MIT Technology Review

Google has just released a technical report detailing how much energy its Gemini apps use for each query. In total, the median prompt-one that falls in the middle of the range of energy demand-consumes 0.24 watt-hours of electricity, the equivalent of running a standard microwave for about one second. The company also provided average estimates...

I remember using a princess toothbrush when I was little. The handle was purple, teal, and sparkly. Like most of the other pieces of plastic that have ever been made, it's probably still out there somewhere, languishing in a landfill. (I just hope it's not in the ocean.) I've been thinking about that toothbrush again...

Oleh Kovalskyy thinks that Starlink terminals are built as if someone assembled them with their feet. Or perhaps with their hands behind their back. To demonstrate this last image, Kovalskyy-a large, 47-year-old Ukrainian, clad in sweatpants and with tattoos stretching from his wrists up to his neck-leans over to wiggle his fingers in the air...

NASA and IBM have released a new open-source machine learning model to help scientists better understand and predict the physics and weather patterns of the sun. Surya, trained on over a decade's worth of NASA solar data, should help give scientists an early warning when a dangerous solar flare is likely to hit Earth. Solar...

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 churches use data and AI as engines of surveillance On a Sunday morning in a Midwestern megachurch, worshippers step through sliding glass doors into a bustling lobby-unaware they've just passed through a...

Despite decades of green certifications, better material sourcing, and the use of more sustainable materials such as mass timber, the built environment is still responsible for a third of global emissions worldwide. According to a 2024 UN report, the building sector has fallen significantly behind on progress" toward becoming more sustainable. Changing the way we...

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 to make clean energy progress under Trump in the states-blue and red alike -Joshua A. Basseches is the David and Jane Flowerree Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Public Policy at Tulane...

When the US Food and Drug Administration approved over-the-counter hearing-aid software for Apple's AirPods Pro in September 2024, with a device price point right around $200, I was excited. I have mild to medium hearing loss and tinnitus, and my everyday programmed hearing aids cost just over $2,000-a lower-cost option I chose after my audiologist...

On a Sunday morning in a Midwestern megachurch, worshippers step through sliding glass doors into a bustling lobby-unaware they've just passed through a gauntlet of biometric surveillance. High-speed cameras snap multiple face probes" per second, isolating eyes, noses, and mouths before passing the results to a local neural network that distills these images into digital...

How do you want your AI to treat you? It's a serious question, and it's one that Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, has clearly been chewing on since GPT-5's bumpy launch at the start of the month. He faces a trilemma. Should ChatGPT flatter us, at the risk of fueling delusions that can spiral out of...

The second Trump administration is proving to be more disastrous for the climate and the clean energy economy than many had feared. Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act repealed most of the clean energy incentives in former president Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act. Meanwhile, his EPA administrator moved to revoke the endangerment finding, 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. Why we should thank pigeons for our AI breakthroughs People looking for precursors to artificial intelligence often point to science fiction by authors like Isaac Asimov or thought experiments like the Turing test....

In 1943, while the world's brightest physicists split atoms for the Manhattan Project, the American psychologist B.F. Skinner led his own secret government project to win World War II. Skinner did not aim to build a new class of larger, more destructive weapons. Rather, he wanted to make conventional bombs more precise. The idea struck...

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. Taiwan's silicon shield" could be weakening Taiwanese politics increasingly revolves around one crucial question: Will China invade? China's ruling party has wanted to seize Taiwan for more than half a century. But in...

June had no idea that GPT-5 was coming. The Norwegian student was enjoying a late-night writing session last Thursday when her ChatGPT collaborator started acting strange. It started forgetting everything, and it wrote really badly," she says. It was like a robot." June, who asked that we use only her first name for privacy reasons,...

There is no word for art in most Native American languages. Instead, the closest terms speak not to objecthood but to action and intention. In Lakota, wowahitaka" implies deep thought or reflection, while wohekiye" suggests offering or prayer. Art is not separate from life; it is ceremony, instruction, design. Like architecture or code, it carries...

One winter afternoon in a conference room in Taipei, a pair of twentysomething women dragged their friend across the floor. Lying on the ground in checkered pants and a brown sweatshirt, she was pretending to be either injured or dead. One friend picked her up by her arms, the other grabbed hold of her legs,...

This time five years ago, we were in the throes of the covid-19 pandemic. By August 2020, we'd seen school closures, national lockdowns, and widespread panic. That year, the coronaviruswas responsible for around 3 million deaths, according to the World Health Organization. Then came the vaccines. The first mRNA vaccines for covid were authorized for...

On Monday, Ford announced plans for an affordable electric truck with a 2027 delivery date and an expected price tag of about $30,000, thanks in part to a new manufacturing process that it says will help cut costs. This could be the shot in the arm that the slowing US EV market needs. Sales are...

Artificial intelligence models that can discover drugs and write code still fail at puzzles a lay person can master in minutes. This phenomenon sits at the heart of the challenge of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Can today's AI revolution produce models that rival or surpass human intelligence across all domains? If so, what underlying enablers-whether...

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 Trump's golden dome" missile defense idea is another ripped straight from the movies Within a week of his inauguration, President Trump issued an executive order to develop The Iron Dome for America"...

In 1940, a fresh-faced Ronald Reagan starred as US Secret Service agent Brass Bancroft in Murder in the Air, an action film centered on a fictional superweapon" that could stop enemy aircraft midflight. A mock newspaper in the movie hails it as the greatest peace argument ever invented." The experimental weapon is the exclusive property...

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 the early-adopter judges using AI The propensity for AI systems to make mistakes that humans miss has been on full display in the US legal system as of late. The follies began...

