MIT Technology Review

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. Elon Musk’s Neuralink hopes to test its brain implant in a human next year Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface company Neuralink is planning to test a brain implant in humans in six months, the…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. I’m coming in with a hot take this week: plastics might just be the most useful inventions of the 20th century. Before you get out the pitchforks, let me take you on a…

Buzz around GPT-4, the anticipated but as-yet-unannounced follow-up to OpenAI’s groundbreaking large language model, GPT-3, is growing by the week. But OpenAI is not yet done tinkering with the previous version. The San Francisco-based company has released a demo of a new model called ChatGPT, a spin-off of GPT-3 that is geared toward answering questions…

UPDATE: I’m claiming victory. Neuralink disclosed it has been testing vision implants in monkeys, although it hasn’t made as much progress as I hoped for. In a presentation lasting more than two hours, Elon Musk said he hoped to win US Food and Drug Administration approval to implant a Neuralink computer inside a human’s skull…

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. Elon Musk has created a toxic mess for the LGBTQ+ community. I would know. By Scott Wiener, a California state senator who represents San Francisco and northern San Mateo County. A mere day…

We tend to lump all plastics into one category, but water bottles, milk jugs, egg cartons, and credit cards are actually made from different materials, as you’ve probably noticed while trying to figure out what can go in your recycling bin. Once they’ve reached a recycling facility, the plastic must be separated, a process that…

China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. The past week has meant many sleepless nights for people in China, and for people like me who are intently watching from afar. You may have seen that nearly three years after the pandemic started,…

A mere day after Elon Musk reactivated Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter account, she tweeted that I’m a “communist groomer,” presumably because I’m a gay Jewish Democratic elected official from San Francisco. Greene’s tweet also promoted her proposed federal law to ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth and to make it effectively impossible for adult…

For years, the 150-year-old Colorado State Fair has held its fine art competition under little media glare. But when it announced the 2022 winners in August, this little-known local event immediately sparked controversy around the globe. Judges had picked synthetic media artist Jason Allen’s artificial intelligence-generated work “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” as the winner 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 AI myth Western lawmakers get wrong While the US and the EU may differ on how to regulate tech, their lawmakers seem to agree on one thing: the West needs to ban…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. While the US and the EU may differ on how to regulate tech, their lawmakers seem to agree on one thing: the West needs to ban AI-powered social scoring. As they understand it, social…

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. What’s next in cybersecurity In the world of cybersecurity, there is always one certainty: more hacks. That is the unavoidable constant in an industry that will spend an estimated $150 billion worldwide this…

This story is a part of MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series, where we look across industries, trends, and technologies to let you know what to expect in the coming year. In the world of cybersecurity, there is always one certainty: more hacks. That is the unavoidable constant in an industry that will spend an…

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. A bot that watched 70,000 hours of Minecraft could unlock AI’s next big thing The news: An AI that binged on 70,000 hours of people playing Minecraft has learned how to play the…

OpenAI has built the best Minecraft-playing bot yet by making it watch 70,000 hours of video of people playing the popular computer game. It showcases a powerful new technique that could be used to train machines to carry out a wide range of tasks by binging on sites like YouTube, a vast and untapped source…

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. Peter Zhu was just 19 years old when he died following a skiing accident in West Point, New York. His donor card made clear he had wanted to donate his organs. But…

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 US and China are pointing fingers at each other over climate change The UN climate conference wrapped up over the weekend after marathon negotiations that ran way over. The most notable outcome was the…

The UN climate conference just wrapped up over the weekend after a marathon negotiating session that stretched talks nearly 48 hours past their scheduled conclusion. (A question for my editor: the UN isn’t hitting deadlines, so do I still have to?) The most notable outcome from the conference was establishment of a fund to help…

Large language models are one of the hottest areas of AI research right now, with companies racing to release programs like GPT-3 that can write impressively coherent articles and even computer code. But there’s a problem looming on the horizon, according to a team of AI forecasters: we might run out of data to train…

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. Meta’s game-playing AI can make and break alliances like a human Meta has created an AI that can beat humans at an online version of Diplomacy, a popular strategy game in which seven…

Meta has created an AI that can beat humans at an online version of Diplomacy, a popular strategy game in which seven players compete for control of Europe by moving pieces around on a map. Unlike other board games that AI has mastered, such as chess and Go, Diplomacy requires players to talk to each…

China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. This morning, I published an explainer on China’s social credit system. The government released a draft law on November 14 that will eventually serve as the top-level guidance on how the country builds the system. …

