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Updated 2025-04-22 14:03
The future of AI processing
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is emerging in everyday use cases, thanks to advances in foundational models, more powerful chip technology, and abundant data. To become truly embedded and seamless, AI computation must now be distributed-and much of it will take place on device and at the edge. To support this evolution, computation for running AI workloads...
The Download: canceled climate tech projects, and South Korea’s AI web comics
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. $8 billion of US climate tech projects have been canceled so far in 2025 This year has been rough for climate technology: Companies have canceled, downsized, or shut down at least 16 large-scale...
Generative AI is reshaping South Korea’s webcomics industry
My mind is still sharp and my hands work just fine, so I have no interest in getting help from AI to draw or write stories," says Lee Hyun-se, a legendary South Korean cartoonist best known for his seminal series A Daunting Team, a 1983 manhwa about the coming-of-age of heroic underdog baseball players. Still,...
AI is pushing the limits of the physical world
Architecture often assumes a binary between built projects and theoretical ones. What physics allows in actual buildings, after all, is vastly different from what architects can imagine and design (often referred to as paper architecture"). That imagination has long been supported and enabled by design technology, but the latest advancements in artificial intelligence have prompted...
The quest to build islands with ocean currents in the Maldives
In satellite images, the 20-odd coral atolls of the Maldives look something like skeletal remains or chalk lines at a crime scene. But these landforms, which circle the peaks of a mountain range that has vanished under the Indian Ocean, are far from inert. They're the products of living processes-places where coral has grown toward...
$8 billion of US climate tech projects have been canceled so far in 2025
This year has been rough for climate technology: Companies have canceled, downsized, or shut down at least 16 large-scale projects worth $8 billion in total in the first quarter of 2025, according to a new report. That's far more cancellations than have typically occurred in recent years, according to a new report from E2, a...
Yahoo will give millions to a settlement fund for Chinese dissidents, decades after exposing user data
A lawsuit to hold Yahoo responsible for willfully turning a blind eye" to the mismanagement of a human rights fund for Chinese dissidents was settled for $5.425 million last week, after an eight-year court battle. At least $3 million will go toward a new fund; settlement documents say it will provide humanitarian assistance to persons...
This spa’s water is heated by bitcoin mining
At first glance, the Bathhouse spa in Brooklyn looks not so different from other high-end spas. What sets it apart is out of sight: a closet full of cryptocurrency-mining computers that not only generate bitcoins but also heat the spa's pools, marble hammams, and showers. When cofounder Jason Goodman opened Bathhouse's first location in Williamsburg...
How creativity became the reigning value of our time
Americans don't agree on much these days. Yet even at a time when consensus reality seems to be on the verge of collapse, there remains at least one quintessentially modern value we can all still get behind: creativity. We teach it, measure it, envy it, cultivate it, and endlessly worry about its death. And why...
Longevity clinics around the world are selling unproven treatments
The quest for long, healthy life-and even immortality-is probably almost as old as humans are, but it's never been hotter than it is right now. Today my newsfeed is full of claims about diets, exercise routines, and supplements that will help me live longer. A lot of it is marketing fluff, of course. It should...
The world’s biggest space-based radar will measure Earth’s forests from orbit
Forests are the second-largest carbon sink on the planet, after the oceans. To understand exactly how much carbon they trap, the European Space Agency and Airbus have built a satellite called Biomass that will use a long-prohibited band of the radio spectrum to see below the treetops around the world. It will lift off from...
A Google Gemini model now has a “dial” to adjust how much it reasons
Google DeepMind's latest update to a top Gemini AI model includes a dial to control how much the system thinks" through a response. The new feature is ostensibly designed to save money for developers, but it also concedes a problem: Reasoning models, the tech world's new obsession, are prone to overthinking, burning money and energy...
The Download: the US office that tracks foreign disinformation is being eliminated, and explaining vibe coding
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. US office that counters foreign disinformation is being eliminated The only office within the US State Department that monitors foreign disinformation is to be eliminated, according to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio,...
How a 1980s toy robot arm inspired modern robotics
As a child of an electronic engineer, I spent a lot of time in our local Radio Shack as a kid. While my dad was locating capacitors and resistors, I was in the toy section. It was there, in 1984, that I discovered the best toy of my childhood: the Armatron robotic arm. Described as...
These four charts sum up the state of AI and energy
While it's rare to look at the news without finding some headline related to AI and energy, a lot of us are stuck waving our hands when it comes to what it all means. Sure, you've probably read that AI will drive an increase in electricity demand. But how that fits into the context of...
We need targeted policies, not blunt tariffs, to drive “American energy dominance”
President Trump and his appointees have repeatedly stressed the need to establish American energy dominance." But the White House's profusion of executive orders and aggressive tariffs, along with its determined effort to roll back clean-energy policies, are moving the industry in the wrong direction, creating market chaos and economic uncertainty that are making it harder...
