MIT Technology Review

Recorded on June 30, 2025 AI journalist Karen Hao's book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI, tells the story of OpenAI's rise to power and its far-reaching impact all over the world. Hear from Karen Hao, former MIT Technology Review senior editor, and executive editor Niall Firth for a conversation exploring...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Meet Jim O'Neill, the longevity enthusiast who is now RFK Jr.'s right-hand man When Jim O'Neill was nominated to be the second in command at the US Department of Health and Human Services,...

When Jim O'Neill was nominated to be the second in command at the US Department of Health and Human Services, Dylan Livingston was excited. As founder and CEO of the lobbying group Alliance for Longevity Initiatives (A4LI), Livingston is a member of a community that seeks to extend human lifespan. O'Neill is kind of one...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. This battery recycling company is now cleaning up AI data centers In a sandy industrial lot outside Reno, Nevada, rows of battery packs that once propelled electric vehicles are now powering a small...

Weight-loss drugs are this decade's blockbuster medicines. Drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro help people with diabetes get their blood sugar under control and help overweight and obese people reach a healthier weight. And they're fast becoming a trendy must-have for celebrities and other figure-conscious individuals looking to trim down. They became so hugely popular...

In a sandy industrial lot outside Reno, Nevada, rows of battery packs that once propelled electric vehicles are now powering a small AI data center. Redwood Materials, one of the US's largest battery recycling companies, showed off this array of energy storage modules, sitting on cinder blocks and wrapped in waterproof plastic, during a press...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Google's new AI will help researchers understand how our genes work When scientists first sequenced the human genome in 2003, they revealed the full set of DNA instructions that make a person. But...

It's crunch time for the grid this week. As I'm writing this newsletter, it's 100 F (nearly 38 C) here in New Jersey, and I'm huddled in the smallest room in my apartment with the shades drawn and a single window air conditioner working overtime. Large swaths of the US have seen brutal heat this...

When scientists first sequenced the human genome in 2003, they revealed the full set of DNA instructions that make a person. But we still didn't know what all those 3 billion genetic letters actually do. Now Google's DeepMind division says it's made a leap in trying to understand the code with AlphaGenome, an AI model...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Introducing: the Power issue Energy is power. Those who can produce it, especially lots of it, get to exert authority in all sorts of ways. The world is increasingly powered by both tangible...

The US is on the brink of enacting rules for digital assets, with growing bipartisan momentum to modernize our financial system. But amid all the talk about innovation and global competitiveness, one issue has been glaringly absent: financial privacy. As we build the digital infrastructure of the 21st century, we need to talk about not...

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn't always easy. That's why we've created the AI Hype Index-a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. AI agents might be the toast of the AI industry, but they're still not that reliable. That's why Yoshua Bengio, one of the...

The last good Instagram account It's a truth universally acknowledged that social media is a Bad Vibe. Thankfully, there is still one Instagram account worth following that's just as incisive, funny, and scathing today as when it was founded back in 2016: Every Outfit (@everyoutfitonsatc). Originally conceived as an homage to Sex and the City's...

Officially, Conor Browne is a biorisk consultant. Based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, he has advanced degrees in security studies and medical and business ethics, along with United Nations certifications in counterterrorism and conflict resolution. He's worked on teams with NATO's Science for Peace and Security Programme and with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, analyzing...

It may sound bluntly obvious, but energy is power. Those who can produce it, especially lots of it, get to exert authority in all sorts of ways. It brings revenue and enables manufacturing, data processing, transportation, and military might. Energy resources are arguably a nation's most important asset. Look at Russia, or Saudi Arabia, or...

The computer first appeared on the Broadway stage in 1955 in a romantic comedy-William Marchant's The Desk Set. The play centers on four women who conduct research on behalf of the fictional International Broadcasting Company. Early in the first act, a young engineer named Richard Sumner arrives in the offices of the research department without...

This past spring, we launched a brand-new manufacturing initiative-building on ideas that are as old as MIT. Since William Barton Rogers created a school to help accelerate America's industrialization, manufacturing has been an essential part of our mission-a particularly MIT brand of manufacturing, informed and improved by scientific principles and advanced by the kind of...

