MIT Technology Review

If you're following AI news, you're probably getting whiplash. AI is a gold rush. AI is a bubble. AI is taking your job. AI can't even read a clock. The 2026 AI Index from Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, AI's annual report card, comes out today and cuts through some of that noise....

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. You have no choice in reading this article-maybe How do humans make decisions? The question has been on Uri Maoz's mind since he read an article in his early twenties suggesting...

Grizzly bears have made such a comeback across eastern Montana that in 2017, the state hired its first-ever prairie-based grizzly manager: wildlife biologist Wesley Sarmento. For some seven years, Sarmento worked to keep both the bears, which are still listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, and the humans, who are sprawling into once-wild...

Uri Maoz loved doing his human research, back when he was getting his PhD. He was studying a very specific topic in computational neuroscience: how the brain instructs our arms to move and how our gray matter in turn perceives that motion. Then his professor asked him to deliver an undergrad lecture. Maoz assumed his...

Is it the Department of Defense or the Department of War? The Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of America? A vaccine-or an individualized neoantigen treatment"? That's the Trump-era vocabulary paradox facing Moderna, the covid-19 shot maker whose plans for next-generation mRNA vaccines against flus and emerging pathogens have been dashed by vaccine skeptics in...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Constellations -Constellations is a short story by Jeff VanderMeer, the author of the critically acclaimed, bestselling Southern Reach series. A spacecraft has crash-landed on a hostile planet. The only survivors...

I. We had crash-landed on the planet. We were far from home. The spaceship could not be repaired, and the rescue beacon had failed. Besides me, only the astrogator, part of the captain, and the ship's AI mind were left. Outside, the atmosphere registered as hostile to most organisms. We huddled in the lifeboat, which...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Isfakegrassabadidea?TheAstroTurfwarsarefarfromover. In 2001,Americans installed just over 7 million square meters of synthetic turf. By 2024, that number was 79 million square meters-enough to carpet all of Manhattan and then some. The...

A rare warm spell in January melted enough snow to uncover Cornell University's newest athletic field, built for field hockey. Months before, it was a meadow teeming with birds and bugs; now it's more than an acre of synthetic turf roughly the color of the felt on a pool table, almost digital in its saturation....

When I started digging into desalination technology for a new story, I couldn't help but obsess over the numbers. I'd known on some level that desalination-pulling salt out of seawater to produce fresh water-was an increasingly important technology, especially in water-stressed regions including the Middle East. But just how much some countries rely on desalination,...

We evolved for a linear world. If you walk for an hour, you cover a certain distance. Walk for two hours and you cover double that distance. This intuition served us well on the savannah. But it catastrophically fails when confronting AI and the core exponential trends at its heart. From the time I began...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Desalination plants in the Middle East are increasingly vulnerable As the conflict in Iran has escalated, a crucial resource is under fire: the desalinization technology that supplies water in the region.President...

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. As the conflict in Iran has escalated, a crucial resource is under fire: the desalination technology that supplies water across much of the region. In early...

Unlike static, rules-based systems, AI agents can learn, adapt, and optimize processes dynamically. As they interact with data, systems, people, and other agents in real time, AI agents can execute entire workflows autonomously. But unlocking their potential requires redesigning processes around agents rather than bolting them onto fragmented legacy workflows using traditional optimization methods. Companies...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. The one piece of data that couldactually shedlight on your job and AI Within Silicon Valley's orbit, an AI-fueledjobs apocalypse is spoken about as a given. Now even economists who have...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. Within Silicon Valley's orbit, an AI-fueled jobs apocalypse is spoken about as a given. The mood is so grim that a societal impacts researcher at Anthropic, responding Wednesday to a call for...

For years Mike McClary sold the Guardian LTE Flashlight, a heavy-duty black model, online through his small outdoor brand. The product, designed for brightness and durability, became one of his most popular items ever. Even after he stopped offering it around 2017, customers kept sending him emails asking where they could buy it. When McClary...

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. In January, Elon Musk's SpaceX filed an application with the US Federal Communications Commission to launch up to one million data centers into Earth's orbit. The...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Fuel prices are soaring. Plastic could be next. As the war in Iran continues, one of the most visible global economic ripple effects has been fossil-fuel prices.But looking ahead, further consequencescould...

As the war in Iran continues to engulf the Middle East and the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, one of the most visible global economic ripple effects has been fossil-fuel prices. In particular, you can't get away from news about the price of gasoline, which just topped an average of $4 a gallon in the...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. The gig workers who are training humanoid robots at home When Zeus, a medical student in Nigeria, returns to his apartment from a long day at the hospital, he straps his...

When Zeus, a medical student living in a hilltop city in central Nigeria, returns to his studio apartment from a long day at the hospital, he turns on his ring light, straps his iPhone to his forehead, and starts recording himself. He raises his hands in front of him like a sleepwalker and puts a...

In the early days of large language models (LLMs), we grew accustomed to massive 10x jumps in reasoning and coding capability with every new model iteration. Today, those jumps have flattened into incremental gains. The exception is domain-specialized intelligence, where true step-function improvements are still the norm. When a model is fused with an organization's...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. There are more AI health tools than ever-but how well do they work? In the last few months alone, Microsoft, Amazon, and OpenAI have all launched medical chatbots. There'sa clear demand...

For decades, artificial intelligence has been evaluated through the question of whether machines outperform humans. From chess to advanced math, from coding to essay writing, the performance of AI models and applications is tested against that of individual humans completing tasks. This framing is seductive: An AI vs. human comparison on isolated problems with clear...

Earlier this month, Microsoft launched Copilot Health, a new space within its Copilot app where users will be able to connect their medical records and ask specific questions about their health. A couple of days earlier, Amazon had announced that Health AI, an LLM-based tool previously restricted to members of its One Medical service, would...