NASA has made an air traffic control system for drones
On Thanksgiving weekend of 2013, Jeff Bezos, then Amazon's CEO, took to 60 Minutes to make a stunning announcement: Amazon was a few years away from deploying drones that would deliver packages to homes in less than 30 minutes. It lent urgency to a problem that Parimal Kopardekar, director of the NASA Aeronautics Research Institute,...
US office that counters foreign disinformation is being eliminated
The only office within the US State Department that monitors foreign disinformation is to be eliminated, according to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, confirming reporting by MIT Technology Review. The Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub is a small office in the State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy that tracks and counters...
Adapting for AI’s reasoning era
Anyone who crammed for exams in college knows that an impressive ability to regurgitate information is not synonymous with critical thinking. The large language models (LLMs) first publicly released in 2022 were impressive but limited-like talented students who excel at multiple-choice exams but stumble when asked to defend their logic. Today's advanced reasoning models are...
The Download: how AI is changing music, and a US city’s AI experiment
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. AI is coming for music, too While large language models that generate text have exploded in the last three years, a different type of AI, based on what are called diffusion models, is...
Jurassic Patent: How Colossal Biosciences is attempting to own the “woolly mammoth”
Colossal Biosciences not only wants to bring back the woolly mammoth-it wants to patent it, too. MIT Technology Review has learned the Texas startup is seeking a patent that would give it exclusive legal rights to create and sell gene-edited elephants containing ancient mammoth DNA. Colossal, which calls itself the de-extinction company," hopes to use...
AI is coming for music, too
The end of this story includes samples of AI-generated music. Artificial intelligence was barely a term in 1956, when top scientists from the field of computing arrived at Dartmouth College for a summer conference. The computer scientist John McCarthy had coined the phrase in the funding proposal for the event, a gathering to work through...
What is vibe coding, exactly?
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what's coming next. You can read more from the series here. When OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy excitedly took to X back in February to post about his new hobby, he probably had no idea he was about...
A small US city is experimenting with AI to find out what residents want
Bowling Green, Kentucky, is home to 75,000 residents who recently wrapped up an experiment in using AI for democracy: Can an online polling platform, powered by machine learning, capture what residents want to see happen in their city? When Doug Gorman, elected leader of the county that includes Bowling Green, took office in 2023, it...
The Download: tracking the evolution of street drugs, and the next wave of military AI
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 the federal government is tracking changes in the supply of street drugs In 2021, the Maryland Department of Health and the state police were confronting a crisis: Fatal drug overdoses in the...
This architect wants to build cities out of lava
Arnhildur Palmadottir was around three years old when she saw a red sky from her living room window. A volcano was erupting about 25 miles away from where she lived on the northeastern coast of Iceland. Though it posed no immediate threat, its ominous presence seeped into her subconscious, populating her dreams with streaks of...
Phase two of military AI has arrived
Last week, I spoke with two US Marines who spent much of last year deployed in the Pacific, conducting training exercises from South Korea to the Philippines. Both were responsible for analyzing surveillance to warn their superiors about possible threats to the unit. But this deployment was unique: For the first time, they were using...
A vision for the future of automation
The manufacturing industry is at a crossroads: Geopolitical instability is fracturing supply chains from the Suez to Shenzhen, impacting the flow of materials. Businesses are battling rising costs and inflation, coupled with a shrinking labor force, with more than half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs in the U.S. alone. And climate change is further intensifying...
DOGE’s tech takeover threatens the safety and stability of our critical data
Tech buzzwords are clanging through the halls of Washington, DC. The Trump administration has promised to leverage blockchain technology" to reorganize the US Agency for International Development, and Elon Musk's DOGE has already unleashed an internal chatbot to automate agency tasks-with bigger plans on the horizon to take over for laid-off employees. The executive order...
The Download: the dangers of DOGE, and how to blow up an asteroid
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. DOGE's tech takeover threatens the safety and stability of our critical data -Steven Renderos is the executive director of Media Justice Tech buzzwords are clanging through the halls of Washington, DC. The Trump...
Meet the researchers testing the “Armageddon” approach to asteroid defense
One day, in the near or far future, an asteroid about the length of a football stadium will find itself on a collision course with Earth. If we are lucky, it will land in the middle of the vast ocean, creating a good-size but innocuous tsunami, or in an uninhabited patch of desert. But if...
The Download: how the military is using AI, and AI’s climate promises
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. Generative AI is learning to spy for the US military For much of last year, US Marines conducting training exercises in the waters off South Korea, the Philippines, India, and Indonesia were also...
Love or immortality: A short story
1. Sophie and Martin are at the 2012 Gordon Research Conference on the Biology of Aging in Ventura, California. It is a foggy February weekend. Both are disappointed about how little sun there is on the California beach. They are two graduate students-Sophie in her sixth and final year, Martin in his fourth-who have traveled...
How AI is interacting with our creative human processes
In 2021, 20 years after the death of her older sister, Vauhini Vara was still unable to tell the story of her loss. I wondered," she writes in Searches, her new collection of essays on AI technology, if Sam Altman's machine could do it for me." So she triedGPT-3. But as it expanded on Vara's...
