MIT Technology Review

The world might seem to be on the brink of a humanoid-robot heyday. New breakthroughs in artificial intelligence promise the type of capable, general-purpose robots previously seen only in science fiction-robots that can do things like assemble cars, care for patients, or tidy our homes, all without being given specialized instructions. It's an idea that...

A live agent spends hours each week manually documenting routine interactions. Another combs through multiple knowledge bases to find the right solution, scrambling to piece it together while the customer waits on hold. A third types out the same response they've written dozens of times before. These repetitive tasks can be draining, leaving less time...

It's a stormy holiday weekend, and you've just received the last notification you want in the busiest travel week of the year: The first leg of your flight is significantly delayed. You might expect this means you'll be sitting on hold with airline customer service for half an hour. But this time, the process looks...

Ready for a fresh set of puzzles? Click here for the January/February Puzzle Corner, brought to you with a special Mystery Hunt twist by guest editor Dan Katz '03. This column includes solutions to three September/October 24 problems. Find solutions to the other three problems here.

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 next generation of neural networks could live in hardware Networks programmed directly into computer chip hardware can identify images faster, and use much less energy, than the traditional neural networks that underpin...

US doctors write billions of prescriptions each year. During 2024, though, one type of drug stood out-wonder drugs" known as GLP-1 agonists. As of September, one of every 20 prescriptions written for adults was for one of these drugs, according to the health data company Truveta. The drugs, which include Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Victoza, are...

Networks programmed directly into computer chip hardware can identify images faster, and use much less energy, than the traditional neural networks that underpin most modern AI systems. That's according to work presented at a leading machine learning conference in Vancouver last week. Neural networks, from GPT-4 to Stable Diffusion, are built by wiring together perceptrons,...

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. Later today, around 10 minutes after this email lands in your inbox, I'll be holding my four-year-old daughter tight as she receives her booster dose of the MMR...

Business applications powered by AI are revolutionizing customer experiences, accelerating the speed of business, and driving employee productivity. In fact, according to research firm Frost & Sullivan's 2024 Global State of AI report, 89% of organizations believe AI and machine learning will help them grow revenue, boost operational efficiency, and improve customer experience. Take for...

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. Digital twins of human organs are here. They're set to transform medical treatment. Steven Niederer, a biomedical engineer at the Alan Turing Institute and Imperial College London, has a cardboard box filled with...

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 vibes in the climate world this year have largely been ... less than great. Global greenhouse-gas emissions hit a new high, reaching 37.4 billion metric tons in 2024. This year is...

A healthy heart beats at a steady rate, between 60 and 100 times a minute. That's not the case for all of us, I'm reminded, as I look inside a cardboard box containing around 20 plastic hearts-each a replica of a real human one. The hearts, which previously sat on a shelf in a lab...

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 is changing how we study bird migration In a warming world, migratory birds face many existential threats. Scientists rely on a combination of methods to track the timing and location of their...

AI is all about data. Reams and reams of data are needed to train algorithms to do what we want, and what goes into the AI models determines what comes out. But here's the problem: AI developers and researchers don't really know much about the sources of the data they are using. AI's data collection...

A small songbird soars above Ithaca, New York, on a September night. He is one of 4 billion birds, a great annual river of feathered migration across North America. Midair, he lets out what ornithologists call a nocturnal flight call to communicate with his flock. It's the briefest of signals, barely 50 milliseconds long, emitted...

Recorded on December 17, 2024 The Worst Technology Failures of 2024 Speakers: Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine, and Niall Firth, executive editor. MIT Technology Review publishes an annual list of the worst technologies of the year. This year, The Worst Technology Failures of 2024 list was unveiled live by our editors. Hear fromMIT Technology...

Towana Looney, a 53-year-old woman from Alabama, has become the third living person to receive a kidney transplant from a gene-edited pig. Looney, who donated one of her kidneys to her mother back in 1999, developed kidney failure several years later following a pregnancy complication that caused high blood pressure. She started dialysis treatment 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. The 8 worst technology failures of 2024 They say you learn more from failure than success. If so, this is the story for you: MIT Technology Review's annual roll call of the biggest...

They say you learn more from failure than success. If so, this is the story for you: MIT Technology Review's annual roll call of the biggest flops, flimflams, and fiascos in all domains of technology. Some of the foul-ups were funny, like the woke" AI which got Google in trouble after it drew Black Nazis....

AI's emissions are about to skyrocket even further It's no secret that the current AI boom is using up immense amounts of energy. Now we have a better idea of how much. A new paper, from a team at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, examined 78% of all data centers in the...

Last week, this space was all about OpenAI's 12 days of shipmas. This week, the spotlight is on Google, which has been speeding toward the holiday by shipping or announcing its own flurry of products and updates. The combination of stuff here is pretty monumental, not just for a single company, but I think because...

It's no secret that the current AI boom is using up immense amounts of energy. Now we have a better idea of how much. A new paper, from teams at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, examined 2,132 data centers operating in the United States (78%...

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 Silicon Valley is disrupting democracy The internet loves a good neologism, especially if it can capture a purported vibe shift or explain a new trend. In 2013, the columnist Adrian Wooldridge coined...

