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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 OpenAI stress-tests its large language models OpenAI has lifted the lid (just a crack) on its safety-testing processes. It has put out two papers describing how it stress-tests its powerful large language…

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. Earlier this year, a boy in Sweden celebrated his 10th birthday. Reproductive scientists and doctors marked the occasion too. This little boy’s birth had been special. He was…

OpenAI is once again lifting the lid (just a crack) on its safety-testing processes. Last month the company shared the results of an investigation that looked at how often ChatGPT produced a harmful gender or racial stereotype based on a user’s name. Now it has put out two papers describing how it stress-tests its powerful…

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. AI can now create a replica of your personality Imagine sitting down with an AI model for a spoken two-hour interview. A friendly voice guides you through a conversation that ranges from your…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. “Well, what about China?” This is a comment I get all the time on the topic of climate change, both in conversations and on whatever social media site is currently en vogue.…

MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done.  Since the start of the generative AI boom, artists have been worried about losing their livelihoods to AI tools. There have been plenty of examples of companies’ replacing human labor with computer programs. Most recently, Coca-Cola sparked controversy by creating a new Christmas ad…

Imagine sitting down with an AI model for a spoken two-hour interview. A friendly voice guides you through a conversation that ranges from your childhood, your formative memories, and your career to your thoughts on immigration policy. Not long after, a virtual replica of you is able to embody your values and preferences with stunning…

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 Clear’s ambitions to manage your identity beyond the airport  Clear Secure is the most visible biometric identity company in the United States. Best known for its line-jumping service in airports, it’s also…

Once again, global greenhouse-gas emissions are projected to hit a new high in 2024.  In this time of shifting political landscapes and ongoing international negotiations, many are quick to blame one country or another for an outsize role in causing climate change. But assigning responsibility is complicated. These three visualizations help explain why and provide…

If you’ve ever been through a large US airport, you’re probably at least vaguely aware of Clear. Maybe your interest (or irritation) has been piqued by the pods before the security checkpoints, the attendants in navy blue vests who usher clients to the front of the security line (perhaps just ahead of you), and the…

Recorded on November 19, 2024 What’s Next for Mixed Reality: Glasses, Goggles, and More. Speakers: Mat Honan, Editor in Chief, and James O’Donnell, AI hardware reporter. We are barreling toward the next big consumer device category: smart glasses. After years of trying, augmented-reality specs are at last a thing. Facebook recently showed off its Orion…

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 the largest gathering of US police chiefs is talking about AI —James O’Donnell The International Association of Chiefs of Police bills itself as the largest gathering of its type in the United…

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first, sign up here. It can be tricky for reporters to get past certain doors, and the door to the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference is one that’s almost perpetually shut to the media. Thus, I 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. The rise of Bluesky, and the splintering of social You may have read that it was a big week for Bluesky. If you’re not familiar, Bluesky is, essentially, a Twitter clone that publishes…

You may have read that it was a big week for Bluesky.  If you’re not familiar, Bluesky is, essentially, a Twitter clone that publishes short-form status updates. It gained more than 2 million users this week. On Wednesday, The Verge reported it had crossed 15 million users. By Thursday, it was at 16 million. By Friday? 17 million and counting.…

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. Every journalist has favorite topics. Regular Checkup readers might already know some of mine, which include the quest to delay or reverse human aging, and new technologies for…

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 this grassroots effort could make AI voices more diverse We are on the cusp of a voice AI boom, as tech companies roll out the next generation of artificial-intelligence-powered assistants. But the…

We are on the cusp of a voice AI boom, with tech companies such as Apple and OpenAI rolling out the next generation of artificial-intelligence-powered assistants. But the default voices for these assistants are often white American—British, if you’re lucky—and most definitely speak English. They represent only a tiny proportion of the many dialects and…

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. Google DeepMind has a new way to look inside an AI’s “mind” We don’t know exactly how AI works, or why it works so well. That’s a problem: It could lead us to…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. It’s time for a party—the Conference of the Parties, that is. Talks kicked off this week at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Running for a couple of weeks each year, the global summit…

AI has led to breakthroughs in drug discovery and robotics and is in the process of entirely revolutionizing how we interact with machines and the web. The only problem is we don’t know exactly how it works, or why it works so well. We have a fair idea, but the details are too complex to…

The complexity of biology has long been a double-edged sword for scientific and medical progress. On one hand, the intricacy of systems (like the human immune response) offers countless opportunities for breakthroughs in medicine and healthcare. On the other hand, that very complexity has often stymied researchers, leaving some of the most significant medical challenges—like…

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 lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI Back in 2022, the tech community was buzzing over image-generating AI models, such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, which could…

Ben Zhao remembers well the moment he officially jumped into the fight between artists and generative AI: when one artist asked for AI bananas.  A computer security researcher at the University of Chicago, Zhao had made a name for himself by building tools to protect images from facial recognition technology. It was this work that…

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 taught a robot dog to scramble around a new environment Teaching robots to navigate new environments is tough. You can train them on physical, real-world data taken from recordings made by…

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 we talk about the global race for AI dominance, the conversation often focuses on tensions between the US and China, and European efforts at regulating the technology.  But it’s high…

