MIT Technology Review

Google DeepMind has used a large language model to crack a famous unsolved problem in pure mathematics. In a paper published in Nature today, the researchers say it is the first time a large language model has been used to discover a solution to a long-standing scientific puzzle-producing verifiable and valuable new information that did...

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 two words that pushed international climate talks into overtime The annual UN climate negotiations at COP28 in Dubai have officially come to a close. Delegates scrambled to get a deal together in...

A new system that teaches robots a domestic task in around 20 minutes could help the field of robotics overcome one of its biggest challenges: a lack of training data. The open-source system, called Dobb-E, was trained using data collected from real homes. It can help to teach a robot how to open an air...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. The annual UN climate negotiations at COP28 in Dubai have officially come to a close. Delegates scrambled to get a deal together in the early morning hours, and the meetings ended a...

Vertex Pharmaceuticals has agreed to buy rights to use a dominant CRISPR patent owned by the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, avoiding a potential lawsuit over its new gene-editing treatment for sickle-cell disease. The agreement allows Vertex to start selling its treatment, approved last Friday, without fear of patent infringement claims. The one-time treatment...

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 former Department of Energy staffers warn we're doing carbon removal all wrong The carbon removal industry is just starting to take off, but some experts are warning that it's already headed in...

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. It's a perennial debate: whether American tech companies are contributing to government control of the internet in China. But long before Apple ceded control of local user data to the state or...

The carbon removal industry is just starting to take off, but some experts are warning that it's already headed in the wrong direction. Two former staffers of the US agency responsible for advancing the technology argue that the profit-driven industry's focus on cleaning up corporate emissions will come at the expense of helping to pull...

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 decades-long fight over Yahoo's misdeeds in China When you think of Big Tech these days, Yahoo is probably not top of mind. But for Chinese dissident Xu Wanping, the company still...

When you think of Big Tech these days, Yahoo is probably not top of mind. But for a 62-year-old Chinese dissident named Xu Wanping, the company still looms large-and has for nearly two decades. In 2005, Xu was arrested for signing online petitions relating to anti-Japanese protests. He didn't use his real name, but he...

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. It's done. It's over. Two and a half years after it was first introduced-after months of lobbying and political arm-wrestling, plus grueling final negotiations that took nearly 40 hours-EU lawmakers have reached a...

Brain organoids, clumps of human brain cells grown in a dish, can be hooked up to an electronic chip and carry out simple computational tasks, a new study shows. Feng Guo and his team at Indiana University Bloomington generated a brain organoid from stem cells, attached it to a computer chip, and connected their setup,...

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 the EU AI Act was so hard to agree on On Saturday, European Union lawmakers announced they'd finally agreed the terms of the final version of the EU AI Act, a major...

This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review's weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. Update: On December 8, 2023, the EU AI Act was agreed on, after this story was written and sent as MIT Technology Review's weekly tech...

The results of my genetic test arrived in an unpretentious white envelope. It was the summer of 2021, and I almost missed it when I flipped through the mail, but I set it aside from the rest of the bills to look at later. About a month before, I had sent a sample of my...

No one can predict the future, but here at MIT Technology Review we spend much of our time thinking about what it might hold. One thing we know is that it's especially hard to make predictions about technology. Most emerging technologies fizzle or flame out. Some start out as consumer devices but wind up finding...

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 lucky break behind the first CRISPR treatment The world's first commercial gene-editing treatment is set to start changing the lives of people with sickle-cell disease. It's called Casgevy, and it was approved...

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. The human body is a labyrinth of vessels and tubing, full of barriers that are difficult to break through. That poses a serious hurdle for doctors....

There are two bowls on the kitchen table: one made of plastic, the other metal. You ask the robot to pick up the bowl and put it in the microwave. Which one will it choose? A human might ask for clarification, but given the vague command, the robot may place the metal bowl in the...

The world's first commercial gene-editing treatment is set to start changing the lives of people with sickle-cell disease.It's called Casgevy, and it was approved last month in the UK. US approval is pending this week. The treatment, which will be sold in the US by Vertex Pharmaceuticals, employs CRISPR, the Nobel-winning molecular scissors that have...

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. Google DeepMind's new Gemini model looks amazing-but could signal peak AI hype Hype about Gemini, Google DeepMind's long-rumored response to OpenAI's GPT-4, has been building for months. Now, the company has finally revealed...

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 could go back in time, what would you change about your life, or the world? The idea of giving myself some much-needed advice is appealing (don't cut your own bangs...

Google released the first phase of its next-generation AI model, Gemini, today. Gemini reflects years of efforts from inside Google, overseen and driven by its CEO, Sundar Pichai. (You can read all about Gemini in our report from Melissa Heikkila and Will Douglas Heaven here.) Pichai, who previously oversaw Chrome and Android, is famously product...

Hype about Gemini, Google DeepMind's long-rumored response to OpenAI's GPT-4, has been building for months. Today the company finally revealed what it has been working on in secret all this time. Was the hype justified? Yes-and no. Gemini is Google's biggest AI launch yet-its push to take on competitors OpenAI and Microsoft in the race...