The internet loves a good neologism, especially if it can capture a purported vibe shift or explain a new trend. In 2013, the columnist Adrian Wooldridge coined a word that eventually did both. Writing for the Economist, he warned of the coming techlash," a revolt against Silicon Valley's rich and powerful fueled by the public's...

The Intel 4004, the first commercial microprocessor, was released in 1971. With 2,300 transistors packed into 12mm2, it heralded a revolution in computing. A little over 50 years later, Apple's M2 Ultra contains 134 billion transistors. The scale of progress is difficult to comprehend, but the evolution of semiconductors, driven for decades by Moore's Law,...

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's new Project Astra could be generative AI's killer app Google DeepMind has announced an impressive grab bag of new products and prototypes that may just let it seize back its lead in...

Google DeepMind has announced an impressive grab bag of new products and prototypes that may just let it seize back its lead in the race to turn generative artificial intelligence into a mass-market concern. Top billing goes to Gemini 2.0-the latest iteration of Google DeepMind's family of multimodal large language models, now redesigned around 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. Bluesky has an impersonator problem -Melissa Heikkila Like many others, I recently joined Bluesky. On Thanksgiving, I was delighted to see a private message from a fellow AI reporter, Will Knight from Wired....

Like many others, I recently fled the social media platform X for Bluesky. In the process, I started following many of the people I followed on X. On Thanksgiving, I was delighted to see a private message from a fellow AI reporter, Will Knight from Wired. Or at least that's who I thought I was...

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 saw a demo of the new AI system powering Anduril's vision for war -James O'Donnell One afternoon in late November, I visited a weapons test site in the foothills east of San...

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 AI sector is plagued by a lack of competition and a lot of deceit-or at least that's one way to interpret the latest flurry of actions taken in Washington. Last...

MIT Technology Review'sHow Toseries helps you get things done. Today, OpenAI released its video generation model Sora to the public. The announcement comes on the fifth day of the company's shipmas" event, a 12-day marathon of tech releases and demos. Here's what you should know-and how you can use the video model right now. What...

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 world's next big environmental problem could come from space In September, a unique chase took place in the skies above Easter Island. From a rented jet, a team of researchers captured a...

This week, OpenAI announced what it calls the 12 days of OpenAI, or 12 days of shipmas. On December 4, CEO Sam Altman took to X to announce that the company would be doing 12 days of openai. each weekday, we will have a livestream with a launch or demo, some big ones and some...

Early on a Sunday morning in September, a team of 12 sleep-deprived, jet-lagged researchers assembled at the world's most remote airport. There, on Easter Island, some 2,330 miles offthe coast of Chile, they were preparing for a unique chase: a race to catch a satellite's last moments as it fell out of space and blazed...

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 China's critical mineral ban means for the US This week, China banned exports of several critical minerals to the US, marking the latest move in an escalating series of tit-for-tat trade restrictions...

Next month, MIT Technology Review will unveil the 2025 list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies. Every year, our newsroom looks across the fields we cover for technologies that are having a true breakthrough moment. This annual package highlights the technologies that we think matter most right now. We define breakthrough' in a few ways-perhaps there's been...

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. There's a new film about IVF out on Netflix. And everyone in the field [of reproductive medicine] has watched it," according to one embryologist I spoke to recently....

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. This week, China banned exports of several critical minerals to the US, marking the latest move in an escalating series of tit-for-tat trade restrictions between the...

The US Department of Defense has invested $2.4 million over two years in deepfake detection technology from a startup called Hive AI. It's the first contract of its kind for the DOD's Defense Innovation Unit, which accelerates the adoption of new technologies for the US defense sector. Hive AI's models are capable of detecting AI-generated...

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's new defense contract completes its military pivot At the start of 2024, OpenAI's rules for how armed forces might use its AI models were unambiguous: it prohibited anyone from using them for...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Last week, we celebrated Thanksgiving here in the US, and I had hearty helpings of ham and turkey alongside my mashed potatoes and green bean casserole. Meat is often the star on...

At the start of 2024, OpenAI's rules for how armed forces might use its technology were unambiguous. The company prohibited anyone from using its models for weapons development" or military and warfare." That changed on January 10, when The Intercept reported that OpenAI had softened those restrictions, forbidding anyone from using the technology to harm...

A company best known for sucking up industrial waste gases is turning its attention to food. LanzaTech, a rising star in the fuel and chemical industries, is joining a growing group of businesses producing microbe-based food as an alternative to plant and animal products. Using microbes to make food is hardly new-beer, yogurt, cheese, and...

Google DeepMind has unveiled an AI model that's better at predicting the weather than the current best systems. The new model, dubbed GenCast, is published in Nature today. This is the second AI weather model that Google has launched in just the past few months. In July, it published details of NeuralGCM, a model 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. How the Ukraine-Russia war is reshaping the tech sector in Eastern Europe It might have been hard a few years ago to imagine soldiers heading to battle on oversized toys made by a...

At first glance, the Mosphera scooter may look normal-just comically oversized. It's like the monster truck of scooters, with a footplate seven inches off the ground that's wide enough to stand on with your feet slightly apart-which you have to do to keep your balance, because when you flip the accelerator with a thumb, it...

A startup called Exa is pitching a new spin on generative search. It uses the tech behind large language models to return lists of results that it claims are more on point than those from its rivals, including Google and OpenAI. The aim is to turn the internet's chaotic tangle of web pages into a...