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. How ASML took over the chipmaking chessboard On a drab Monday February morning in California, at the drab San Jose Convention Center, attendees of the SPIE Advanced Lithography and Patterning Conference gathered to...

For most people around the world, Meta's text-based social network Threads is a platform that they haven't thought of for months. But for Liu, a design professional in Taipei, it's where she's receiving unprecedented attention. My casual posts often receive a large number of reposts now. It used to only happen every few months on...

Today, interactions matter more than ever. According to data compiled by NICE, once a consumer makes a buying decision for a product or service, 80% of their decision to keep doing business with that brand hinges on the quality of their customer service experience, according to NICE research. Enter AI. I think AI is becoming...

On a drab Monday morning in San Jose, California, at the drab San Jose Convention Center, attendees of the SPIE Advanced Lithography and Patterning Conference filed into the main ballroom until all the seats were taken and the crowd began to line the walls along the back and sides of the room. The convention brings...

Alex Reben's work is often absurd, sometimes surreal: a mash-up of giant ears imagined by DALL-E and sculpted by hand out of marble; critical burns generated by ChatGPT that thumb the nose at AI art. But its message is relevant to everyone. Reben is interested in the roles humans play in a world filled with...

Watermarks for AI-generated text are easy to remove and can be stolen and copied, rendering them useless, researchers have found. They say these kinds of attacks discredit watermarks and can fool people into trusting text they shouldn't. Watermarking works by inserting hidden patterns in AI-generated text, which allow computers to detect that the text comes...

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. Justin Graves was managing a scuba dive shop in Louisville, Kentucky, when he first had a seizure. He was talking to someone and suddenly 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. What's next for generative video When OpenAI revealed its new generative video model, Sora, last month, it invited a handful of filmmakers to try it out. This week the company published the results:...

In the last month, a handful of filmmakers have taken Sora for a test drive. The results, which OpenAI published this week, are amazing. The short films are a big jump up even from the cherry-picked demo videos that OpenAI used to tease its new generative model just six weeks ago. Here's how three of...

MIT Technology Review's What's Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. When OpenAI revealed its new generative video model, Sora, last month, it invited a handful of filmmakers to try it out. This week the company published...

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've ever eaten at a fusion restaurant or seen an episode of Glee, you know a mashup can be a wonderful thing. Plug-in hybrid vehicles should be the mashup that 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 problem with plug-in hybrids? Their drivers. Plug-in hybrids are supposed to be the best of both worlds-the convenience of a gas-powered car with the climate benefits of a battery electric vehicle. But...

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. In 2019, MIT Technology Review covered a report that shined a light on how fast China's AI talent pool was growing. Its main finding was pretty interesting: the number of elite AI...

Plug-in hybrids are supposed to be the best of both worlds-the convenience of a gas-powered car with the climate benefits of a battery electric vehicle. But new data suggests that some official figures severely underestimate the emissions they produce. According to new real-world driving data from the European Commission, plug-in hybrids produce roughly 3.5 times...

Crafting a good-tasting beer is a difficult task. Big breweries select hundreds of trained tasters from among their employees to test their new products. But running such sensory tasting panels is expensive, and perceptions of what tastes good can be highly subjective. What if artificial intelligence could help lighten the load? New AI models can...

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 Adobe's bet on non-exploitative AI is paying off Since the beginning of the generative AI boom, there has been a fight over how large AI models are trained. In one camp sit...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The UK is home to AI powerhouse Google DeepMind, a slew of exciting AI startups, and some of the world's best universities. It's also where I live, along with quite a...

Since the beginning of the generative AI boom, there has been a fight over how large AI models are trained. In one camp sit tech companies such as OpenAI that have claimed it is impossible" to train AI without hoovering the internet of copyrighted data. And in the other camp are artists who argue 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. 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...