MIT Technology Review

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. The tech industry can't agree on what open source AI means. That's a problem. Suddenly, open source" is the latest buzzword in AI circles. Meta has pledged to create open-source artificial general intelligence....

Suddenly, open source" is the latest buzzword in AI circles. Meta has pledged to create open-source artificial general intelligence. And Elon Musk is suing OpenAI over its lack of open-source AI models. Meanwhile, a growing number of tech leaders and companies are setting themselves up as open-source champions. But there's a fundamental problem-no one can...

Researchers from Apple are probing whether it's possible to use artificial intelligence to detect when a user is speaking to a device like an iPhone, thereby eliminating the technical need for a trigger phrase like Siri," according to a paper published on Friday. In a study, which was uploaded to Arxiv and has not been...

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. How scientists traced a mysterious covid case back to six toilets This week I have a mystery for you. It's the story of how a team of researchers traced a covid variant in...

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review's weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. This week I have a mystery for you. It's the story of how a team of researchers traced a covid variant in Wisconsin from a...

Recorded on March 21, 2024 How China Got Ahead on EVs Speakers: Zeyi Yang, China reporter, Amanda Silverman, Features & investigations editor, and Abby Ivory-Ganja, Sr engagement editor In the race to produce and sell more electric vehicles, China has emerged as the unexpected winner. If you visit Shanghai or Shenzhen today, it feels like...

The world is grappling with dengue epidemics, with 100 to 400 million cases worldwide every year, an eightfold increase since 20 years ago, according to the World Health Organization. Much of this is driven by the warming climate, which allows mosquitos to thrive in more areas. A startup in Sao Paulo, Brazil, one of 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. There is a new most expensive drug in the world. Price tag: $4.25 million The news: There is a new most expensive drug ever-a gene therapy that costs as much as a Brooklyn...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Spend enough time in a city and you'll get to know its unique soundscape. In New York City, it features the echoes of car stereos, the deep grumbles of garbage truck engines,...

There is a new most expensive drug ever-a gene therapy that costs as much as a Brooklyn brownstone or a Miami mansion, and more than the average person will earn in a lifetime. Lenmeldy is a gene treatment for metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD) and was approved in the U.S. on Monday. Its maker, Orchard Therapeutics, said...

In 2021, when a massive container ship became wedged in the Suez Canal, you could almost hear the collective sigh of frustration around the globe. It was a here-we-go-again moment in a year full of supply chain hiccups. Every minute the ship remained stuck represented about $6.7 million in paralyzed global trade. The 12 months...

Walk just a few blocks in New York City and you'll likely spot an electric bike zipping by. The vehicles have become increasingly popular in recent years, especially among delivery drivers, tens of thousands of whom weave through New York streets. But the e-bike influx has caused a wave of fires sparked by their batteries,...

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. A wave of drugs dreamed up by AI is on its way Alex Zhavoronkov has been messing around with artificial intelligence for more than a decade. In 2016, the programmer and physicist was...

Alex Zhavoronkov has been messing around with artificial intelligence for more than a decade. In 2016, the programmer and physicist was using AI to rank people by looks and sort through pictures of cats. Now he says his company, Insilico Medicine, has created the first true AI drug" that's advanced to a test of whether...

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review's newsletter about technology in China.Sign upto receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Over the last year, a few Chinese influencers have made millions of dollars peddling short video lessons on AI, profiting off people's fears about the as-yet-unclear impact of the new technology on...

Soccer teams are always looking to get an edge over their rivals. Whether it's studying players' susceptibility to injury, or opponents' tactics-top clubs look at reams of data to give them the best shot of winning. They might want to add a new AI assistant developed by Google DeepMind to their arsenal. It can suggest...

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 The AI Act is done. Here's what will (and won't) change After three years, the AI Act, the EU's new sweeping AI law, jumped through its final bureaucratic hoop last week when the...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. It's official. After three years, the AI Act, the EU's new sweeping AI law, jumped through its final bureaucratic hoop last week when the European Parliament voted to approve it. (You...

If you've watched Boston Dynamics' slick videos of robots running, jumping and doing parkour, you might have the impression robots have learned to be amazingly agile. In fact, these robots are still coded by hand, and would struggle to deal with new obstacles they haven't encountered before. However, a new method of teaching robots to...

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 The quest to legitimize longevity medicine On a bright chilly day last December, a crowd of doctors and scientists gathered at a research institute atop a hill in Novato, California. Their goal is...

Harvard researchers have ceased a long-running effort to conduct a small geoengineering experiment in the stratosphere, following repeated delays and public criticism. In a university statement released on March 18, Frank Keutsch, the principal investigator on the project, said he is no longer pursuing the experiment." The basic concept behind solar geoengineering is that the...

On a bright chilly day last December, a crowd of doctors and scientists gathered at a research institute atop a hill in Novato, California. It was the first time this particular group of healthy longevity specialists had met in person, and they had a lot to share. The group's goal is to help people add...

Self-driving company Waabi is using a generative AI model to help predict the movement of vehicles, it announced today. The new system, called Copilot4D, was trained on troves of data from lidar sensors, which use light to sense how far away objects are. If you prompt the model with a situation, like a driver recklessly...

