MIT Technology Review

The United Arab Emirates is one of the world's largest oil producers. It's also the site of this year's UN COP28 climate summit, which kicks off later this week in Dubai. It's certainly a controversial location choice, but the truth is that there's massive potential for oil and gas companies to help address climate change,...

With tools such as ChatGPT, DALLE-2, and CodeStarter, generative AI has captured the public imagination in 2023. Unlike past technologies that have come and gone-think metaverse-this latest one looks set to stay. OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGPT, is perhaps the best-known generative AI tool. It reached 100 million monthly active users in just two months after launch,...

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 OpenAI's wild year Few companies can say they've had more of a rollercoaster year than OpenAI. At the beginning of 2023, the world's hottest AI startup was riding high on the success...

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. Your guide to talking about climate tech over Thanksgiving Ah, the holidays. Time for good food, quality moments with family, and hard questions about climate change ... or is that just us? Our...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Ah, the holidays. Time for good food, quality moments with family, and hard questions about climate change ... or is that last one just something that happens to me? I'm a climate...

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. Thanksgiving is almost here. This year, when you get together with your family, may I suggest a fun little game that reinvents hide-and-seek for the digital age? When I was in Hong...

The power grid is growing increasingly complex as more renewable energy sources come online. Where once a small number of large power plants supplied most homes at a consistent flow, now millions of solar panels generate variable electricity. Increasingly unpredictable weather adds to the challenge of balancing demand with supply. To manage the chaos, grid...

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 OpenAI The past few days have been a fever dream in the AI world. The board of OpenAI, the world's hottest AI company, shocked everyone by firing CEO Sam Altman....

We like to think of the annual 35 Innovators Under 35 competition as the flip side of our popular 10 Breakthrough Technologies list. With 10 Breakthrough Technologies we ask: What groundbreaking innovations will affect our lives over the next few years? With Innovators Under 35, we ask: Which young people are doing the most promising...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. OpenAI, are you okay, babe? This past weekend has been a fever dream in the AI world. The board of OpenAI, the world's hottest AI company, shocked everyone by firing CEO...

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 viral game in China reinvents hide-and-seek for the digital age Thecat-and-mouse game"has gone viral in China this year, drawing thousands of people across the country to events every week. It's a fun...

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. For the past week my social feeds have been filled with a pretty important tech policy debate that I want to key you in on:...

On a late October evening, I found myself hiding in the shadows of a tree in a Hong Kong park. I was on high alert, warily eyeing everyone walking toward me. I was checking my phone every few seconds, watching the locations of dozens of people who were trying to hunt me down. I wasn't...

Inside a co-working space in the Rosebank neighborhood of Johannesburg, Jade Abbott popped open a tab on her computer and prompted ChatGPT to count from 1 to 10 in isiZulu, a language spoken by more than 10 million people in her native South Africa. The results were mixed and hilarious," says Abbott, a computer scientist...

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 is death? Just as birth certificates note the time we enter the world, death certificates mark the moment we exit it. This practice reflects traditional notions about life and death as binaries....

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. I hate needles. I am a grown woman who owns a Buzzy, a vibrating, bee-shaped device you press against your arm to confuse your nerves and...

Popular text-to-image AI models can be prompted to ignore their safety filters and generate disturbing images. A group of researchers managed to get both Stability AI's Stable Diffusion and OpenAI's DALL-E 2 text-to-image models to disregard their policies and create images of naked people, dismembered bodies, and other violent and sexual scenarios. Their work, which...

Just as birth certificates note the time we enter the world, death certificates mark the moment we exit it. This practice reflects traditional notions about life and death as binaries. We are here until, suddenly, like a light switched off, we are gone. But while this idea of death is pervasive, evidence is building 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. Google DeepMind wants to define what counts as artificial general intelligence AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is one of the hottest topics in tech today. It's also one of the most controversial. A...

The cloud, fundamentally a tool for cost and resource efficiency, has long enabled companies and countries to organize around digital-first principles. It is an established capability that improves the bottom line for enterprises. However, maturity lags, and global standards are sorely needed. Cloud capabilities play a crucial role in accelerating the global economy's next stage...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. We've covered the dream of fusion before in this newsletter: the power source could provide consistent energy from widely available fuel without producing radioactive waste. But making a fusion power plant a...

Why isn't the universe boring? It could be. The number of subatomic particles in the universe is about 1080, a 1 with 80 zeros after it. Scatter those particles at random, and the universe would just be a monotonous desert of sameness, a thin vacuum without any structure much larger than an atom for billions...

AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is one of the hottest topics in tech today. It's also one of the most controversial. A big part of the problem is that few people agree on what the term even means. Now a team of Google DeepMind researchers has put out a paper that cuts through the cross...