As an MIT visiting scholar, rap legend Lupe Fiasco decided to go fishing for ideas on campus. In an approach he calls ghotiing" (pronounced fishing"), he composed nine raps inspired by works in MIT's public art collection, writing and recording them on site. On May 2, he and the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble debuted six...

Hundred-year storm tides could strike every decade in Bangladesh Tropical cyclones can generate devastating storm tides-seawater heightened by the tides that causes catastrophic floods in coastal regions. An MIT study finds that as the planet warms, the recurrence of destructive storm tides will increase tenfold for one of the world's hardest-hit regions. New electronic skin"...

It was a banner year for the Engineers in 2024-'25, with four MIT women's teams all clinching NCAA Division III national titles for the first time. After winning their fourth straight NCAA East Regional Championship, the cross country team claimed their first national title in November with All-American performances from Christina Crow '25 (pictured), Rujuta...

Two new studies from MIT and Harvard Medical School add to a growing body of evidence that infection-fighting molecules called cytokines also influence the brain, leading to behavioral changes during illness. By mapping the locations in the brain of receptors for different forms of IL-17, the researchers found that the cytokine acts on the somatosensory...

Over the past decade, Institute Professor Paula Hammond '84, PhD '93, and her students have used a technique known as layer-by-layer assembly to create a variety of polymer-coated nanoparticles that can be loaded with cancer-fighting drugs. The particles, which could prevent many side effects of chemotherapy by targeting tumors directly, have proved effective in mouse...

Bacteria can be engineered to sense a variety of molecules, such as pollutants or soil nutrients, but usually these signals must be detected microscopically. Now Christopher Voigt, head of MIT's Department of Biological Engineering, and colleagues have triggered bacterial cells to produce signals that can be read from as far as 90 meters away. Their...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Namibia wants to build the world's first hydrogen economy Factories have used fossil fuels to process iron ore for three centuries, and the climate has paid a heavy price: According to the International...

Over six years and across four continents, the London-based documentary photographer Zed Nelson has examined how humans have immersed themselves in increasingly simulated environments to mask their destructive divorce from the natural world. Featuring everything from theme parks and zoos to national parks and African safaris, his images reveal not only a desperate craving for...

On an afternoon in March in the middle of the world's oldest desert, Johannes Michels looks out at an array of solar panels, the size of 40 football fields, that stretches toward a ridge of jagged peaks between the ochre-colored sand and a cloudless blue sky. Inside a building to Michels's left sits a 12-megawatt...

As a tech reporter I often get asked questions like Is DeepSeek actually better than ChatGPT?" or Is the Anthropic model any good?" If I don't feel like turning it into an hour-long seminar, I'll usually give the diplomatic answer: They're both solid in different ways." Most people asking aren't defining good" in any precise...

When testing an AI model, it's hard to tell if it is reasoning or just regurgitating answers from its training data. Xbench, a new benchmark developed by the Chinese venture capital firm HSG, or HongShan Capital Group, might help to sidestep that issue. That's thanks to the way it evaluates models not only on the...

Around the world, countries are facing the challenges of aging populations, growing rates of chronic disease, and workforce shortages, leading to a growing burden on health care systems. From diagnosis to treatment, AI and other digital solutions can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of health care, easing the burden on straining systems. According to the...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. See the stunning first images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory The first spectacular images taken by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory have been released for the world to peruse: a panoply of...

Privacy only matters to those with something to hide. So goes one of the more inane and disingenuous justifications for mass government and corporate surveillance. There are others, of course, but the nothing to hide" argument remains a popular way to rationalize or excuse what's become standard practice in our digital age: the widespread and...

The first spectacular images taken by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory have been released for the world to peruse: a panoply of iridescent galaxies and shimmering nebulas. This is the dawn of the Rubin Observatory," says Meg Schwamb, a planetary scientist and astronomer at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. Much has been written about...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. It's pretty easy to get DeepSeek to talk dirty AI companions like Replika are designed to engage in intimate exchanges, but people use general-purpose chatbots for sex talk too, despite their stricter content...