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. Millions of coders are now using AI assistants. How will that change software? Two weeks into the coding class he was teaching at Duke University in North Carolina this spring, Noah Gift told...

Two weeks into the coding class he was teaching at Duke University in North Carolina this spring, Noah Gift told his students to throw out the course materials he'd given them. Instead of working with Python, one of the most popular entry-level programming languages, the students would now be using Rust, a language that was...

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. Have you ordered food delivery lately? If you have, you probably know that particular feeling of frustration when you have to wait too long for your order or, when you finally receive...

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. Make no mistake-AI is owned by Big Tech -By Amba Kak, Sarah Myers West and Meredith Whittaker, members of the AI Now Institute Until late November, when the epic saga of OpenAI's board...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. World leaders are currently in Dubai for the UN COP28 climate talks. As 2023 is set to become thehottest year on record, this year's meeting is amoment of reckoning for oil...

Until late November, when the epic saga of OpenAI's board breakdown unfolded, the casual observer could be forgiven for assuming that the industry around generative AI was a vibrant competitive ecosystem. But this is not the case-nor has it ever been. And understanding why is fundamental to understanding what AI is, and what threats it...

Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are on track to reach a record high by the end of 2023. And a new report shows just how insignificant technologies that pull greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere are by comparison. Worldwide, those emissions are projected to reach 36.8 billion metric tons in 2023, a 1.1% increase...

Advances in machine learning (ML) and AI are emerging on a near-daily basis-meaning that industry, academia, government, and society writ large are evolving their understanding of the associated risks and capabilities in real time. As enterprises seek to capitalize on the potential of AI, it's critical that they develop, maintain, and advance state-of-the-art ML practices...

On a picturesque fall day a few years ago, I opened the mailbox and took out an envelope as thick as a Bible that would change my life. The package was from Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and it contained a consent form to participate in a clinical trial for a new gene-editing drug to treat sickle cell...

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. Climate tech is back-and this time, it can't afford to fail A cleantech bust in 2011 left almost all the renewable-energy startups in the US either dead or struggling to survive. Over a...

This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review's weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. I want to share a story about an inspirational young woman and her mother, who have stepped into the fray on AI policy issues after...

There are no jury trials in Chinese courts-but if you think the noodles you just got delivered were too hot, a jury of your peers will quickly determine guilt in the app where you ordered it. Jury trials, in fact, are plentiful on Chinese apps-especially Meituan, the country's most popular food delivery service, where millions...

Lost in a stupor of deja vu, I rang the intercom buzzer a second time. I had the odd sensation of being unstuck in time. The headquarters of this solar startup looked strangely similar to its previous offices, which I had visited more than a decade before. The name of the company had changed from...

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. Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone The news: Generating a single image using a powerful AI model takes as much energy as fully charging your...

On October 20, Francesca Mani was called to the counselor's office at her New Jersey high school. A 14-year-old sophomore and a competitive fencer, Francesca wasn't one for getting in trouble. That day, a rumor had been circulating the halls: over the summer, boys in the school had used artificial intelligence to create sexually explicit...

That's a real nice CRISPR cure you have there. It would be a pity if anything happened to it. Okay. Drop the tough-guy accent and toss the black fedora aside. But I do believe that similar conversations could be occurring now that a historic gene-editing cure is coming to market, as soon as this year....

Each time you use AI to generate an image, write an email, or ask a chatbot a question, it comes at a cost to the planet. In fact, generating an image using a powerful AI model takes as much energy as fully charging your smartphone, according to a new study by researchers at the 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. The University of California has all but dropped carbon offsets-and thinks you should, too In the fall of 2018, the University of California tasked a team of researchers with identifying projects from which...

In the fall of 2018, the University of California (UC) tasked a team of researchers with identifying tree planting or similar projects from which it could confidently purchase carbon offsets that would reliably cancel out greenhouse gas emissions across its campuses. The researchers found next to nothing. We took a look across the whole market...

From EV batteries to solar cells to microchips, new materials can supercharge technological breakthroughs. But discovering them usually takes months or even years of trial-and-error research. Google DeepMind hopes to change that with a new tool that uses deep learning to dramatically speed up the process of discovering new materials. Called graphical networks for material...

Money can't buy happiness, but X Prize founder Peter Diamandis hopes it might be able to buy better health. Today the X Prize Foundation, which funds global competitions to spark development of breakthrough technologies, announced a new $101 million prize-the largest yet-to address the mental and physical decline that comes with aging. The winners will...

Imagine an integrated workplace with 3D visualizations that augment presentations, interactive and accelerated onboarding, and controlled training simulations. This is the future of immersive technology that global head of Immersive Technology Research at JPMorgan Chase, Blair MacIntyre is working to build. Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies can blend physical and digital dimensions...

Procurement professionals face challenges more daunting than ever. Recent years' supply chain disruptions and rising costs, deeply familiar to consumers, have had an outsize impact on business buying. At the same time, procurement teams are under increasing pressure to supply their businesses while also contributing to business growth and profitability. Deloitte's 2023 Global Chief Procurement...

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 the UN climate talks are a moment of reckoning for oil and gas companies The United Arab Emirates is one of the world's largest oil producers. It's also the site of this...