MIT Technology Review

Meta is releasing a new transparency product called the Meta Content Library and API, according to an announcement from the company today. The new tools will allow select researchers to access publicly available data on Facebook and Instagram in an effort to give a more overarching view of what's happening on the platforms. The move...

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. Large language models aren't people. Let's stop testing them as if they are. In the past few years, multiple researchers claim to have shown that large language models can pass cognitive tests designed...

Children who attend preschool at age four are significantly more likely to go to college, according to an empirical study led by MIT economist Parag Pathak. To conduct the study, Pathak and his colleagues followed more than 4,000 students who took part from 1997 to 2003 in a lottery the Boston public school system conducted…

MIT took all five top spots in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition for the third year in a row and won the prize for the top woman for the fourth time in as many years. Seventy of the top 100 in the December event were MIT students, including 21 of the top 25. The…

For years, the Indonesian government sent 10-kilo bags of rice to villages, where local leaders were supposed to distribute them to poor residents every month. But starting about five years ago, recipients were instead sent debit cards to buy the food themselves. The result, according to a study led in part by MIT economists, was…

Priscilla King Gray, the wife of former MIT president Paul Gray ’54, SM ’55, ScD ’60, and cofounder of the MIT Public Service Center (since renamed the PKG Center), died February 8 at age 89. In more than 50 years at the Institute, beginning when her husband joined the faculty in 1960, Gray made an…

(This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review’s weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here.) Advances in artificial intelligence tend to be followed by anxieties around jobs. This latest wave of AI models, like ChatGPT and OpenAI’s new GPT-4, is…

When computer science students and faculty at Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for Software Research returned to campus in the summer of 2020, there was a lot to adjust to. Beyond the inevitable strangeness of being around colleagues again after months of social distancing, the department was also moving into a brand-new building: the 90,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art…

To say that semiconductor technology is part of the fabric of modern society is not an overstatement—it underpins everything from our cars to our phones to our home appliances. In 2021, the semiconductor industry shipped a record 1.15 trillion chips, and sales topped half a trillion dollars worldwide, while thousands of new chip designs entered…

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. What are chemical pollutants doing to our bodies? It’s a question that’s been on my mind this week, for a few reasons. Last week, people in Philadelphia cleared grocery shelves of bottled…

Repairing a human liver using lab-grown cells. Using oral antibiotics to treat cystic fibrosis patients. Producing a single-dose treatment for breast cancer that’s proving highly effective. Predicting cancer with AI. All of this innovation came out of the UK life sciences industry. “It’s really the only industry that can both improve the health of your…

Investors today no longer reward companies for incremental changes in their core business. Embracing digital throughout the business can help traditional companies exponentially increase value and their ability to compete with digital natives, if done correctly. However, an EY-Parthenon report finds that 70% of digital investments don’t capture their intended value and only 16% of…

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 watermark for chatbots can spot text written by an AI What’s happened: A new method could help us to spot AI-generated texts. Watermarking buries hidden patterns in the text that are invisible…

Hidden patterns purposely buried in AI-generated texts could help identify them as such, allowing us to tell whether the words we’re reading are written by a human or not. These “watermarks” are invisible to the human eye but let computers detect that the text probably comes from an AI system. If embedded in large language…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. As a climate reporter, I sometimes hesitate to admit this, but I feel it’s time that I came clean on something … I love flying. It’s not even just about traveling and seeing…

The end could be coming soon for cars as we know them. To limit global warming to 1.5 °C, the 2015 international Paris climate agreement set 2050 as a worldwide deadline to reach net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions. That means gas-powered vehicles will need to be largely off the road by then. And since cars typically have…

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 US Postal Service is finally going electric. The USPS announced Tuesday that it plans to acquire at least 66,000 electric delivery vehicles between now and 2028, and all purchases after 2026 will…

We’re going back to the moon—again—in 2023. Multiple uncrewed landings are planned for the next 12 months, spurred on by a renewed effort in the US to return humans to the lunar surface later this decade. Both private space companies and national agencies are set to make the 240,000-mile trek to our celestial neighbor, where…

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. I just watched Biggie Smalls perform ‘live’ in the metaverse For a moment on Friday, Biggie Smalls was the only man on stage. A spotlight shone on him in his red velvet suit,…

This sentence was written by an AI—or was it? OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT, presents us with a problem: How will we know whether what we read online is written by a human or a machine? Since it was released in late November, ChatGPT has been used by over a million people. It has the AI…

For a moment on Friday, Biggie Smalls was the only man on stage. A spotlight shone on him in his red velvet suit, and amid pre-recorded cheers, he rapped the lyrics to “Mo Money Mo Problems,” swiveling to the beat in his orange sneakers. You wouldn’t be wrong to be confused. Smalls died in 1997…

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. Generative AI is changing everything. But what’s left when the hype is gone? It was clear that OpenAI was on to something. In late 2021, a small team of researchers was playing around…

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has been at the heart of the San Francisco–based firm since cofounding it with Elon Musk and others in 2015. His vision for the future of AI and how to get there has shaped not only what OpenAI does, but also the direction in which AI research is heading in general.…

