MIT Technology Review

From large language models (LLMs) to reasoning agents, today's AI tools bring unprecedented computational demands. Trillion-parameter models, workloads running on-device, and swarms of agents collaborating to complete tasks all require a new paradigm of computing to become truly seamless and ubiquitous. First, technical progress in hardware and silicon design is critical to pushing the boundaries...

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 benchmark used Reddit's AITA to test how much AI models suck up to us Back in April, OpenAI announced it was rolling back an update to its GPT-4o model that made ChatGPT's...

Back in April, OpenAIannounced it was rolling back an update to its GPT-4o model that made ChatGPT's responses to user queries too sycophantic. An AI model that acts in an overly agreeable and flattering way is more than just annoying. It could reinforce users' incorrect beliefs, mislead people, and spread misinformation that can be dangerous-a...

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 giant microwave may change the future of war Imagine: China deploys hundreds of thousands of autonomous drones in the air, on the sea, and under the water-all armed with explosive warheads or...

It's been a little over a week since we published Power Hungry, a package that takes a hard look at the expected energy demands of AI. Last week in this newsletter, I broke down the centerpiece of that package, an analysis I did with my colleague James O'Donnell. (In case you're still looking for an...

Imagine: China deploys hundreds of thousands of autonomous drones in the air, on the sea, and under the water-all armed with explosive warheads or small missiles. These machines descend in a swarm toward military installations on Taiwan and nearby USbases, and over the course of a few hours, a single robotic blitzkrieg overwhelms the US...

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. Large language models confidently present their responses as accurate and reliable, even when they're neither of those things. That's why we've recently seen...

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. OpenAI: The power and the pride OpenAI's release of ChatGPT 3.5 set in motion an AI arms race that has changed the world. How that turns out for humanity is something we are...

In April, Paul Graham, the founder of the tech startup accelerator Y Combinator, sent a tweet in response to former YC president and current OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Altman had just bid a public goodbye to GPT-4 on X, and Graham had a follow-up question. If you had [GPT-4's model weights] etched on a piece...

A California-based company called Magrathea just turned on a new electrolyzer that can make magnesium metal from seawater. The technology has the potential to produce the material, which is used in vehicles and defense applications, with net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions. Magnesium is an incredibly light metal, and it's used for parts in cars and planes, as...

A new type of fuel cell that runs on sodium metal could one day help clean up sectors where it's difficult to replace fossil fuels, like rail, regional aviation, and short-distance shipping. The device represents a departure from technologies like lithium-based batteries and is more similar conceptually to hydrogen fuel cell systems. The sodium-air fuel...

In the U.S., two-thirds of the country's 150,000 convenience stores are run by independent operators. Mom-and-pop shops, powered by personal relationships and local knowledge, are the backbone of the convenience sector. These neighborhood operators have long lacked the resources needed to compete with larger chains when it comes to technology, operations, and customer loyalty programs....

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. Can nuclear power really fuel the rise of AI? In the AI arms race, all the major players say they want to go nuclear. Over the past year, the likes of Meta, Amazon,...

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 Cathy Tie, Bride of China's Frankenstein" Since the Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui was released from prison in 2022, he has sought to make a scientific comeback and to repair his reputation after...

This week, two new leaders at the US Food and Drug Administration announced plans to limit access to covid vaccines, arguing that there is not much evidence to support the value of annual shots in healthy people. New vaccines will be made available only to the people who are most vulnerable-namely, those over 65 and...

Since the Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui was released from prison in 2022, he has sought to make a scientific comeback and to repair his reputation after a three-year incarceration for illegally creating the world's first gene-edited children. While he has bounced between cities, jobs, and meetings with investors, one area of visible success on his...

Anthropic has announced two new AI models that it claims represent a major step toward making AI agents truly useful. AI agents trained on Claude Opus 4, the company's most powerful model to date, raise the bar for what such systems are capable of by tackling difficult tasks over extended periods of time and responding...

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 data center boom in the desert In the high desert east of Reno, Nevada, construction crews are flattening the golden foothills of the Virginia Range, laying the foundations of a data center...

This week, we published Power Hungry, a package all about AI and energy. At the center of this package is the most comprehensive look yet at AI's growing power demand, if I do say so myself. This data-heavy story is the result of over six months of reporting by me and my colleague James O'Donnell...

In 2003, engineers from Germany and Switzerland began building a bridge across the Rhine River simultaneously from both sides. Months into construction, they found that the two sides did not meet. The German side hovered 54 centimeters above the Swiss side. The misalignment occurred because the German engineers had measured elevation with a historic level...

Recorded on May 21, 2025 Big Tech's appetite for energy is growing rapidly as adoption of AI accelerates. But just how much energy does even a single AI query use? And what does it mean for the climate? Hear fromMIT Technology Revieweditor in chief Mat Honan, senior climate reporter Casey Crownhart, and AI reporter James...

If you want to know where AI is headed, this year's Google I/O has you covered. The company's annual showcase of next-gen products, which kicked off yesterday, has all of the pomp and pizzazz, the sizzle reels and celebrity walk-ons, that you'd expect from a multimillion-dollar marketing event. But it also shows us just how...

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. We did the math on AI's energy footprint. Here's the story you haven't heard. It's well documented that AI is a power-hungry technology. But there has been far less reporting on the extent...