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. Here’s why China’s new social credit law matters It’s easier to talk about what China’s social credit system isn’t than what it is. Ever since 2014, when China announced plans to build it,…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. When Meta launched Galactica, an open-source large language model designed to help scientists, the company—reeling from criticism of its expensive metaverse investments and its recent massive layoffs—was hoping for a big PR win. Instead,…

It’s easier to talk about what China’s social credit system isn’t than what it is. Ever since 2014, when China announced a six-year plan to build a system to reward actions that build trust in society and penalize the opposite, it has been one of the most misunderstood things about China in Western discourse. Now,…

When Ananye Agarwal took his dog out for a walk up and down the steps in the local park near Carnegie Mellon University, other dogs stopped in their tracks. That’s because Agarwal’s dog was a robot—and a special one at that. Unlike other robots, which tend to rely heavily on an internal map to get…

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. How much would you pay to see a woolly mammoth? Sara Ord has one of the most futuristic job titles around—director of species restoration at Colossal Biosciences, the world’s first “de-extinction” company. Her…

In August, President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) into law, the largest US climate bill in more than a decade. The legislation puts the country back on track to meet its commitments under the 2015 Paris Agreement. Beyond enacting specific measures to reduce US carbon emissions by more than 40 percent by…

Sara Ord spent her week talking to scientists about skin cells from a mouse-size marsupial called the dunnart. The cells were sent to the “de-extinction” company where she works, Colossal Biosciences, from collaborators in Australia. Ord’s job is to lead a team that’s figuring out how to use gene editing to gradually change the DNA…

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. Former Twitter employees fear the platform might only last weeks Recently-departed Twitter staff have told MIT Technology Review they worry that the platform has weeks to live based on current staffing levels, mass…

On November 15 Meta unveiled a new large language model called Galactica, designed to assist scientists. But instead of landing with the big bang Meta hoped for, Galactica has died with a whimper after three days of intense criticism. Yesterday the company took down the public demo that it had encouraged everyone to try out.…

This article was updated on November 21, 2022 after delegates at COP27 reached an agreement on financing for climate loss and damages. Nearly two days after talks were scheduled to end, leaders at the annual UN climate conference finally reached an agreement that includes a historic climate finance deal. Delegates at COP27 agreed to establish…

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. You’re only as old as you feel, so they say. Now biological clocks attempt to put a number on it. These tools analyze proteins in your blood, chemical markers on your DNA, or…

Recently departed Twitter staff have told MIT Technology Review they worry that the platform has weeks to live judging from current staffing levels, mass resignations overnight, and the morale of those few who remain. With some within Twitter estimating that 75% of those remaining plan to quit after Elon Musk sent an email informing them…

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. A new tick-borne disease is killing cattle in the US In the spring of 2021, Cynthia and John Grano, who own a cattle operation in Culpeper County, Virginia, started noticing some of their…

This story comes from The Spark, my weekly newsletter on energy. Sign up to get it in your inbox first here. There’s a lot going on in the climate world. Election workers are still counting and recounting votes in the US to determine control of Congress, and at the UN climate conference, delegates are heads-down…

In the spring of 2021, Cynthia and John Grano, who own a cattle operation and sell performance horses in Culpeper County, Virginia, started noticing some of their cows slowing down and acting “spacey.” They figured the animals were suffering from anaplasmosis, a common infectious disease that causes anemia in cattle. But Melinda McCall, their veterinarian,…

Although the world population has continued to steadily increase, farming practices have largely remained the same. Amid this growth, climate change poses great challenges to the agricultural industry and its capacity to feed the world sustainably. According to the World Bank, 70% of the world’s fresh water is used in agriculture and droughts and heat…

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 billion-dollar meeting for the mega-rich who want to live forever Back in September, Jessica Hamzelou, our senior biotech reporter, traveled to Gstaad, a swanky ski-resort town in the Swiss…

China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Honestly, it’s hard to keep up with the news these days. If you aren’t already consumed with the slow-moving implosion of Twitter or the quick collapse of crypto exchange FTX, there are also the flashy…

“Who wants to live forever?” The immortal words of Freddie Mercury blast from the speakers as blue lights swivel around the room and a smoky mist floats up from the stage in front of me. If the audience is anything to go by, the answer to his question is: the mega rich. I’d come to…

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. Tencent wants you to pay with your palm. What could go wrong? Would you want a bottle of soda for just one cent? Before you say yes, there’s a catch: You have to…