MIT Technology Review

If you're a longtime reader, you probably know that our newsroom selects 10 breakthroughs every year that we think will define the future. This group exercise is mostly fun and always engrossing, but at times it can also be quite difficult. We collectively pitch dozens of ideas, and the editors meticulously review and debate the...

The past year has marked a turning point in the corporate AI conversation. After a period of eager experimentation, organizations are now confronting a more complex reality: While investment in AI has never been higher, the path from pilot to production remains elusive. Three-quarters of enterprises remain stuck in experimentation mode, despite mounting pressure to...

One day this fall, I watched an electronic sign outside the Broadway-Lafayette subway station in Manhattan switch seamlessly between an ad for makeup and one promoting the website Pickyourbaby.com, which promises a way for potential parents to use genetic tests to influence their baby's traits, including eye color, hair color, and IQ. Inside the station,...

In January 2024, the phone rang in homes all around New Hampshire. On the other end was Joe Biden's voice, urging Democrats to save your vote" by skipping the primary. It sounded authentic, but it wasn't. The call was a fake, generated by artificial intelligence. Today, the technology behind that hoax looks quaint. Tools like...

In 2024, a Democratic congressional candidate in Pennsylvania, Shamaine Daniels, used an AI chatbot named Ashley to call voters and carry on conversations with them. Hello. My name is Ashley, and I'm an artificial intelligence volunteer for Shamaine Daniels's run for Congress," the calls began. Daniels didn't ultimately win. But maybe those calls helped her...

Most organizations feel the imperative to keep pace with continuing advances in AI capabilities, as highlighted in a recent MIT Technology Review Insights report. That clearly has security implications, particularly as organizations navigate a surge in the volume, velocity, and variety of security data. This explosion of data, coupled with fragmented toolchains, is making it...

Sometimes geothermal hot spots are obvious, marked by geysers and hot springs on the planet's surface. But in other places, they're obscured thousands of feet underground. Now AI could help uncover these hidden pockets of potential power. A startup company called Zanskar announced today that it's used AI and other advanced computational methods to uncover...

As many of us are ramping up with shopping, baking, and planning for the holiday season, nuclear power plants are also getting ready for one of their busiest seasons of the year. Here in the US, nuclear reactors follow predictable seasonal trends. Summer and winter tend to see the highest electricity demand, so plant operators...

OpenAI is testing another new way to expose the complicated processes at work inside large language models. Researchers at the company can make an LLM produce what they call a confession, in which the model explains how it carried out a task and (most of the time) owns up to any bad behavior. Figuring out...

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. Everything you need to know about AI and coding AI has already transformed how code is written, but a new wave of autonomous systems promise to make the process even smoother and less...

In 1913, Henry Ford cut the time it took to build a Model T from 12 hours to just over 90 minutes. He accomplished this feat through a revolutionary breakthrough in process design: Instead of skilled craftsmen building a car from scratch by hand, Ford created an assembly line where standardized tasks happened in sequence,...

MIT Technology ReviewExplains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what's coming next. You can readmore from the series here. Weight-loss drugs have been back in the news this week. First, we heard that Eli Lilly, the company behind the drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound, became the first healthcare...

Today's IT leaders face competing mandates to do more (make us an AI-first' enterprise-yesterday") with less (no new hires for at least the next six months"). VMware has become a focal point of these dueling directives. It remains central to enterprise IT, with 80% of organizations using VMware infrastructure products. But shifting licensing models are...

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 AI is changing the economy There's a lot at stake when it comes to understanding how AI is changing the economy right now. Should we be pessimistic? Optimistic? Or is the situation...

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn't always easy. That's why we've created the AI Hype Index-a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. Last year, the fantasy author Joanna Maciejewska went viral (if such a thing is still possible on X) with a post saying I...

For decades, business continuity planning meant preparing for anomalous events like hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, or regional power outages. In anticipation of these rare disasters, IT teams built playbooks, ran annual tests, crossed their fingers, and hoped they'd never have to use them. In recent years, an even more persistent threat has emerged. Cyber incidents, particularly...

Welcome back to The State of AI, a new collaboration between the Financial Times and MIT Technology Review. Every Monday, writers from both publications debate one aspect of the generative AI revolution reshaping global power. In this week's conversation MIT Technology Review's senior reporter for features and investigations, Eileen Guo, and FT tech correspondent Melissa...

In 2017, fresh off a PhD on theoretical chemistry, John Jumper heard rumors that Google DeepMind had moved on from building AI that played games with superhuman skill and was starting up a secret project to predict the structures of proteins. He applied for a job. Just three years later, Jumper celebrated a stunning win...

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. Meet the man building a starter kit for civilization You live in a house you designed and built yourself. You rely on the sun for power, heat your home with a woodstove, and...

It has started to get really wintry here in London over the last few days. The mornings are frosty, the wind is biting, and it's already dark by the time I pick my kids up from school. The darkness in particular has got me thinking about vitamin D, a.k.a. the sunshine vitamin. At a checkup...

Everything is a conspiracy theory now. MIT Technology Review's series, The New Conspiracy Age," explores how this moment is changing science and technology. Watch a discussion with our editors and Mike Rothschild, journalist and conspiracy theory expert, about how we can make sense of them all. Speakers: Amanda Silverman, Editor, Features & Investigations; Niall Firth,...

