MIT Technology Review

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 the Rubin Observatory will help us understand dark matter and dark energy We can put a good figure on how much we know about the universe: 5%. That's how much of what's...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. The launch of a single new AI model does not normally cause much of a stir outside tech circles, nor does it typically spook investors enough to wipe out $1 trillion in...

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. We can put a good figure on how much we know about the universe: 5%. That's how much of what's floating about in the cosmos is...

Recorded onFebruary 3, 2025 What DeepSeek's Breakout Success Means for AI Speakers: Charlotte Jee, news editor, Will Douglas Heaven, senior AI editor, and Caiwei Chen, China reporter. The tech world is abuzz over a new open-source reasoning AI model developed by DeepSeek, a Chinese startup. Its success is remarkable given the constraints that Chinese AI...

AI firm Anthropic has developed a new line of defense against a common kind of attack called a jailbreak. A jailbreak tricks large language models (LLMs) into doing something they have been trained not to, such as help somebody create a weapon. Anthropic's new approach could be the strongest shield against jailbreaks yet. It's at...

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 DeepSeek ripped up the AI playbook-and why everyone's going to follow its lead When the Chinese firm DeepSeek dropped a large language model called R1 two weeks ago, it sent shock waves...

OpenAI has launched a new agent capable of conducting complex, multistep online research into everything from scientific studies to personalized bike recommendations at what it claims is the same level as a human analyst. The tool, called Deep Research, is powered by a version of OpenAI's o3 reasoning model that's been optimized for web browsing...

In the week since a Chinese AI model called DeepSeek became a household name, a dizzying number of narratives have gained steam, with varying degrees of accuracy: that the model is collecting your personal data (maybe); that it will upend AI as we know it (too soon to tell-but do read my colleague Will's story...

On Thursday, Microsoft announced that it's rolling OpenAI's reasoning model o1 out to its Copilot users, and now OpenAI is releasing a new reasoning model, o3-mini, to people who use the free version of ChatGPT. This will mark the first time that the vast majority of people will have access to one of OpenAI's reasoning...

When the Chinese firm DeepSeek dropped a large language model called R1 last week, it sent shock waves through the US tech industry. Not only did R1 match the best of the homegrown competition, it was built for a fraction of the cost-and given away for free. The US stock market lost $1 trillion, President...

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 measuring vaccine hesitancy could help health professionals tackle it This week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump's pick to lead the US's health agencies, has been facing questions from senators as...

This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Review'sweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. This week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump's pick to lead the US's health agencies, has been facing questions from senators as part of his confirmation hearing...

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. Three questions about the future of US climate tech under Trump Donald Trump has officially been in office for just over a week, and the new administration has already issued a blizzard of...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Donald Trump has officially been in office for just over a week, and the new administration has hit the ground running with a blizzard of executive orders and memos. Some of the...

A Canadian startup called Xanadu has built a new quantum computer it says can be easily scaled up to achieve the computational power needed to tackle scientific challenges ranging from drug discovery to more energy-efficient machine learning. Aurora is a photonic" quantum computer, which means it crunches numbers using photonic qubits-information encoded in light. In...

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. Mice with two dads have been created using CRISPR What's new: Mice with two fathers have been born-and have survived to adulthood-following a complex set of experiments by a team in China. The...

Earlier this month, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta will cut back on its content moderation efforts and eliminate fact-checking in the US in favor of the more democratic" approach that X (formerly Twitter) calls Community Notes, rolling back protections that he claimed had been developed only in response to media and government pressure. The move...

Mice with two fathers have been born-and have survived to adulthood-following a complex set of experiments by a team in China. Zhi-Kun Li at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and his colleagues used CRISPR to create the mice, using a novel approach to target genes that normally need to be inherited from both...

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. AI's energy obsession just got a reality check Just a week in, the AI sector has already seen its first battle of wits under the new Trump administration. The clash stems from two...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. Just a week in, the AI sector has already seen its first battle of wits under the new Trump administration. The clash stems from two key pieces of news: the announcement 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. How a top Chinese AI model overcame US sanctions The AI community is abuzz over DeepSeek R1, a new open-source reasoning model. The model was developed by the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which...

On January 8, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang jolted the stock market by saying that practical quantum computing is still 15 to 30 years away, at the same time suggesting those computers will need Nvidia GPUs in order to implement the necessary error correction. However, history shows that brilliant people are not immune to making mistakes....

The AI community is abuzz over DeepSeek R1, a new open-source reasoning model. The model was developed by the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which claims that R1 matches or even surpasses OpenAI's ChatGPT o1 on multiple key benchmarks but operates at a fraction of the cost. This could be a truly equalizing breakthrough that is...

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 launches Operator-an agent that can use a computer for you What's new: After weeks of buzz, OpenAI has released Operator, its first AI agent. Operator is a web app that can carry...

This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Review'sweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. On January 20, his first day in office, US president Donald Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization. Ooh, that's a...

MIT Technology Review's What's Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of themhere. Jan Liphardt teaches bioengineering at Stanford, but to many strangers in Los Altos, California, he is a peculiar man they see walking a four-legged robotic dog down...

