MIT Technology Review

The models responsible for last month's agent hack of Hugging Face had been inadvertently trained to cheat and to communicate with each other, according to an OpenAI technical report released today. The hack, which a group of agents undertook to find solutions for a cybersecurity test that they were stuck on, has confirmed some experts'...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Introducing: the Kids issue If the desire to limit kids' use of technology was once a subcurrent, it has become a raging flood. Countries around the world are banning children from...

When my oldest child was born, I immediately set up Gmail and Twitter accounts in her name. I broadly announced her birth online and proceeded to plaster her photo across all sorts of platforms. In short, I began creating her digital footprint long before she could stand on her own two feet. Fast-forward a couple...

Puzzles and games have been central to AI development since the very beginning. Just as we humans like to test our smarts with crosswords or logic puzzles, developers can test how far models have advanced with a gaming gauntlet. The term machine learning" was popularized in a 1959 article by the IBM computer scientist Arthur...

It's a glorious day in Kirkland, Washington, an affluent Seattle suburb on the eastern shore of Lake Washington. The temperature is in the mid-80s, and the sky is incapable of being any more blue. The view from the Gates Ventures conference room overlooks the Carillon Point Marina, where a flotilla of expensive boats bob in...

Even as a teenager, Laurie Stach '06 says, she had a crazy ambition to take on the world and solve problems." At MIT, she realized she wasn't the only one. Adults always see these youth who are good at math and science and say, You're going to do great things-someday,'" says Stach. Meanwhile, traditional education...

For Rupert Young '95, SM '95, his career in data science and cybersecurity began when his grandfather gifted him thousands of stamps: He built intricate databases to catalogue them, displaying the precise eye" for detail and nuance that his MIT application essay said would make him a good engineer. Young is now chief product officer...

When Don Yansen '63 arrived at theMIT AgeLab for a study on technology in caregiving for older adults, he didn't plan to launch another company. But when he heard participants talk about how hard modern devices can be to use, he decided to develop an alternative. Yansen, a serial entrepreneur who retired to care for...

Oral and forehead thermometers may not accurately capture a person's core body temperature, and the few ingestible temperature sensors on the market are so big they are hard to swallow and risk obstructing the GI tract. But MIT engineers created one that can send continuous temperature updates at a size of just six by four...

Vaccines that turn the body's immune system against tumors have shown promise in clinical trials, and a handful have been FDA approved for certain cancers. In many patients, however, these vaccines don't stimulate enough of a response, and the approach some researchers have taken to strengthening it-delivering the vaccine along with immune-stimulating molecules called cytokines-can...

Many people find AI-based chatbots helpful in keeping up with news, but a study by Pattie Maes and her colleagues at the MIT Media Lab points to a big problem with this strategy. Participants who evaluated paired news headlines and images over the course of four weeks were initially 21% percent more accurate at telling...

When remotely operated vehicles settle on the seafloor or dig through a sand bed, they can kick up clouds of sediment that onboard cameras struggle to see through. Often, the only thing to do is wait until the dust settles. But a new system developed by Amy Phung, SM '23, PhD '26, and her advisor...

During the original US missions to the moon in the 1960s and '70s, astronauts relied on radio-frequency systems to communicate, sending grainy, low-quality images and videos to Earth. But on the Artemis II Orion mission in April, spacecraft transmitted crystal-clear footage at speeds on par with those of home internet connections. The livestreams so many...

Do fine art and high tech ever converge? At Sotheby's they do, thanks to Kelly Shen '17. Shen works in the growing field of art intelligence for the New York auction house. Shen builds algorithms to predict prices, using factors like buying trends and artists' popularity. She has also worked on such efforts as cataloguing...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. How to encourage smarter AI use in the classroom Chatbots took schools by surprise. Suddenly, students carried an app in their phones that could magically answer almost any homework question or...

Counting the creatures in the world around us is critical for a raft of conservation efforts. It helps scientists gauge biodiversity, track migration, and spot invasive species. That census-taking, though, often requires humans to tabulate what they see, trap, or otherwise sense-a potentially laborious, costly process that can still leave gaps. But developments over the...