Before OpenAI released GPT-5 last Thursday, CEO Sam Altman said its capabilities made him feel useless relative to the AI." He said working on it carries a weight he imagines the developers of the atom bomb must have felt. As tech giants converge on models that do more or less the same thing, OpenAI's new...

My colleague Grace Huckins has a great story on OpenAI's release of GPT-5, its long-awaited new flagship model. One of the takeaways, however, is that while GPT-5 may make for a better experience than the previous versions, it isn't something revolutionary. GPT-5 is, above all else," Grace concludes, a refined product." This is pretty much...

The propensity for AI systems to make mistakes and for humans to miss those mistakes has been on full display in the US legal system as of late. The follies began when lawyers-including some at prestigious firms-submitted documents citing cases that didn't exist. Similar mistakes soon spread to other roles in the courts. In December,...

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 quantum radar could image buried objects Physicists have created a new type of radar that could help improve underground imaging, using a cloud of atoms in a glass cell to detect reflected...

Physicists have created a new type of radar that could help improve underground imaging, using a cloud of atoms in a glass cell to detect reflected radio waves. The radar is a type of quantum sensor, an emerging technology that uses the quantum-mechanical properties of objects as measurement devices. It's still a prototype, but its...

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. GPT-5 is here. Now what? At long last, OpenAI has released GPT-5. The new system abandons the distinction between OpenAI's flagship models and its o series of reasoning models, automatically routing user queries...

At long last, OpenAI has released GPT-5. The new system abandons the distinction between OpenAI's flagship models and its o series of reasoning models, automatically routing user queries to a fast nonreasoning model or a slower reasoning version. It is now available to everyone through the ChatGPT web interface-though nonpaying users may need to wait...

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. Five ways that AI is learning to improve itself Last week, Mark Zuckerberg declared that Meta aims to achieve smarter-than-human AI. He seems to have a recipe for achieving that goal, and the...

In the spring of 2021, climate scientists were stumped. The global economy was just emerging from the covid-19 lockdowns, but for some reason the levels of methane-a greenhouse gas emitted mainly through agriculture and fossil-fuel production-had soared in the atmosphere the previous year, rising at the fastest rate on record. Researchers around the world set...

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg declared that Meta is aiming to achieve smarter-than-human AI. He seems to have a recipe for achieving that goal, and the first ingredient is human talent: Zuckerberg has reportedly tried to lure top researchers to Meta Superintelligence Labs with nine-figure offers. The second ingredient is AI itself. Zuckerberg recently said on...

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 has finally released open-weight language models The news: OpenAI has finally released its first open-weight large language models since 2019's GPT-2. Unlike the models available through OpenAI's web interface, these new open...

OpenAI has finally released its first open-weight large language models since 2019's GPT-2. These new gpt-oss" models are available in two different sizes and score similarly to the company's o3-mini and o4-mini models on several benchmarks. Unlike the models available through OpenAI's web interface, these new open models can be freely downloaded, run, and even...

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. These protocols will help AI agents navigate our messy lives A growing number of companies are launching AI agents that can do things on your behalf-actions like sending an email, making a document,...

OpenAI has given itself a dual mandate. On the one hand, it's a tech giant rooted in products, including of course ChatGPT, which people around the world reportedly send 2.5 billion requests to each day. But its original mission is to serve as a research lab that will not only create artificial general intelligence" but...

A growing number of companies are launching AI agents that can do things on your behalf-actions like sending an email, making a document, or editing a database. Initial reviews for these agents have been mixed at best, though, because they struggle to interact with all the different components of our digital lives. Part 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. Forcing LLMs to be evil during training can make them nicer in the long run Large language models have recently acquired a reputation for behaving badly. In April, ChatGPT suddenly became an aggressive...

A new study from Anthropic suggests that traits such as sycophancy or evilness are associated with specific patterns of activity in large language models-and turning on those patterns during training can, paradoxically, prevent the model from adopting the related traits. Large language models have recently acquired a reputation for behaving badly. In April, ChatGPT suddenly...

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 decades-old frozen embryos are changing the shape of families This week we welcomed a record-breaking baby to the world. Thaddeus Daniel Pierce, who arrived over the weekend, developed from an embryo that...

This week we welcomed a record-breaking baby to the world. Thaddeus Daniel Pierce, who arrived over the weekend, developed from an embryo that was frozen in storage for 30 and a half years. You could call him the world's oldest baby. His parents, Lindsey and Tim Pierce, were themselves only young children when that embryo...

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 people shaping the future of OpenAI's research -Will Douglas Heaven For the past couple of years, OpenAI has felt like a one-man brand. With his showbiz style and fundraising glitz, CEO...

For the past couple of years, OpenAI has felt like a one-man brand. With his showbiz style and fundraising glitz, CEO Sam Altman overshadows all other big names on the firm's roster. Even his bungled ouster ended with him back on top-and more famous than ever. But look past the charismatic frontman and you get...

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. The Trump administration recently declared war on so-called woke AI," issuing an executive order aimed at preventing companies whose models exhibit a liberal...

This story is part of MIT Technology Review's America Undone" series, examining how the foundations of US success in science and innovation are currently under threat.You can read the rest here. The mechanism that allows the US federal government to regulate climate change is on the chopping block. On Tuesday, US Environmental Protection Agency administrator...

Amsterdam tried using algorithms to fairly assess welfare applicants, but bias still crept in. Why did Amsterdam fail? And more important,can this ever be done right? Hear from MIT Technology Review editor Amanda Silverman, investigative reporter Eileen Guo, and Lighthouse Reports investigative reporter Gabriel Geiger as they explore if algorithms can ever be fair. Speakers:...