MIT Technology Review

MIT Technology Review's How To series helps you get things done. Simon Willison has a plan for the end of the world. It's a USB stick, onto which he has loaded a couple of his favorite open-weight LLMs-models that have been shared publicly by their creators and that can, in principle, be downloaded and run...

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. Researchers announce babies born from a trial of three-person IVF Eight babies have been born in the UK thanks to a technology that uses DNA from three people: the two biological parents plus...

I'll admit that I've rarely hesitated to point an accusing finger at air-conditioning. I've outlined in many stories and newsletters that AC is a significant contributor to global electricity demand, and it's only going to suck up more power as temperatures rise. But I'll also be the first to admit that it can be a...

Eight babies have been born in the UK thanks to a technology that uses DNA from three people: the two biological parents plus a third person who supplies healthy mitochondrial DNA. The babies were born to mothers who carry genes for mitochondrial diseases and risked passing on severe disorders. The eight babies are healthy, say...

No one knows exactly how AI will transform our communities, workplaces, and society as a whole. Because it's hard to predict the impact AI will have on jobs, many workers and local governments are left trying to read the tea leaves to understand how to prepare and adapt. A new interactive report released today by...

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 generative video model Veo 3 has a subtitles problem As soon as Google launched its latest video-generating AI model at the end of May, creatives rushed to put it through its paces....

In June 2023, technology leaders and IT services executives had a lightning bolt headed their way when McKinsey published the The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier" report. It echoed a moment from the 2010s when Amazon Web Services launched an advertising campaign aimed at Main Street's C-suite: Why would any fiscally...

Adaptive production is more than a technological upgrade: it is a paradigm shift. This new frontier enables the integration of cutting-edge technologies to create an increasingly autonomous environment, where interconnected manufacturing plants go beyond the limits of traditional automation. Artificial intelligence, digital twins, and robotics are among the powerful tools manufacturers are using to create...

As soon as Google launched its latest video-generating AI model at the end of May, creatives rushed to put it through its paces. Released just months after its predecessor, Veo 3 allows users to generate sounds and dialogue for the first time, sparking a flurry of hyperrealistic eight-second clips stitched together into ads, ASMR videos,...

When Darren Riley moved to Detroit seven years ago, he didn't expect the city's air to change his life-literally. Developing asthma as an adult opened his eyes to a much larger problem: the invisible but pervasive impact of air pollution on the health of marginalized communities. I was fascinated about why we don't have 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. AI text-to-speech programs could one day unlearn" how to imitate certain people The news: A new technique known as machine unlearning" could be used to teach AI models to forget specific voices. How...

A technique known as machine unlearning" could teach AI models to forget specific voices-an important step in stopping the rise of audio deepfakes, where someone's voice is copied to carry out fraud or scams. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have revolutionized the quality of text-to-speech technology so that people can convincingly re-create a piece of...

School's out and it's high summer, but a bunch of teachers are plotting how they're going to use AI this upcoming school year. God help them. On July 8, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic announced a $23 million partnership with one of the largest teachers' unions in the United States to bring more AI into K-12...

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. California is set to become the first US state to manage power outages with AI California's statewide power grid operator is poised to become the first in North America to deploy artificial intelligence...

California's statewide power grid operator is poised to become the first in North America to deploy artificial intelligence to manage outages, MIT Technology Review has learned. We wanted to modernize our grid operations. This fits in perfectly with that," says Gopakumar Gopinathan, a senior advisor on power system technologies at the California Independent System Operator-known...

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. Cybersecurity's global alarm system is breaking down Every day, billions of people trust digital systems to run everything from communication to commerce to critical infrastructure. But the global early warning system that alerts...

This week I'm sending congratulations to two sets of parents in South Africa. Babies Milayah and Rossouw arrived a few weeks ago. All babies are special, but these two set a new precedent. They're the first to be born following simplified" IVF performed in a mobile lab. This new mobile lab is essentially a trailer...

Every day, billions of people trust digital systems to run everything from communication to commerce to critical infrastructure. But the global early warning system that alerts security teams to dangerous software flaws is showing critical gaps in coverage-and most users have no idea their digital lives are likely becoming more vulnerable. Over the past 18...

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 tool strips away anti-AI protections from digital art The news: A new technique called LightShed will make it harder for artists to use existing protective tools to stop their work from being...

China is the dominant force in next-generation energy technologies today. It's pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into putting renewable sources like wind and solar on its grid, manufacturing millions of electric vehicles, and building out capacity for energy storage, nuclear power, and more. This investment has been transformational for the country's economy and has...

A new technique called LightShed will make it harder for artists to use existing protective tools to stop their work from being ingested for AI training. It's the next step in a cat-and-mouse game-across technology, law, and culture-that has been going on between artists and AI proponents for years. Generative AI models that create images...

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 empire: A conversation with Karen Hao In a wide-ranging Roundtables conversation for MIT Technology Review subscribers, journalist and author Karen Hao recently spoke about her new book, Empire of AI: Dreams...

In a wide-ranging Roundtables conversation for MIT Technology Review subscribers, AI journalist and author Karen Hao spoke about her new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI. She talked with executive editor Niall Firth about how she first covered the company in 2020 while on staff at MIT Technology Review, and...

The Big, Beautiful Bill" that President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4 was chock full of controversial policies-Medicaid work requirements, increased funding for ICE, and an end to tax credits for clean energy and vehicles, to name just a few. But one highly contested provision was missing. Just days earlier, during a late-night...

Michigan may be best known as the birthplace of the American auto industry, but its innovation legacy runs far deeper, and its future is poised to be even broader. From creating the world's largest airport factory during World War II at Willow Run to establishing the first successful polio vaccine trials in Ann Arbor to...