Digital resilience-the ability to prevent, withstand, and recover from digital disruptions-has long been a strategic priority for enterprises. With the rise of agentic AI, the urgency for robust resilience is greater than ever. Agentic AI represents a new generation of autonomous systems capable of proactive planning, reasoning, and executing tasks with minimal human intervention. As...

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 things to know about the future of electricity The International Energy Agency recently released the latest version of the World Energy Outlook, the annual report that takes stock of the current state...

One of the dominant storylines I've been following through 2025 is electricity-where and how demand is going up, how much it costs, and how this all intersects with that topic everyone is talking about: AI. Last week, the International Energy Agency released the latest version of the World Energy Outlook, the annual report that takes...

Manufacturing is getting a major system upgrade. As AI amplifies existing technologies-like digital twins, the cloud, edge computing, and the industrial internet of things (IIoT)-it is enabling factory operations teams to shift from reactive, isolated problem-solving to proactive, systemwide optimization. Digital twins-physically accurate virtual representations of a piece of equipment, a production line, a process,...

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. Quantum physicists have shrunk and de-censored" DeepSeek R1 The news: A group of quantum physicists at Spanish firm Multiverse Computing claims to have created a version of the powerful reasoning AI model DeepSeek...

A group of quantum physicists claims to have created a version of the powerful reasoning AI model DeepSeek R1 that strips out the censorship built into the original by its Chinese creators. The scientists at Multiverse Computing, a Spanish firm specializing in quantum-inspired AI techniques, created DeepSeek R1 Slim, a model that is 55% smaller...

The Ryder Cup is an almost-century-old tournament pitting Europe against the United States in an elite showcase of golf skill and strategy. At the 2025 event, nearly a quarter of a million spectators gathered to watch three days of fierce competition on the fairways. From a technology and logistics perspective, pulling off an event of...

Training an AI model to predict equipment failures is an engineering achievement. But it's not until prediction meets action-the moment that model successfully flags a malfunctioning machine-that true business transformation occurs. One technical milestone lives in a proof-of-concept deck; the other meaningfully contributes to the bottom line. Craig Partridge, senior director worldwide of Digital Next...

Google today unveiled Gemini 3, a major upgrade to its flagship multimodal model. The firm says the new model is better at reasoning, has more fluid multimodal capabilities (the ability to work across voice, text or images), and will work like an agent. The previous model, Gemini 2.5, supports multimodal input. Users can feed it...

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 State of AI: How war will be changed forever -Helen Warrell & James O'Donnell It is July 2027, and China is on the brink of invading Taiwan. Autonomous drones with AI targeting...

Welcome back to The State of AI, a new collaboration between the Financial Times and MIT Technology Review. Every Monday, writers from both publications debate one aspect of the generative AI revolution reshaping global power. In this conversation, Helen Warrell, FT investigations reporter and former defense and security editor, and James O'Donnell, MIT Technology Review's...

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 the chance your plane will be hit by space debris? The risk of flights being hit by space junk is still small, but it's growing. About three pieces of old space...

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. In mid-October, a mysterious object cracked the windshield of a packed Boeing 737 cruising at 36,000 feet above Utah, forcing the pilots into an emergency landing....

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 LLM exposes the secrets of how AI really works The news: ChatGPT maker OpenAI has built an experimental large language model that is far easier to understand than typical models. Why...

Earlier this week, the UK's science minister announced an ambitious plan: to phase out animal testing. Testing potential skin irritants on animals will be stopped by the end of next year, according toa strategy released on Tuesday. By 2027, researchers are expected to end" tests of the strength of Botox on mice. And drug tests...

ChatGPT maker OpenAI has built an experimental large language model that is far easier to understand than typical models. That's a big deal, because today's LLMs are black boxes: Nobody fully understands how they do what they do. Building a model that is more transparent sheds light on how LLMs work in general, helping researchers...

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 quantify pain Researchers around the world are racing to turn pain-medicine's most subjective vital sign-into something a camera or sensor can score as reliably as blood pressure. The...

Last week, we hosted EmTech MIT, MIT Technology Review's annual flagship conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Over the course of three days of main-stage sessions, I learned about innovations in AI, biotech, and robotics. But as you might imagine, some of this climate reporter's favorite moments came in the climate sessions. I was listening especially closely...

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 it's like to be in the middle of a conspiracy theory (according to a conspiracy theory expert) -Mike Rothschild is a journalist and an expert on the growth and impact of conspiracy...

For years, many chief information officers (CIOs) looked at VMware-to-cloud migrations with a wary pragmatism. Manually mapping dependencies and rewriting legacy apps mid-flight was not an enticing, low-lift proposition for enterprise IT teams. But the calculus for such decisions has changed dramatically in a short period of time. Following recent VMware licensing changes, organizations are...

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 quest to find out how our bodies react to extreme temperatures Climate change is subjecting vulnerable people to temperatures that push their limits. In 2023, about 47,000 heat-related deaths are believed to...

Welcome back toThe State of AI, a new collaboration between the Financial Times and MIT Technology Review. Every Monday, writers from both publications debate one aspect of the generative AI revolution and how it is reshaping global power. This week, Casey Crownhart, senior reporter for energy at MIT Technology Review and Pilita Clark, FT's columnist,...

AI and quantum technologies are dramatically reconfiguring how cybersecurity functions, redefining the speed and scale with which digital defenders and their adversaries can operate. The weaponization of AI tools for cyberattacks is already proving a worthy opponent to current defenses. From reconnaissance to ransomware, cybercriminals can automate attacks faster than ever before with AI. This...