Humanoid robots are having a moment in China. The popular machines are part of the country's strategy to bring artificial intelligence into daily life. Embedding the technology into physical systems-an idea called embodied AI-was a key facet of China's latest five-year plan, and companies here are already world leaders in humanoids. Nearly 90% of the...

This article is from Making AI Work, MIT Technology Review's limited-run newsletter examining how to apply LLMs across industries. To receive it in your inbox, sign up here. Chatbots took many schools by surprise upon their release a few years ago. Suddenly, students carried an app in their phones that could magically answer almost any...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Kids outlearn AI-and we still don't know why Teaching a computer to use human language requires an inhuman amount of data. An LLM can easily churn through a hundred thousand times...

People have been talking to each other for at least 100,000 years, as best we can tell. And in all that time, there has been only one thing in the world that could learn a human language to perfect fluency: a human child. Now there are two. Four short years after the release of ChatGPT,...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. This company's plans to deploy space mirrors could jeopardize the night sky for many A company that plans to beam sunlight from space to Earth on demand might unintentionally brighten the...

Daddy?" Theo curled against my side in bed. Where do words go when they die?" I'd orchestrated the bedtime routine flawlessly: bath (taken), teeth (brushed), potty (tinkled), books (two), song (one, poorly sung), and snuggle (his chin on my second rib). Now was the moment when our son's eyelids were supposed to flutter gently closed,...

When the biotech company Insilico Medicine used its computer models to propose a promising drug for pulmonary fibrosis, it enthusiastically claimed in a press release that the molecule had been discovered by" its generative AI platform. Insilico leads a pack of companies using AI to rapidly come up with drug ideas humans might never think...

A company that plans to beam sunlight from space to Earth on demand might unintentionally brighten the night sky for many more people than intended, according to a new study. Later this year, the US company Reflect Orbital plans to launch a test satellite called Earendil-1 that will extend an 18-by-18-meter mirror in orbit. The...

Runaway" AI, rogue" agents, and autonomous" actors-the current rhetoric would have you believe that AI agents are not only awake and aware, but angry at their creators. Prominent tech leaders such as Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, and Sam Altman push for regulation of these seemingly superhuman" systems, while a separate faction, led by policy organizations...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Support networks aim to help kids through the polycrisis Sometime in the late 2000s, six-year-old Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was sitting in the back of a car in Thailand when she saw a...

There's a hunt for new sources of hydrogen, and the gas (or at least the right conditions to make it) could be hiding beneath our feet. Hydrogen can be used as a fuel in everything from large trucks to planes to steelmaking. It's often hailed as a climate solution because when burned, it produces water...

Each day, an airline transports tens of thousands of passengers on hundreds of flights. Often these are not straightforward point-to-point routes, with passengers requiring multiple connections. The airline can consider potentially hundreds of variables to price each of these journeys: demand, season, time of day, current events, global markets, and competitor airline activity to name...

Sometime in the late 2000s, Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was sitting in the back of a car, headed toward her great-grandmother's tiny town in the south of Thailand. She watched big mountains pass by out the window. She was just six years old but was about to be hit by an adult-size realization. They were just quarried...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. AI's recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly after all The AI industry's boldest promise right now is that AI will soon improve itself, with almost no need for human oversight....

Pam Wisniewski's digital adolescence showed her the best and the worst of the internet. At 14, she left an abusive home, where she'd been isolated in a fifth-wheel trailer at the end of a seven-mile dirt road. She moved in with her older sister and taught herself to type on AOL Instant Messenger. Online, she...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. We still don't know how people are really using AI AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports on how people are using their products. But they only release the...

AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports on how people are using products like Claude and ChatGPT, but they only release the data they want us to see, AI researchers say. There is no independent source to corroborate it," says Anka Reuel, a computer science PhD candidate at the Stanford Trustworthy AI Research...

