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Recorded on February 3, 2025 What DeepSeek’s Breakout Success Means for AI Speakers: Charlotte Jee, news editor, Will Douglas Heaven, senior AI editor, and Caiwei Chen, China reporter. The tech world is abuzz over a new open-source reasoning AI model developed by DeepSeek, a Chinese startup. Its success is remarkable given the constraints that Chinese AI…

AI firm Anthropic has developed a new line of defense against a common kind of attack called a jailbreak. A jailbreak tricks large language models (LLMs) into doing something they have been trained not to, such as help somebody create a weapon.  Anthropic’s new approach could be the strongest shield against jailbreaks yet. “It’s at…

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 DeepSeek ripped up the AI playbook—and why everyone’s going to follow its lead When the Chinese firm DeepSeek dropped a large language model called R1 two weeks ago, it sent shock waves…

OpenAI has launched a new agent capable of conducting complex, multistep online research into everything from scientific studies to personalized bike recommendations at what it claims is the same level as a human analyst. The tool, called Deep Research, is powered by a version of OpenAI’s o3 reasoning model that’s been optimized for web browsing…

In the week since a Chinese AI model called DeepSeek became a household name, a dizzying number of narratives have gained steam, with varying degrees of accuracy: that the model is collecting your personal data (maybe); that it will upend AI as we know it (too soon to tell—but do read my colleague Will’s story…

On Thursday, Microsoft announced that it’s rolling OpenAI’s reasoning model o1 out to its Copilot users, and now OpenAI is releasing a new reasoning model, o3-mini, to people who use the free version of ChatGPT. This will mark the first time that the vast majority of people will have access to one of OpenAI’s reasoning…

When the Chinese firm DeepSeek dropped a large language model called R1 last week, it sent shock waves through the US tech industry. Not only did R1 match the best of the homegrown competition, it was built for a fraction of the cost—and given away for free.  The US stock market lost $1 trillion, President…

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 measuring vaccine hesitancy could help health professionals tackle it This week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the US’s health agencies, has been facing questions from senators as…

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. This week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the US’s health agencies, has been facing questions from senators as part of his confirmation hearing…

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. Three questions about the future of US climate tech under Trump Donald Trump has officially been in office for just over a week, and the new administration has already issued a blizzard of…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Donald Trump has officially been in office for just over a week, and the new administration has hit the ground running with a blizzard of executive orders and memos. Some of the…

A Canadian startup called Xanadu has built a new quantum computer it says can be easily scaled up to achieve the computational power needed to tackle scientific challenges ranging from drug discovery to more energy-efficient machine learning. Aurora is a “photonic” quantum computer, which means it crunches numbers using photonic qubits—information encoded in light. 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. Mice with two dads have been created using CRISPR What’s new: Mice with two fathers have been born—and have survived to adulthood—following a complex set of experiments by a team in China. The…

Earlier this month, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta will cut back on its content moderation efforts and eliminate fact-checking in the US in favor of the more “democratic” approach that X (formerly Twitter) calls Community Notes, rolling back protections that he claimed had been developed only in response to media and government pressure. The move…

Mice with two fathers have been born—and have survived to adulthood—following a complex set of experiments by a team in China.  Zhi-Kun Li at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and his colleagues used CRISPR to create the mice, using a novel approach to target genes that normally need to be inherited from both…

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’s energy obsession just got a reality check Just a week in, the AI sector has already seen its first battle of wits under the new Trump administration. The clash stems from two…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Just a week in, the AI sector has already seen its first battle of wits under the new Trump administration. The clash stems from two key pieces of news: the announcement 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. How a top Chinese AI model overcame US sanctions The AI community is abuzz over DeepSeek R1, a new open-source reasoning model.  The model was developed by the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which…

On January 8, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang jolted the stock market by saying that practical quantum computing is still 15 to 30 years away, at the same time suggesting those computers will need Nvidia GPUs in order to implement the necessary error correction.  However, history shows that brilliant people are not immune to making mistakes.…

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 launches Operator—an agent that can use a computer for you What’s new: After weeks of buzz, OpenAI has released Operator, its first AI agent. Operator is a web app that can carry…

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. On January 20, his first day in office, US president Donald Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization. “Ooh, that’s a…

MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. Jan Liphardt teaches bioengineering at Stanford, but to many strangers in Los Altos, California, he is a peculiar man they see walking a four-legged robotic dog down…

After weeks of buzz, OpenAI has released Operator, its first AI agent. Operator is a web app that can carry out simple online tasks in a browser, such as booking concert tickets or filling an online grocery order. The app is powered by a new model called Computer-Using Agent—CUA (“coo-ah”), for short—built on top 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. This is what might happen if the US withdraws from the WHO On January 20, his first day in office, US president Donald Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the US from…