In April, Mark Zuckerberg, as tech billionaires are so fond of doing these days, pontificated at punishing length on a podcast. In the interview, he addressed America's loneliness epidemic: The average American has-I think it's fewer than three friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's like 15 friends or...

Living comes with a side effect: aging. Despite what you might hear on social media or in advertisements, there are no drugs that are known to slow or reverse human aging. But there's some evidence to support another approach: cutting back on calories. Caloric restriction (reducing your intake of calories) and intermittent fasting (switching between...

AI companions like Replika are designed to engage in intimate exchanges, but people use general-purpose chatbots for sex talk too, despite their stricter content moderation policies. Now new research shows that not all chatbots are equally willing to talk dirty: DeepSeek is the easiest to convince. But other AI chatbots can be enticed too, if...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Before we embark on our usual programming we're thrilled to share that The Download won Best Technology Newsletter at this year's Publisher Newsletter Awards! Thank you to all of you for reading, subscribing,...

One morning in the middle of March, a slow-moving spring blizzard stalled above eastern Nebraska, pounding the state capital of Lincoln with 60-mile-per-hour winds, driving sleet, and up to eight inches of snow. Lincoln Electric System, the local electric utility, has approximately 150,000 customers. By lunchtime, nearly 10% of them were without power. Ice was...

Coal power is on life support in the US. It used to carry the grid with cheap electricity, but now plants are closing left and right. There are a lot of potential reasons to let coal continue its journey to the grave. Carbon emissions from coal plants are a major contributor to climate change. And...

A new paper from OpenAI has shown why a little bit of bad training can make AI models go rogue-but also demonstrates that this problem is generally pretty easy to fix. Back in February, a group of researchers discovered that fine-tuning an AI model (in their case, OpenAI's GPT-4o) by training it on code that...

Ready for a fresh set of puzzles? Click here for the July/August 2025 Puzzle Corner,brought to you by guest editor Ed Faulkner '03. Send problems, solutions (by August 1), and comments to puzzlecorner@technologyreview.com. Editor emeritus Allan Gottlieb '67 launched Puzzle Corner in 1966. Find back issues through 2022 atcs.nyu.edu/~gottlieb/trand more recent back issues attechnologyreview.com/puzzle-corner.

Ready for a fresh set of puzzles? Click here for the September/October 2024 Puzzle Corner, brought to you by guest editor Edward Faulkner '03.

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Why it's so hard to stop tech-facilitated abuse After Gioia had her first child with her then husband, he installed baby monitors throughout their home-to watch what we were doing," she says, while...

After Gioia had her first child with her then husband, he installed baby monitors throughout their Massachusetts home-to watch what we were doing," she says, while he went to work. She'd turn them off; he'd get angry. By the time their third child turned seven, Gioia and her husband had divorced, but he still found...

When OpenAI acquired Io to create the coolest piece of tech that the world will have ever seen," it confirmed what industry experts have long been saying: Hardware is the new frontier for AI. AI will no longer just be an abstract thing in the cloud far away. It's coming for our homes, our rooms,...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Puerto Rico's power struggles On the southeastern coast of Puerto Rico lies the country's only coal-fired power station, flanked by a mountain of toxic ash. The plant, owned by the utility giant AES,...

At first glance, it seems as if life teems around Carmen Suarez Vazquez's little teal-painted house in the municipality of Guayama, on Puerto Rico's southeastern coast. The edge of the Aguirre State Forest, home to manatees, reptiles, as many as 184 species of birds, and at least three types of mangrove trees, is just a...

Last fall, while attending a board meeting in Amsterdam, I had a few free hours and made an impromptu visit to the Van Gogh Museum. I often steal time for visits like this-a perk of global business travel for which I am grateful. Wandering the galleries, I found myself before The Courtesan (after Eisen), painted...

Back in February, I flew to Amsterdam to report on a high-stakes experiment the city had recently conducted: a pilot program for what it called Smart Check, which was its attempt to create an effective, fair, and unbiased predictive algorithm to try to detect welfare fraud. But the city fell short of its lofty goals-and,...