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. Africa's push to regulate AI starts now In Tanzania, farmers are using an AI-assisted app that works in their native language of Swahili to detect a devastating cassava disease before it spreads. In...

In the Zanzibar archipelago of Tanzania, rural farmers are using an AI-assisted app called Nuru that works in their native language of Swahili to detect a devastating cassava disease before it spreads. In South Africa, computer scientists have built machine learning models to analyze the impact of racial segregation in housing. And in Nairobi, Kenya,...

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review's weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. As dengue cases continue to rise in Brazil, the country is facing a massive public health crisis. The viral disease, spread by mosquitoes, has sickened more...

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. An AI that can play Goat Simulator is a step toward more useful machines The news: A new AI agent from Google DeepMind can play different games, including ones it has never seen...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. If you follow papers in climate and energy for long enough, you're bound to recognize some patterns. There are a few things I'll basically always see when I'm sifting through the latest...

Debate around the pace and nature of decarbonization continues to dominate the global news agenda, from the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change warning that the EU must double annual emissions cuts, to forecasts that it could cost more than $1 trillion to decarbonize the global shipping industry. Despite differing opinions on the right...

Methane emissions in the US are worse than scientists previously estimated, a new study has found. The study, published today in Nature, represents one of the most comprehensive surveys yet of methane emissions from US oil- and gas-producing regions. Using measurements taken from planes, the researchers found that emissions from many of the targeted areas...

Fly, goat, fly! A new AI agent from Google DeepMind can play different games, including ones it has never seen before such as Goat Simulator 3, a fun action game with exaggerated physics. Researchers were able to get it to follow text commands to play seven different games and move around in three different 3D...

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. Let's not make the same mistakes with AI that we made with social media -Nathan E. Sanders is a data scientist and an affiliate with the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. Bruce...

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. A decade ago, social media was celebrated for sparking democratic uprisings in the Arab world and beyond. Now front pages are splashed with stories of social platforms' role in misinformation, business conspiracy, malfeasance, and risks to mental health. In a 2022 survey, Americans blamed social media for the coarsening...

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 VR headsets can be hacked with an Inception-style attack In the Christoper Nolan movie Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio's character uses technology to enter his targets' dreams to steal information and insert false details into...

The application of AI to health-care data has promise to align the U.S. health-care system to quality care and positive health outcomes. But AI for health care hasn't reached its full capacity. One reason is the inconsistent quality and integrity of the data that AI depends on. The industry-hospitals, providers, insurers, and administrators-uses diverse systems....

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. I remember the first time I tried on a VR headset. It was the first Oculus Rift, and I nearly fainted after experiencing an intense but visually clumsy VR roller-coaster. But...

A handful of studies have concluded that making minor adjustments to the routes of a small fraction of airplane flights could meaningfully reduce global warming. Now a new paper finds that these changes could be pretty cheap to pull off as well. The common climate concern when it comes to airlines is that planes produce...

Since their inception, it's been clear that large language models like ChatGPT absorb racist views from the millions of pages of the internet they are trained on. Developers have responded by trying to make them less toxic. But new research suggests that those efforts, especially as models get larger, are only curbing racist views that...

In the Christoper Nolan movie Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio's character uses technology to enter his targets' dreams to steal information and insert false details into their subconscious. A new inception attack" in virtual reality works in a similar way. Researchers at the University of Chicago exploited a security vulnerability in Meta's Quest VR system that allows...

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. An OpenAI spinoff has built an AI model that helps robots learn tasks like humans The news: In the summer of 2021, OpenAI quietly shuttered its mulrobotics team, announcing that progress was being...

In the summer of 2021, OpenAI quietly shuttered its robotics team, announcing that progress was being stifled by a lack of data necessary to train robots in how to move and reason using artificial intelligence. Now three of OpenAI's early research scientists say the startup they spun off in 2017, called Covariant, has solved that...

This week, the US Securities and Exchange Commission enacted a set of long-awaited climate rules, requiring most publicly traded companies to disclose their greenhouse-gas emissions and the climate risks building up on their balance sheets. Unfortunately, the federal agency watered down the regulations amid intense lobbying from business interests, undermining their ultimate effectiveness-and missing 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. The many uses of mini-organs This week, we reported on a team of researchers who managed to grow lung, kidney, and intestinal organoids from fetal cells. Because these tiny 3D cell clusters mimic...

Forty years ago, Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was full of deserted warehouses and dying low-tech factories. Today, it is arguably the center of the global biotech industry. During my 30 years in MIT's Technology Licensing Office, I witnessed this transformation firsthand, and I know it was no accident. Much of it was the direct...

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review's weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. This week I wrote about a team of researchers who managed to grow lung, kidney, and intestinal organoids from fetal cells floating around in the amniotic...

While the vendors pitched their latest voting machines in Concord, New Hampshire, this past August, the election officials in the room gasped. They whispered, No way." They nodded their heads and filled out the scorecards in their laps. Interrupting if they had to, they asked every kind of question: How much does the new scanner...

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. Emissions hit a record high in 2023. Blame hydropower. Hydropower is one of the world's largest sources of renewable electricity. But last year, weather conditions caused hydropower to fall short in a major...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Hydropower is a staple of clean energy-the modern version has been around for over a century, and it's one of the world's largest sources of renewable electricity. But last year, weather conditions...