The thousands of sprawling acres in rural northeast Louisiana had gone unwanted for nearly two decades. Louisiana authorities bought the land in Richland Parish in 2006 to promote economic development in one of the poorest regions in the state. For years, they marketed the former agricultural fields as the Franklin Farm mega site, first to...

With seemingly no limit to the demand for artificial intelligence, everyone in the energy, AI, and climate fields is justifiably worried. Will there be enough clean electricity to power AI and enough water to cool the data centers that support this technology? These are important questions with serious implications for communities, the economy, and the...

In the high desert east of Reno, Nevada, construction crews are flattening the golden foothills of the Virginia Range, laying the foundations of a data center city. Google, Tract, Switch, EdgeCore, Novva, Vantage, and PowerHouse are all operating, building, or expanding huge facilities within the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, a business park bigger than the...

When we set out to write a story on the best available estimates for AI's energy and emissions burden, we knew there would be caveats and uncertainties to these numbers. But, we quickly discovered, the caveats are the story too. This story is a part of MIT Technology Review's series Power Hungry: AI and our...

In the AI arms race, all the major players say they want to go nuclear. Over the past year, the likes of Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have sent out a flurry of announcements related to nuclear energy. Some are about agreements to purchase power from existing plants, while others are about investments looking to...

The day after his inauguration in January, President Donald Trump announced Stargate, a $500 billion initiative to build out AI infrastructure, backed by some of the biggest companies in tech. Stargate aims to accelerate the construction of massive data centers and electricity networks across the US to ensure it keeps its edge over China. This...

It's been quite a couple weeks for stories about AI in the courtroom. You might have heard about the deceased victim of a road rage incident whose family created an AI avatar of him to show as an impact statement (possibly the first time this has been done in the US). But there's a bigger,...

Millions of people argue with each other online every day, but remarkably few of them change someone's mind. New research suggests that large language models (LLMs) might do a better job. The finding suggests that AI could become a powerful tool for persuading people, for better or worse. A multi-university team of researchers found that...

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. Inside the story that enraged OpenAI -Niall Firth, executive editor, MIT Technology Review In 2019, Karen Hao, a senior reporter with MIT Technology Review, pitched me a story about a then little-known company,...

In a 2019 speech at Georgetown University, Mark Zuckerberg famously declared that he didn't want Facebook to be an arbiter of truth." And yet, in the years since, his company, Meta, has used several methods to moderate content and identify misleading posts across its social media apps, which include Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. These methods...

In 2019, Karen Hao, a senior reporter with MIT Technology Review, pitched me on writing a story about a then little-known company, OpenAI. It was her biggest assignment to date. Hao's feat of reporting took a series of twists and turns over the coming months, eventually revealing how OpenAI's ambition had taken it far afield...

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 baby boy was treated with the first personalized gene-editing drug Doctors say they constructed a bespoke gene-editing treatment in less than seven months and used it to treat a baby with a...

A couple of weeks ago I was in Washington, DC, for a gathering of scientists, policymakers, and longevity enthusiasts. They had come together to discuss ways to speed along the development of drugs and other treatments that might extend the human lifespan. One approach that came up was to simply make experimental drugs more easily...

Doctors say they constructed a bespoke gene-editing treatment in less than seven months and used it to treat a baby with a deadly metabolic condition. The rapid-fire attempt to rewrite the child's DNA marks the first time gene editing has been tailored to treat a single individual, according to a report published in the New...

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 first US hub for experimental medical treatments is coming The news: A bill that allows clinics to sell unproven treatments has been passed in Montana. Under the legislation, doctors can apply for...

Over the last few months, and especially the last few weeks, there's been an explosion of news about proposed budget cuts to science in the US. One trend I've noticed: Researchers and civil servants are sounding the alarm that those cuts mean we might lose key data that helps us understand our world and how...

Google DeepMind has once again used large language models to discover new solutions to long-standing problems in math and computer science. This time the firm has shown that its approach can not only tackle unsolved theoretical puzzles, but improve a range of important real-world processes as well. Google DeepMind's new tool, called AlphaEvolve, uses the...

A bill that allows medical clinics to sell unproven treatments has been passed in Montana. Under the legislation, doctors can apply for a license to open an experimental treatment clinic and recommend and sell therapies not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to their patients. Once it's signed by the governor, the law...

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 climate researchers are taking the temperature of mountain snow The Sierra's frozen reservoir provides about a third of California's water and most of what comes out of the faucets, shower heads, and...

On a crisp morning in early April, Dan McEvoy and Bjoern Bingham cut clean lines down a wide run at the Heavenly Ski Resort in South Lake Tahoe, then ducked under a rope line cordoning off a patch of untouched snow. They side-stepped up a small incline, poled past a row of Jeffrey pines, then...

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 US court just put ownership of CRISPR back in play The CRISPR patents are back in play. Yesterday, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said scientists Jennifer Doudna and...

Six months ago I attended the largest gathering of chiefs of police in the US to see how they're using AI. I found some big developments, like officers getting AI to write their police reports. Today, I published a new story that shows just how far AI for police has developed since then. It's about...

The CRISPR patents are back in play. On Monday, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said scientists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier will get another chance to show they ought to own the key patents on what many consider the defining biotechnology invention of the 21st century. The pair shared a 2020...