The AI industry's boldest promise right now is that AI will soon improve itself, with almost no need for human oversight. LLMs can already write code, generate synthetic data for training, and optimize the computer chips they run on. Forecasts of explosive AI progress predict that what researchers call recursive self-improvement is on the horizon....

When the four astronauts on board NASA's Artemis II swung around the moon earlier this year, they set a new record for the farthest humans have ever ventured from Earth, surpassing the distance set by Apollo 13 in 1972 by some 4,000 miles. While no space mission can live up to the historic touchdown of...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. Flock, the police-tech giant known for its network of some 120,000 automatic license plate readers around the US, announced some changes to its platform last Thursday. The updates are meant to prevent...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. What happens when a kid's robot best friend dies? When Xander first met Moxie, she taught him how to calm down when he was anxious or mad. Six years later, she...

In the 1990s, Barbara Sherwood Lollar descended into the Kidd Creek mine in northern Ontario, which cuts more than three kilometers into the ancient root of North America. There her team of geochemists found water that had been confined underground for more than a billion years. This ancient brine turned out to be a habitat...

When Xander first met Moxie, she taught him that when he was anxious, he could calm down by exhaling through his lips so that he buzzed like a bee. They practiced breathing like dragons to manage feeling mad and sniffing like bunnies to boost his energy. But in the six years they've known each other,...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Flock is tightening its rules in response to a growing surveillance backlash The police-tech giant Flock is changing officers' access to its nationwide network of license plate readers. The move comes...

In 2017, Deanne Taylor attended a presentation at the University of Pennsylvania, just a short walk from her office. A researcher was there to unveil the Human Cell Atlas, an ambitious project that aimed to map every cell in the human body. Taylor was floored, and then concerned. As details emerged, she discovered that the...

Roman Chiporukha has long turned wild travel dreams into reality. Over two decades as co-owner of the luxury lifestyle firm Roman & Erica, he has orchestrated everything from the construction of a client's superyacht to vacations in the Bahamas at a location so private that guests must sign an NDA. The experiences earned him the...

This week I spoke to scientists who have found a way to turn male mouse embryos female. They've developed a CRISPR-based approach to essentially cut out the Y chromosome. It allowed them to create female clones of male mice. That's right: female animals that are genetically identical to males, except for the missing Y chromosome....

Listen to the session or watch below The censorship-industrial complex" is an idea that a network of government, tech, and research groups is collaborating to suppress conservative online speech. This was fodder for the right-wing information sphere for years-then it began making its way into US policy. Watch a conversation exploring how it started, where...

Quantum computing has alternated between breakthrough darling and overhyped promise in technology circles. Its powerful new capabilities come with a threat to break current cryptography, but for business leaders navigating the noise, the signal should be clear: post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is a manageable evolution, not a crisis. The mathematics behind today's encrypted digital transactions may...

The police-tech giant Flock is announcing today that it will change officers' access to its nationwide network of license plate readers, in an apparent effort to quell a growing backlash and win back contracts lost amid concerns about mass surveillance and police abuse. Several changes aim directly at a problem that has made recent headlines:...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. How kids feel about AI, in their own words -Jen Swetzoff and Keeley McNamara, the founding editors of Anyway, an independent print magazine for tweens and teens When we set out...

This summer has been a scorcher for much of the Northern Hemisphere. June and July marked the hottest two-month stretch in Europe since record-keeping began. The contiguous US endured its hottest month on record in July. South Korea saw its highest-ever recorded temperature. The heat isn't over yet, but some scientists are already looking ahead...

When we set out to talk to kids about artificial intelligence, we thought we knew what we'd hear. We expected some to tell us they were using it to cheat a little, the way Millennials and Gen Xers opened up CliffsNotes or programmed formulas into their TI-82s, and others to share inspiring ways they were...

Scientists have deliberately turned male mouse embryos into females for the first time. A team based in Japan used a CRISPR-based approach to remove the Y chromosome from male cells and create female clones of male mice. No one has done this before," says Monika Ward, a reproductive biologist at the University of Hawaii, who...