has denied OpenAI’s attempt to trademark “GPT,” ruling that the term is “merely descriptive” and therefore unable to be registered. I

Largest text-to-speech AI model yet shows ’emergent abilities’

Researchers at Amazon have trained the largest ever text-to-speech model yet, which they claim exhibits “emergent” qualities improving its ability to speak even complex sentences naturally
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