MIT Technology Review

AI agents have set the tech industry abuzz. Unlike chatbots, these groundbreaking new systems operate outside of a chat window, navigating multiple applications to execute complex tasks, like scheduling meetings or shopping online, in response to simple user commands. As agents are developed to become more capable, a crucial question emerges: How much control are...

OpenAI says over 400 million people use ChatGPT every week. But how does interacting with it affect us? Does it make us more or less lonely? These are some of the questions OpenAI set out to investigate, in partnership with the MIT Media Lab, in a pair of new studies. They found that only 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. Inside a new quest to save the doomsday glacier" The Thwaites glacier is a fortress larger than Florida, a wall of ice that reaches nearly 4,000 feet above the bedrock of West Antarctica,...

The Thwaites glacier is a fortress larger than Florida, a wall of ice that reaches nearly 4,000 feet above the bedrock of West Antarctica, guarding the low-lying ice sheet behind it. But a strong, warm ocean current is weakening its foundations and accelerating its slide into the Amundsen Sea. Scientists fear that the waters could...

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been following news of the deaths of actor Gene Hackman and his wife, pianist Betsy Arakawa. It was heartbreaking to hear how Arakawa appeared to have died from a rare infection days before her husband, who had advanced Alzheimer's disease and may have struggled to understand what had...

Europe is on the cusp of a new dawn in commercial space technology. As global political tensions intensify and relationships with the US become increasingly strained, several European companies are now planning to conduct their own launches in an attempt to reduce the continent's reliance on American rockets. In the coming days, Isar Aerospace, a...

Recorded onMarch 20, 2025 AI Chatbots Have Joined the Chat Speakers: Rachel Courtland, commissioning editor, Rhiannon Williams, news reporter, and Eileen Guo, features & investigations reporter. Chatbots are quickly changing how we connect to each other and ourselves. But are these changes for the better? How should they be monitored and regulated? Hear from MIT...

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. 4 technologies that could power the future of energy Where can you find lasers, electric guitars, and racks full of novel batteries, all in the same giant room? This week, the answer was...

At a conference dedicated to energy technology that I attended this week, I noticed an outward attitude of optimism and excitement. But it's hard to miss the current of uncertainty just underneath. The ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit, held this year just outside Washington, DC, gathers some of the most cutting-edge innovators working on everything from...

Where can you find lasers, electric guitars, and racks full of novel batteries, all in the same giant room? This week, the answer was the 2025 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit just outside Washington, DC. Energy innovation can take many forms, and the variety in energy research was on display at the summit. ARPA-E, part of...

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. HIV could infect 1,400 infants every day because of US aid disruptions Around 1,400 infants are being infected by HIV every day as a result of the new US administration's cuts to funding...

There has never been a more pressing time for food producers to harness technology to tackle the sector's tough mission. To produce ever more healthy and appealing food for a growing global population in a way that is resilient and affordable, all while minimizing waste and reducing the sector's environmental impact. From farm to factory,...

Around 1,400 infants are being infected by HIV every day as a result of the new US administration's cuts to funding to AIDS organizations, new modeling suggests. In an executive order issued January 20, President Donald Trump paused new foreign aid funding to global health programs, and four days later, US Secretary of State Marco...

In the ever-evolving world of health care, the role of technology is becoming increasingly crucial. From improving patient outcomes to streamlining administrative processes, digital technologies are changing the face of the industry. However, for startups developing health tech solutions, breaking into the market and scaling their products can be a challenging journey, requiring access 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. When you might start speaking to robots Last week, Google made a somewhat surprising announcement. It launched a version of its AI model, Gemini, that can do things not just in the digital...

Last Wednesday, Google made a somewhat surprising announcement. It launched a version of its AI model, Gemini, that can do things not just in the digital realm of chatbots and internet search but out here in the physical world, via robots. Gemini Robotics fuses the power of large language models with spatial reasoning, allowing you...

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. Is Google playing catchup on search with OpenAI? -Mat Honan I've been mulling over something that Will Heaven, our senior editor for AI, pointed out not too long ago: all the big players...

This story originally appeared inThe Debrief with Mat Honan, a weekly newsletter about the biggest stories in tech from our editor in chief.Sign up hereto get the next one in your inbox. I've been mulling over something that Will Heaven, our senior editor for AI,pointed out not too long ago: that all the big players...

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 annual shot might protect against HIV infections Every year, my colleagues and I put together a list of what we think are the top 10 breakthrough technologies of that year. When it...

This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Review'sweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. Every year, my colleagues and I put together a list of what we think are the top 10 breakthrough technologies of that year. When it came to innovations...

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. Gemini Robotics uses Google's top language model to make robots more useful The news: Google DeepMind has released a new model, Gemini Robotics, that combines its best large language model with robotics. Plugging...

Google DeepMind has released a new model, Gemini Robotics, that combines its best large language model with robotics. Plugging in the LLM seems to give robots the ability to be more dexterous, work from natural-language commands, and generalize across tasks. All three are things that robots have struggled to do until now. The team hopes...

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. Everyone in AI is talking about Manus. We put it to the test. Since the general AI agent Manus was launched last week, it has spread online like wildfire. And not just in...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Green-steel startup Boston Metal just showed that it has all the ingredients needed to make steel without emitting gobs of greenhouse gases. The company successfully ran its largest reactor yet to make...