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 Thursday, a California judge temporarily blocked the Pentagon from labeling Anthropic a supply chain risk and ordering government agencies to stop using its AI. It's the latest development in the month-long...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Inside the stealthy startup that pitched brainless human clones Afteroperatingin secrecy for years, R3 Bio, a California-based startup, suddenly revealed last week that it had raised money to createnonsentientmonkey organ sacks"...

After operating in secrecy for years, a startup company called R3 Bio, in Richmond, California, suddenly shared details about its work last week-saying it had raised money to create nonsentient monkey organ sacks" as an alternative to animal testing. In an interview with Wired, R3 listed three investors: billionaire Tim Draper, the Singapore-based fund Immortal...

Think of this as a human body," says Javier Gonzalez. In front of me is essentially a metal box on wheels. Standing at around a meter in height, it reminds me of a stainless-steel counter in a restaurant kitchen. It is covered in flexible plastic tubing-which act as veins and arteries-connecting a series of transparent...

This week I reported on some rather unusual research that focuses on the brain of L. Stephen Coles. Coles was a gerontologist who died from pancreatic cancer in 2014. He had spent the latter part of his career specializing in human longevity. And before he died, he decided to have his brain preserved by a...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Why this battery company is pivoting to AI Qichao Hudoesn'tmince words about the state of the battery industry. Almost everyWestern battery company has either died or is going to die.It'skind of...

The best snow-forecasting app for skiers and snowboarders isn't from any of the federally funded weather services. Nor from any of the big-name brands. It's an independent app startup that leverages government data, its own AI models, and decades of alpine-life experience to offer better snow (and soon avalanche) predictions than anything else out there....

I live in a dense city with plentiful public transportation options and limited parking, so I don't own a car. I'm often utterly clueless about the current price of gasoline. But as the conflict in Iran has escalated, fossil-fuel prices have been on a roller-coaster, and I've started paying attention. In the US, average gas...

Listen to the session or watch below Whether it's the race to find life on Mars, the campaign to outsmart killer asteroids, or the quest to make the moon a permanent home to astronauts, scientists' efforts in space can tell us more about where humanity is headed. This subscriber-only discussion examines the progress and possibilities...

Qichao Hu doesn't mince words about how he sees the state of the battery industry. Almost every Western battery company has either died or is going to die. It's kind of the reality," he says. Hu is the CEO of SES AI, a Massachusetts-based battery company. It once had aims of making huge amounts of...

Axiom Math, a startup based in Palo Alto, California, has released a free new AI tool for mathematicians, designed to discover mathematical patterns that could unlock solutions to long-standing problems. The tool, called Axplorer, is a redesign of an existing one called PatternBoost that Francois Charton, now a research scientist at Axiom, co-developed in 2024...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. This scientist rewarmed and studied pieces of his friend's cryopreserved brain L. StephenColes'sbrain sits in a vat at a storage facility in Arizona. It has been held there at a temperature...

Imagine telling a digital agent, Use my points and book a family trip to Italy. Keep it within budget, pick hotels we've liked before, and handle the details." Instead of returning a list of links, the agent assembles an itinerary and executes the purchase. That shift, from assistance to execution, is what makes agentic AI...

AI is at war. Anthropic and the Pentagon feuded over how to weaponize Anthropic's AI model Claude; then OpenAI swept the Pentagon off its feet with an opportunistic and sloppy" deal. Users quit ChatGPT in droves. People marched through London in the biggest protest against AI to date. If you're keeping score, Anthropic-the company founded...

We're starting to give AI agents real autonomy, but are we prepared for what could happen next? This subscriber-only eBook explores this and angles from experts, such as If we continue on the current path ... we are basically playing Russian roulette with humanity." by Grace Huckins June 12, 2025 Related Stories: Access all subscriber-only...

L. Stephen Coles's brain sits cushioned in a vat at a storage facility in Arizona. It has been held there at a temperature of around -146 degrees C for over a decade, largely undisturbed. That is, apart from the time, a little over a year ago, when scientists slowly lifted the brain to take photos...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. The hardest question to answer about AI-fueleddelusions Whatactually happenswhen people spiral into delusion with AI? To find out, Stanford researchersanalyzedtranscripts from chatbot users who experienced these spirals. Their findings suggest that...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. I was originally going to write this week's newsletter about AI and Iran, particularly the news we broke last Tuesday that the Pentagon is making plans for AI companies to train on...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. The Bay Area's animal welfare movement wants to recruit AI In early February, animal welfare advocates and AI researchers arrived in stocking feet at Mox, a scrappy, shoes-free coworking space in...

In early February, animal welfare advocates and AI researchers gathered in stocking feet at Mox, a scrappy, shoes-free coworking space in San Francisco. Yellow and red canopies billowed overhead, Persian rugs blanketed the floor, and mosaic lamps glowed beside potted plants. In the common area, a wildlife advocate spoke passionately to a crowd lounging in...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. OpenAI is throwing everything into building a fully automated researcher OpenAI has a new grand challenge: building an AI researcher-a fully automated agent-based system capable of tackling large, complex problems by...

OpenAI is refocusing its research efforts and throwing its resources into a new grand challenge. The San Francisco firm has set its sights on building what it calls an AI researcher, a fully automated agent-based system that will be able to go off and tackle large, complex problems by itself. OpenAI says that this new...

This week I want to look at where we are with psychedelics, the mind-altering substances that have somehow made the leap from counterculture to major focus of clinical research. Compounds like psilocybin-which is found in magic mushrooms-are being explored for all sorts of health applications, including treatments for depression, PTSD, addiction, and even obesity. Over...