Generative AI is learning to spy for the US military
For much of last year, about 2,500 US service members from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit sailed aboard three ships throughout the Pacific, conducting training exercises in the waters off South Korea, the Philippines, India, and Indonesia. At the same time, onboard the ships, an experiment was unfolding: The Marines in the unit responsible for...
Why the climate promises of AI sound a lot like carbon offsets
The International Energy Agency states in a new report that AI could eventually reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, possibly by much more than the boom in energy-guzzling data centers pushes them up. The finding echoes a point that prominent figures in the AI sector have made as well to justify, at least implicitly, the gigawatts' worth of...
The Download: AI co-creativity, and what Trump’s tariffs mean for 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. How AI can help supercharge creativity Existing generative tools can automate a striking range of creative tasks and offer near-instant gratification-but at what cost? Some artists and researchers fear that such technology could...
How AI can help supercharge creativity
Sometimes Lizzie Wilson shows up to a rave with her AI sidekick. One weeknight this past February, Wilson plugged her laptop into a projector that threw her screen onto the wall of a low-ceilinged loft space in East London. A small crowd shuffled in the glow of dim pink lights. Wilson sat down and started...
Tariffs are bad news for batteries
Update: Since this story was first published in The Spark, our weekly climate newsletter, the White House announced that most reciprocal tariffs would be paused for 90 days. That pause does not apply to China, which will see an increased tariff rate of 125%. Today, new tariffs go into effect for goods imported into the...
The Download: detecting bird flu, and powering industrial processes with nuclear energy
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 new biosensor can detect bird flu in five minutes Over the winter, eggs suddenly became all but impossible to buy. As a bird flu outbreak rippled through dairy and poultry farms, grocery...
A new biosensor can detect bird flu in five minutes
Over the winter, eggs suddenly became all but impossible to buy. As a bird flu outbreak rippled through dairy and poultry farms, grocery stores struggled to keep them on shelves. The shortages and record-high prices in February raised costs dramatically for restaurants and bakeries and led some shoppers to skip the breakfast staple entirely. But...
The Download: a “dire wolf” revival, and safeguarding AI companions
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. Game of clones: Colossal's new wolves are cute, but are they dire? For several years now, Texas-based company Colossal Biosciences has been in the news for its plans to re-create woolly mammoths someday....
Game of clones: Colossal’s new wolves are cute, but are they dire?
Somewhere in the northern US, drones fly over a 2,000-acre preserve, protected by a nine-foot fence built to zoo standards. It is off-limits to curious visitors, especially those with a passion for epic fantasies or mythical creatures. The reason for such tight security? Inside the preserve roam three striking snow-white wolves-which a startup called Colossal...
AI companions are the final stage of digital addiction, and lawmakers are taking aim
On Tuesday, California state senator Steve Padilla will make an appearance with Megan Garcia, the mother of a Florida teen who killed himself following a relationship with an AI companion that Garcia alleges contributed to her son's death. The two will announce a new bill that would force the tech companies behind such AI companions...
The Download: how the US is meeting China’s technological rise, and Trump’s tariff war intensifies
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 the Pentagon is adapting to China's technological rise It's been just over two months since Kathleen Hicks stepped down as US deputy secretary of defense. As the highest-ranking woman in Pentagon history,...
How the Pentagon is adapting to China’s technological rise
It's been just over two months since Kathleen Hicks stepped down as US deputy secretary of defense. As the highest-ranking woman in Pentagon history, Hicks shaped US military posture through an era defined by renewed competition between powerful countries and a scramble to modernize defense technology. She's currently taking a break before jumping into her...
The Download: what Trump’s tariffs mean for climate tech, and hacking AI agents
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. Trump's tariffs will deliver a big blow to climate tech US president Donald Trump's massive, sweeping tariffs sent global stock markets tumbling yesterday, setting the stage for a worldwide trade war and ratcheting...
Cyberattacks by AI agents are coming
Agents are the talk of the AI industry-they're capable of planning, reasoning, and executing complex tasks like scheduling meetings, ordering groceries, or even taking over your computer to change settings on your behalf. But the same sophisticated abilities that make agents helpful assistants could also make them powerful tools for conducting cyberattacks. They could readily...
Trump’s tariffs will deliver a big blow to climate tech
US president Donald Trump's massive, sweeping tariffs sent global stock markets tumbling on Thursday, setting the stage for a worldwide trade war and ratcheting up the dangers of a punishing recession. Experts fear that the US cleantech sector is especially vulnerable to a deep downturn, which would undermine the nation's progress on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions...
The Download: dethroning SpaceX, and air-conditioning’s energy demands
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. Rivals are rising to challenge the dominance of SpaceX SpaceX is a space launch juggernaut. In just two decades, the company has managed to edge out former aerospace heavyweights Boeing, Lockheed, and Northrop...
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