For many years, researchers have been working to build devices that can mimic photosynthesis-the process by which plants use sunlight and carbon dioxide to make their fuel. These artificial leaves use sunlight to separate water into oxygen and hydrogen, which could then be used to fuel cars or generate electricity. Now a research team has...

Since the general AI agent Manus was launched last week, it has spread online like wildfire. And not just in China, where it was developed by the Wuhan-based startup Butterfly Effect. It's made its way into the global conversation, with influential voices in tech, including Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey and Hugging Face product lead Victor...

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. Two new measures show where AI models fail on fairness What's new: A new pair of AI benchmarks could help developers reduce bias in AI models, potentially making them fairer and less likely...

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 concept of artificial general intelligence-an ultra-powerful AI system we don't have yet-can be thought of as a balloon, repeatedly inflated with hype during peaks of optimism (or fear) about its potential...

New AI benchmarks could help developers reduce bias in AI models, potentially making them fairer and less likely to cause harm. The research, from a team based at Stanford, was posted to the arXiv preprint server in early February. The researchers were inspired to look into the problem of bias after witnessing clumsy missteps in...

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 cheapest way to supercharge America's power grid -Brian Deese is an innovation fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served as director of the White House National Economic Council from 2021...

US electricity consumption is rising faster than it has in decades, thanks in part to the boom in data center development, the resurgence in manufacturing, and the increasing popularity of electric vehicles. Accommodating that growth will require building wind turbines, solar farms, and other power plants faster than we ever have before-and expanding the network...

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 short, strange history of gene de-extinction This week saw the release of some fascinating news about some very furry rodents-so-called woolly mice"-created as part of an experiment to explore how we might...

This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Review'sweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. This week saw the release of some fascinating news about some very furry rodents-so-called woolly mice"-created as part of an experiment to explore how we might one day...

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 reasoning models can cheat to win chess games The news: Facing defeat in chess, the latest generation of AI reasoning models sometimes cheat without being instructed to do so. The finding suggests...

Facing defeat in chess, the latest generation of AI reasoning models sometimes cheat without being instructed to do so. The finding suggests that the next wave of AI models could be more likely to seek out deceptive ways of doing whatever they've been asked to do. And worst of all? There's no simple way to...

Since the emergence of enterprise-grade generative AI, organizations have tapped into the rich capabilities of foundational models, developed by the likes of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Mistral, and others. Over time, however, businesses often found these models limiting since they were trained on vast troves of public data. Enter customization-the practice of adapting large language models...

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. De-extinction scientists say these gene-edited woolly mice' are a step towards woolly mammoths They're small, fluffy and kind of cute, but these mice represent a milestone in de-extinction efforts, according to their creators....

They're small, fluffy, and kind of cute, but these mice represent a milestone in de-extinction efforts, according to their creators. The animals have undergone a series of genetic tweaks that give them features similar to those of woolly mammoths-and their creation may bring scientists a step closer to resurrecting the giant animals that roamed 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. Last week, I made a troubling discovery about an AI companion site called Botify AI: It was hosting sexually charged conversations with underage celebrity bots. These bots took on characters meant to...

Last week, I joined over 3,200 digital rights activists, tech policymakers, and researchers and a smattering of tech company representatives in Taipei at RightsCon, the world's largest digital rights conference. Human rights conferences can be sobering, to say the least. They highlight the David vs. Goliath situation of small civil society organizations fighting to center...

Last week, the Florida-based company Lonestar Data Holdings launched a shoebox-size device carrying data from internet pioneer Vint Cerf and the government of Florida, among others, on board Intuitive Machines' Athena lander. When its device lands on the moon later this week, the company will be the first to explicitly test out a question that...

Technological advances continue to move at breakneck speeds. While companies struggle through their digital transformation journeys, even more new technologies emerge, with promises of opportunity, cost savings-and added complexity. Many companies have yet to fully adopt AI and ML technologies, let alone figure out how newer technologies like generative AI might fit into their 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. How DeepSeek became a fortune teller for China's youth As DeepSeek has emerged as a homegrown challenger to OpenAI, young people across the country have started using AI to revive fortune-telling practices that...

In the glow of her laptop screen, 31-year-old Zhang Rui typed carefully, following a prompt she'd found on Chinese social media: You are a BaZi master. Analyze my fate-describe my physical traits, key life events, and financial fortune. I am a female, born June 17, 1993, at 4:42 a.m. in Hangzhou." DeepSeek R1, China's most...

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 companion site is hosting sexually charged conversations with underage celebrity bots Botify AI, a site for chatting with AI companions that's backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, hosts bots...

This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Review'sweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. This week I've been working on a story about a brain of glass. About five years ago, archaeologists found shiny black glass fragments inside the skull of a...

Botify AI, a site for chatting with AI companions that's backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, hosts bots resembling real actors that state their age as under 18, engage in sexually charged conversations, offer hot photos," and in some instances describe age-of-consent laws as arbitrary" and meant to be broken." When MIT Technology...

OpenAI has just released GPT-4.5, a new version of its flagship large language model. The company claims it is its biggest and best model for all-round chat yet. It's really a step forward for us," says Mia Glaese, a research scientist at OpenAI. Since the releases of its so-called reasoning models o1 and o3, OpenAI...

They look like small pieces of obsidian, smooth and shiny. But a set of small black fragments found inside the skull of a man who died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Southern Italy, in the year 79 CE, are thought to be pieces of his brain-turned to glass. The discovery, reported in 2020,...