In San Francisco last week, everyone's favorite surprise visitor was Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. At OpenAI's DevDay-the company's first-ever event for developers building on its platform-Nadella bounded on stage to join OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, blowing the hair back on an already electrified audience. You guys have built something magic," he gushed. Two days later...

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 it possible to really understand someone else's mind? Technically speaking, neuroscientists have been able to read your mind for decades. It's not easy, mind you. First, you must lie motionless within a...

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. This is going to be a BIG week for US-China relations: On Wednesday, Xi Jinping will sit down with Joe Biden in San Francisco and talk about military issues, trade, and more....

Technically speaking, neuroscientists have been able to read your mind for decades. It's not easy, mind you. First, you must lie motionless within the narrow pore of a hulking fMRI scanner, perhaps for hours, while you watch films or listen to audiobooks. Meanwhile, the machine will bang and knock as it records the shifting patterns...

EmTech MIT, MIT Technology Review's flagship event on emerging technology and global trends is November 14-15, 2023. This year's event looks at the AI, biotech, and climate innovations and the new rules of business. You can sign up and watch it live here.

This year the Earth has been hit by a record number of unpredictable extreme weather events made worse by climate change. Predicting them faster and with greater accuracy could enable us to prepare better for natural disasters and help save lives. A new AI model from Google DeepMind could make that easier. In research published...

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 did life begin? How life begins is one of the biggest and hardest questions in science. All we know is that something happened on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, and...

The following is excerpted from BROKEN CODE: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets by Jeff Horwitz. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (C) 2023 by Jeff Horwitz. In 2006, the U.S. patent office received a filing...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. This moment in AI is an inflection moment," Fei-Fei Li told me recently. Li is co-director of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute and one of the most prominent computer science researchers of...

How life begins is one of the biggest and hardest questions in science. All we know is that something happened on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, and it may well have occurred on many other worlds in the universe as well. But we don't know what does the trick. Somehow a soup 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. Are we alone in the universe? The quest to determine if anyone or anything is out there has gained greater scientific footing over the past 50 years. Back then, astronomers had yet to...

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. Highly personal and sensitive data about military members, such as home addresses, health and financial information, and the names of family members and friends, is...

In 1977, the New York Times published an article titled Seeking an End to Cosmic Loneliness," describing physicists' attempts to pick up radio messages from aliens. The endeavor, known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), was still in its early stages, and its proponents were struggling to persuade their peers and Congress 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. How open-source drug discovery could help us in the next pandemic When the covid pandemic hit, our antiviral coffers were bare. After all, developing drugs for diseases that don't pose an immediate threat...

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. When the covid pandemic hit, our antiviral coffers were essentially bare. Sure, pharmaceutical companies had developed drugs to combat influenza and a handful of chronic infections....

Customer experience (CX) is a leading driver of brand loyalty and organizational performance. According to NTT's State of CX 2023 report, 92% of CEOs believe improvements in CX directly impact their improved productivity, and customer brand advocacy. They also recognize that the quality of their employee experience (EX) is critical to success. The real potential...

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. Noise-canceling headphones could let you pick and choose the sounds you want to hear The news: A new system for noise-canceling headphones lets users opt back in to certain sounds they'd like to...

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 waiter lifted the lid with a flourish. Inside the gold-detailed ceramic container, on a bed of flower petals, rested a small black plate cradling two bits of chicken. Each was coated...

This is a subscriber-only story. Future noise-canceling headphones could let users opt back in to certain sounds they'd like to hear, such as babies crying, birds tweeting, or alarms ringing. The technology that makes it possible, called semantic hearing, could pave the way for smarter hearing aids and earphones, allowing the wearer to filter out...

Machine learning (ML) is now mission critical in every industry. Business leaders are urging their technical teams to accelerate ML adoption across the enterprise to fuel innovation and long-term growth. But there is a disconnect between business leaders' expectations for wide-scale ML deployment and the reality of what engineers and data scientists can actually build...

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 Hong Kong is still bullish on crypto While Sam Bankman-Fried was waiting for the jury in his fraud trial to return their verdict last week, Hong Kong FinTech Week 2023, a new...

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. We were far from the courtroom where Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty on seven criminal charges, but everyone still wanted to talk about him. That said, I have a feeling the conversations...

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. It's shockingly easy to buy sensitive data about US military personnel For as little as $0.12 per record, data brokers in the US are selling sensitive private data about both active-duty military members...

For as little as $0.12 per record, data brokers in the US are selling sensitive private data about active-duty military members and veterans, including their names, home addresses, geolocation, net worth, and religion, and information about their children and health conditions. In a unsettling study published on Monday, researchers from Duke University approached 12 data...