Teaching robots to navigate new environments is tough. You can train them on physical, real-world data taken from recordings made by humans, but that’s scarce and expensive to collect. Digital simulations are a rapid, scalable way to teach them to do new things, but the robots often fail when they’re pulled out of virtual worlds…

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 Africa needs to do to become a major AI player Africa is still early in the process of adopting AI technologies. But researchers say the continent is uniquely hospitable to it for…

Rather than analyzing the news this week, I thought I’d lift the hood a bit on how we make it.  I’ve spent most of this year being pretty convinced that Donald Trump would be the 47th president of the United States. Even so, like most people, I was completely surprised by the scope of his…

Kessel Okinga-Koumu paced around a crowded hallway. It was her first time presenting at the Deep Learning Indaba, she told the crowd gathered to hear her, filled with researchers from Africa’s machine-learning community. The annual weeklong conference (‘Indaba’ is a Zulu word for gathering), was held most recently in September at Amadou Mahtar Mbow University…

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. Why AI could eat quantum computing’s lunch Tech companies have been funneling billions of dollars into quantum computers for years. The hope is that they’ll be a game changer for fields as diverse…

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. Earlier this week, Americans cast their votes in a seminal presidential election. But it wasn’t just the future president of the US that was on the ballot. Ten…

Tech companies have been funneling billions of dollars into quantum computers for years. The hope is that they’ll be a game changer for fields as diverse as finance, drug discovery, and logistics. Those expectations have been especially high in physics and chemistry, where the weird effects of quantum mechanics come into play. In theory, this…

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. Trump’s win is a tragic loss for climate progress —James Temple Donald Trump’s decisive victory is a stunning setback for the fight against climate change. The Republican president-elect’s return to the White House…

Donald Trump’s decisive victory is a stunning setback for the fight against climate change. The Republican president-elect’s return to the White House means the US is going to squander precious momentum, unraveling hard-won policy progress that was just beginning to pay off, all for the second time in less than a decade.  It comes at…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Voters have elected Donald Trump to a second term in the White House. In the days leading up to the election, I kept thinking about what four years means for climate change…

The world’s first barcode, designed in 1948, took more than 25 years to make it out of the lab and onto a retail package. Since then, the barcode has done much more than make grocery checkouts faster—it has remade our understanding of how physical objects can be identified and tracked, creating a new pace and…

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. Life-seeking, ice-melting robots could punch through Europa’s icy shell At long last, NASA’s Europa Clipper mission is on its way. It launched on October 14 and is now en route to its target:…

At long last, NASA’s Europa Clipper mission is on its way. After overcoming financial and technological hurdles, the $5 billion mission launched on October 14 from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. It is now en route to its target: Jupiter’s ice-covered moon Europa, whose frozen shell almost certainly conceals a warm saltwater ocean. When the spacecraft…

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 do jumping spiders find sexy? How DIY tech is offering insights into the animal mind. Studying the minds of other animals comes with a challenge that human psychologists don’t usually face: Your…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. OpenAI’s Olivier Godement, head of product for its platform, and Romain Huet, head of developer experience, are on a whistle-stop tour around the world. Last week, I sat down with 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. How a breakthrough gene-editing tool will help the world cope with climate change Jennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of the breakthrough gene-editing tool CRISPR, says the technology will help the world grapple…

Jennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of the breakthrough gene-editing tool CRISPR, says the technology will help the world grapple with the growing risks of climate change by delivering crops and animals better suited to hotter, drier, wetter, or weirder conditions. “The potential is huge,” says Doudna, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry…

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. OpenAI has brought a new web search tool to ChatGPT The news: ChatGPT can now search the web for up-to-date answers to a user’s queries. Previously it was restricted to generating answers from…

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. Over the past month or so, I’ve been working on a story about exosomes. You might have seen them advertised—they’re being touted as a hot new beauty treatment,…

When you walk around in a version of the video game Minecraft from the AI companies Decart and Etched, it feels a little off. Sure, you can move forward, cut down a tree, and lay down a dirt block, just like in the real thing. If you turn around, though, the dirt block you just…

In late October, News Corp filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI, a popular AI search engine. At first glance, this might seem unremarkable. After all, the lawsuit joins more than two dozen similar cases seeking credit, consent, or compensation for the use of data by AI developers. Yet this particular dispute is different, and it…

ChatGPT can now search the web for up-to-date answers to a user’s queries, OpenAI announced today.  Until now, ChatGPT was mostly restricted to generating answers from its training data, which is current up to October 2023 for GPT-4o, and had limited web search capabilities. Searches about generalized topics will still draw on this information from…

Inspired by an unprecedented opportunity, the life sciences sector has gone all in on AI. For example, in 2023, Pfizer introduced an internal generative AI platform expected to deliver $750 million to $1 billion in value. And Moderna partnered with OpenAI in April 2024, scaling its AI efforts to deploy ChatGPT Enterprise, embedding the tool’s…

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. Housing is an election issue. But the US sucks at it. Ahead of abortion access, ahead of immigration, and way ahead of climate change, US voters under 30 are most concerned about one…