Artists will have the chance to opt out of the next version of one of the world’s most popular text-to-image AI generators, Stable Diffusion, the company behind it has announced. Stability.AI will work with Spawning, an organization founded by artist couple Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon, who have built a website called HaveIBeenTrained that allows…

It was clear that OpenAI was on to something. In late 2021, a small team of researchers was playing around with an idea at the company’s San Francisco office. They’d built a new version of OpenAI’s text-to-image model, DALL-E, an AI that converts short written descriptions into pictures: a fox painted by Van Gogh, perhaps,…

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. For the past five years or so, barely a week has gone by without a study, comment, or press release about the potential benefits of psychedelic drugs landing in my inbox. Psychedelics…

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. We’re witnessing the brain death of TwitterThe state of Twitter since Elon Musk’s takeover feels like a brain death: the processes that keep it online are somehow still beating, but what Twitter was…

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 fusion’s breakthrough means for clean energy The news: After decades of trying, scientists have reached a milestone in fusion research, finally running a reaction that created more energy than was put in…

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. MIT Technology Review’s biggest stories of the year As 2022 starts to draw to a close, we thought it was high time to take a look back over the most popular stories we’ve…

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. Like many other people, I’m pretty sure I don’t get enough sleep. In my case, it’s partly because my four-year-old likes to wake me up for a chat at some point between…

In early 2021, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia announced The Line: a “civilizational revolution” that would house up to 9 million people in a zero-carbon megacity, 170 kilometers long and half a kilometer high but just 200 meters wide. Within its mirrored, car-free walls, residents would be whisked around in underground trains…

Correction: this story has been updated to include Uber’s response. The opening has been amended to remove an anecdote about a specific driver’s experience based on that response. Uber drivers in India say that problems with the facial recognition they use to access their apps is costing them work. In a survey conducted by MIT…

Editor’s note: This is a translation of a story about a Chinese painter based in Italy who became a critical source of information for many in China during recent protests against the country’s zero-covid policy. Find the English language version here. 过去一周，随着针对中国新冠防疫政策的抗议席卷了社交媒体，一个推特账号@李老师不是你老师 变成了各种相关信息来源的“集散地”。中国各地民众纷纷通过私信发来抗议视频和实时消息，而该账号帮投稿人隐去身份，匿名将这些消息发布出来。 这个账户背后只有一个人：李（大家称他为李老师），出于安全考虑，他要求只透露姓氏。他是一位居住在意大利的中国画家，且从未在新闻行业工作过，但这并没有阻止他把自己的推特账号变成了一个单人值守的新闻直播间。 针对新冠清零政策的抗议活动在 11 月的最后一个周末达到了高峰，李老师每秒钟都会收到十几条私信，他也在尽可能在收到投稿的一瞬间分辨、过滤掉不实信息。尽管在过去的一年里，他一直在发布关注者们的匿名私信，但这对他来说，也是一次完全不同的经历。 长期以来，他一直在网上关注并谈论中国的社会问题。2021 年的时候，他开始在微博上收到私信，这些人担心暴露自己的身份，希望通过他将这些信息发布出去。 但是后来，他发布的消息开始被审查和删帖；到今年2月，他的账户被封禁。之后的两个月中，他又有 49 个账户陆续被禁。但他的关注者们大方地让他使用自己的手机号去注册更多的账号（来发布信息）。今年 4 月，他被微博禁止访问，于是辗转到了推特。也正是在推特上，他收到了大量国际账户以及翻墙访问推特的中国用户的关注。 上周，郑州富士康工厂的工人与管理层爆发冲突，李老师开始通过中国社交媒体和他的关注者提供的信息来跟踪事态走向。那一晚，他只休息了 3…

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 app aims to help the millions of people living with long covid The news: A new app could help people with long covid cope with their condition by giving them a…

This week, dozens of companies are expected to compete for the right to lease the first commercial wind power sites off the coast of California in a federal online auction that could kick-start the state’s next clean energy boom. Collectively, the winners will pay at least tens of millions of dollars for exclusive rights to…

A new app could help people with long covid cope with their condition by giving them a clearer understanding of what helps—and hinders—their health. People with long covid, defined by the World Health Organization as a post-covid illness lasting two months or more, suffer from symptoms that include headaches, fatigue, weakness, and fever. Some use…

In late September, Bianca Bahman snorkeled above a seagrass meadow off the western coast of Flores, a scorpion-shaped volcanic island in eastern Indonesia. As she flutter-kicked over the green seabed, Bahman steered an underwater camera suspended on a pair of small pontoons. The stereoscopic camera captures high-resolution footage from two slightly different angles, creating a…

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 how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeks On November 4, just hours after Elon Musk fired half of the 7,500 employees previously working at Twitter, some people…

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. Twitter may have lost more than a million users since Elon Musk took over The news: In the days since Elon Musk confirmed his purchase of Twitter on October 27, tweeting “the bird…

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. Sending a jolt of electricity through a person’s brain can do remarkable things. You only have to watch the videos of people with Parkinson’s disease who have electrodes implanted in their brains.…