From a cluster of call centers in Canada, a criminal network defrauded elderly victims in the US out of $21 million in total between 2021 and 2024. The fraudsters used voice over internet protocol technology todupe victims into believing the calls came from their grandchildren in the US, customizing conversations using banks of personal data,...

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 the most dangerous asteroid hunt ever If you were told that the odds of something were 3.1%, it might not seem like much. But for the people charged with protecting our planet,...

Fusion energy holds the potential to shift a geopolitical landscape that is currently configured around fossil fuels. Harnessing fusion will deliver the energy resilience, security, and abundance needed for all modern industrial and service sectors. But these benefits will be controlled by the nation that leads in both developing the complex supply chains required and...

Today's AI landscape is defined by the ways in which neural networks are unlike human brains. A toddler learns how to communicate effectively with only a thousand calories a day and regular conversation; meanwhile, tech companies are reopening nuclear power plants, polluting marginalized communities, and pirating terabytes of books in order to train and run...

If you were told that the odds of something were 3.1%, it really wouldn't seem like much. But for the people charged with protecting our planet, it was huge. On February 18, astronomers determined that a 130- to 300-foot-long asteroid had a 3.1% chance of crashing into Earth in 2032. Never had an asteroid of...

When a historic UK-based retailer set out to modernize its IT environment, it was wrestling with systems that had grown organically for more than 175 years. Prior digital transformation efforts had resulted in a patchwork of hundreds of integration flows spanning cloud, on-premises systems, and third-party vendors, all communicating across multiple protocols. The company needed...

Digital transformation has long been a boardroom buzzword-shorthand for ambitious, often abstract visions of modernization. But today, digital technologies are no longer simply concepts in glossy consultancy decks and on corporate campuses; they're also being embedded directly into factory floors, logistics hubs, and other mission-critical, frontline environments. This evolution is playing out across sectors: Field...

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 latest threat from the rise of Chinese manufacturing In 2013, a trio of academics showed convincing evidence that increased trade with China beginning in the early 2000s and the resulting flood of...

The findings a decade ago were, well, shocking. Mainstream economists had long argued that free trade was overall a good thing; though there might be some winners and losers, it would generally bring lower prices and widespread prosperity. Then, in 2013, a trio of academic researchers showed convincing evidence that increased trade with China beginning...

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 India's scramble for AI independence Despite its status as a global tech hub, India lags far behind the likes of the US and China when it comes to homegrown AI. That gap...

In Bengaluru, India, Adithya Kolavi felt a mix of excitement and validation as he watched DeepSeek unleash its disruptive language model on the world earlier this year. The Chinese technology rivaled the best of the West in terms of benchmarks, but it had been built with far less capital in far less time. I thought:...

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. Don't let hype about AI agents get ahead of reality -Yoav Shoham is a professor emeritus at Stanford University and cofounder of AI21 Labs. At Google's I/O 2025 event in May, the company...

We got two big pieces of energy news from Google this week. The company announced that it's signed an agreement to purchase electricity from a fusion company's forthcoming first power plant. Google also released its latest environmental report, which shows that its energy use from data centers has doubled since 2020. Taken together, these two...

Google's recent unveiling of what it calls a new class of agentic experiences" feels like a turning point. At its I/O 2025 event in May, for example, the company showed off a digital assistant that didn't just answer questions; it helped work on a bicycle repair by finding a matching user manual, locating a YouTube...

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 generative AI could help make construction sites safer More than 1,000 construction workers die on the job each year in the US, making it the most dangerous industry for fatal slips, trips,...

Last winter, during the construction of an affordable housing project on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, a 32-year-old worker named Jose Luis Collaguazo Crespo slipped off a ladder on the second floor and plunged to his death in the basement. He was one of more than1,000constructionworkers who die on the job each year in the US, making...

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. People are using AI to sit' with them while they trip on psychedelics A growing number of people are using AI chatbots as trip sitters"-a phrase that traditionally refers to a sober person...

The internet infrastructure company Cloudflare announced today that it will now default to blocking AI bots from visiting websites it hosts. Cloudflare will also give clients the ability to manually allow or ban these AI bots on a case-by-case basis, and it will introduce a so-called pay-per-crawl" service that clients can use to receive compensation...

Peter sat alone in his bedroom as the first waves of euphoria coursed through his body like an electrical current. He was in darkness, save for the soft blue light of the screen glowing from his lap. Then he started to feel pangs of panic. He picked up his phone and typed a message to...

Last week, the technology companies Anthropic and Meta each won landmark victories in two separate court cases that examined whether or not the firms had violated copyright when they trained their large language models on copyrighted books without permission. The rulings are the first we've seen to come out of copyright cases of this kind....

Recorded on June 30, 2025 AI journalist Karen Hao's book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI, tells the story of OpenAI's rise to power and its far-reaching impact all over the world. Hear from Karen Hao, former MIT Technology Review senior editor, and executive editor Niall Firth for a conversation exploring...

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 Jim O'Neill, the longevity enthusiast who is now RFK Jr.'s right-hand man When Jim O'Neill was nominated to be the second in command at the US Department of Health and Human Services,...

When Jim O'Neill was nominated to be the second in command at the US Department of Health and Human Services, Dylan Livingston was excited. As founder and CEO of the lobbying group Alliance for Longevity Initiatives (A4LI), Livingston is a member of a community that seeks to extend human lifespan. O'Neill is kind of one...

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 battery recycling company is now cleaning up AI data centers In a sandy industrial lot outside Reno, Nevada, rows of battery packs that once propelled electric vehicles are now powering a small...

Weight-loss drugs are this decade's blockbuster medicines. Drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro help people with diabetes get their blood sugar under control and help overweight and obese people reach a healthier weight. And they're fast becoming a trendy must-have for celebrities and other figure-conscious individuals looking to trim down. They became so hugely popular...