MIT Technology Review

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...

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...