After weeks of buzz, OpenAI has released Operator, its first AI agent. Operator is a web app that can carry out simple online tasks in a browser, such as booking concert tickets or filling an online grocery order. The app is powered by a new model called Computer-Using Agent-CUA (coo-ah"), for short-built on top 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. This is what might happen if the US withdraws from the WHO On January 20, his first day in office, US president Donald Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the US from...

On January 20, his first day in office, US president Donald Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization. Ooh, that's a big one," he said as he was handed the document. The US is the biggest donor to the WHO, and the loss of this income is likely...

It might sound like something straight out of the 19th century, but one of the most cutting-edge areas in energy today involves drilling deep underground to hunt for materials that can be burned for energy. The difference is that this time, instead of looking for fossil fuels, the race is on to find natural deposits...

Many organizations have experimented with AI, but they haven't always gotten the full value from their investments. A host of issues standing in the way center on the accuracy, fairness, and securityof AI systems. In response, organizations are actively exploring the principles of responsible AI: the idea that AI systems must be fair, transparent, and...

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 upped its lobbying efforts nearly sevenfold OpenAI spent $1.76 million on government lobbying in 2024 and $510,000 in the last three months of the year alone, according to a new disclosure...

OpenAI spent $1.76 million on government lobbying in 2024 and $510,000 in the last three months of the year alone, according to a new disclosure filed on January 22-a significant jump from 2023, when the company spent just $260,000 on Capitol Hill. The company also disclosed a new in-house lobbyist, Meghan Dorn, who worked for...

The United States and China are entangled in what many have dubbed an AI arms race." In the early days of this standoff, US policymakers drove an agenda centered on winning" the race, mostly from an economic perspective. In recent months, leading AI labs such asOpenAIandAnthropicgot involved in pushing the narrative of beating China" in...

Forget massive steel tanks-some scientists want to make chemicals with the help of rocks deep beneath Earth's surface. New research shows that ammonia, a chemical crucial for fertilizer, can be produced from rocks at temperatures and pressures that are common in the subsurface. The research was published today in Joule, and MIT Technology Review can...

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 it's so hard to use AI to diagnose cancer Finding and diagnosing cancer is all about spotting patterns. Radiologists use x-rays and magnetic resonance imaging to illuminate tumors, and pathologists examine tissue...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Peering into the body to find and diagnose cancer is all about spotting patterns. Radiologists use x-rays and magnetic resonance imaging to illuminate tumors, and pathologists examine tissue from kidneys, livers,...

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 second wave of AI coding is here Ask people building generative AI what generative AI is good for right now-what they're really fired up about-and many will tell you: coding. Everyone from...

Ask people building generative AI what generative AI is good for right now-what they're really fired up about-and many will tell you: coding. That's something that's been very exciting for developers," Jared Kaplan, chief scientist at Anthropic, told MIT Technology Review this month: It's really understanding what's wrong with code, debugging it." Copilot, a tool...

When you think of AI's contributions to science, you probably think of AlphaFold, the Google DeepMind protein-folding program that earned its creator a Nobel Prize last year. Now OpenAI says it's getting into the science game too-with a model for engineering proteins. The company says it has developed a language model that dreams up proteins...

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. We need to protect the protocol that runs Bluesky -Eli Pariser & Deepti Doshi Last week, when Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta would be ending third-party fact-checking, it was a shocking pivot, but not...

Last week, when Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would be ending third-party fact-checking, it was a shocking pivot, but not exactly surprising. It's just the latest example of a billionaire flip-flop affecting our social lives on the internet. After January 6, 2021, Zuckerberg bragged to Congress about Facebook's industry-leading fact-checking program" and banned Donald Trump...

This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Review'sweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. Over the past few months, I've been working on a piece about IVF embryos. The goal of in vitro fertilization is to create babies via a bit 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. What to expect from Neuralink in 2025 In November, a young man named Noland Arbaugh announced he'd be livestreaming from his home for three days straight. His broadcast was in some ways typical...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Lately, the vibes have been good for nuclear power. Public support is building, and public and private funding have made the technology more economical in key markets. There's also a swell of...

MIT Technology Review's What's Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of themhere. In November, a young man named Noland Arbaugh announced he'd be livestreaming from his home for three days straight. His broadcast was in some ways typical fare:...

Meta has released a new AI model that can translate speech from 101 different languages. It represents a step toward real-time, simultaneous interpretation, where words are translated as soon as they come out of someone's mouth. Typically, translation models for speech use a multistep approach. First they translate speech into text. Then they translate that...

In the rapidly evolving landscape of digital innovation, staying adaptable isn't just a strategy-it's a survival skill. Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face," says Luis Nino, digital manager for technology ventures and innovation at Chevron, quoting Mike Tyson. Drawing from a career that spans IT, HR, and infrastructure operations across...

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. China wants to restore the sea with high-tech marine ranches A short ferry ride from the port city of Yantai, on the northeast coast of China, sits Genghai No. 1, a 12,000-metric-ton ring...

Imagine the bustling floors of tomorrow's manufacturing plant: Robots, well-versed in multiple disciplines through adaptive AI education, work seamlessly and safely alongside human counterparts. These robots can transition effortlessly between tasks-from assembling intricate electronic components to handling complex machinery assembly. Each robot's unique education enables it to predict maintenance needs, optimize energy consumption, and innovate...