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Soon after OpenAI released GPT-4o on Monday, May 13, some Chinese speakers started to notice that something seemed off about this newest version of the chatbot: the tokens it uses to parse text were full of spam and porn phrases. On May 14, Tianle Cai, a PhD student at Princeton University studying inference efficiency 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. How cuddly robots could change dementia care Companion animals can stave off some of the loneliness, anxiety, and agitation that come with Alzheimer’s disease, according to studies. Sadly, people with Alzheimer’s aren’t always…

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.  Last week, I scoured the internet in search of a robotic dog. I wanted a belated birthday present for my aunt, who was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.…

Recorded on May 16, 2024 Why thermal batteries are so hot right now Speakers: Casey Crownhart, climate reporter and Amy Nordrum, executive editor Thermal batteries could be a key part of cleaning up heavy industry, and our readers chose them as the 11th breakthrough on MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2024. Learn what…

Generative AI is poised to unlock trillions in annual economic value across industries. This rapidly evolving field is changing the way we approach everything from content creation to software development, promising never-before-seen efficiency and productivity gains. In this session, experts from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, discuss the drivers fueling the massive…

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 grim but revolutionary DNA technology is changing how we respond to mass disasters Last August, a wildfire tore through the Hawaiian island of Maui. The list of missing residents climbed into the…

Seven days No matter who he called—his mother, his father, his brother, his cousins—the phone would just go to voicemail. Cell service was out around Maui as devastating wildfires swept through the Hawaiian island. But while Raven Imperial kept hoping for someone to answer, he couldn’t keep a terrifying thought from sneaking into his mind:…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. I’m ready for summer, but if this year is anything like last year, it’s going to be a doozy. In fact, the summer of 2023 in the Northern Hemisphere was the hottest…

Recent highly publicized scandals have gotten the physics community worried about its reputation—and its future. Over the last five years, several claims of major breakthroughs in quantum computing and superconducting research, published in prestigious journals, have disintegrated as other researchers found they could not reproduce the blockbuster results.  Last week, around 50 physicists, scientific journal…

This week, Google and OpenAI both announced they’ve built supercharged AI assistants: tools that can converse with you in real time and recover when you interrupt them, analyze your surroundings via live video, and translate conversations on the fly.  OpenAI struck first on Monday, when it debuted its new flagship model GPT-4o. The live demonstration…

When a commercial ship travels from the port of Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia to Tokyo Bay, it’s not only carrying cargo; it’s also transporting millions of data points across a wide array of partners and complex technology systems. Consider, for example, Maersk. The global shipping container and logistics company has more than 100,000 employees,…

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’s Astra is its first AI-for-everything agent What’s happening: Google is set to launch a new system called Astra later this year. It promises that it will be the most powerful, advanced type…

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. We finally know the result of a legal case I’ve been tracking in Hong Kong for almost a year. Last week, the Hong Kong Court of Appeal granted an injunction that permits…

MIT Technology Review is celebrating our 125th anniversary with an online series that draws lessons for the future from our past coverage of technology.  Do we use technology, or does it use us? Do our gadgets improve our lives or just make us weak, lazy, and dumb? These are old questions—maybe older than you think.…

Google is set to introduce a new system called Astra later this year and promises that it will be the most powerful, advanced type of AI assistant it’s ever launched.  The current generation of AI assistants, such as ChatGPT, can retrieve information and offer answers, but that is about it. But this year, Google is…

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’s new GPT-4o lets people interact using voice or video in the same model The news: OpenAI just debuted GPT-4o, a new kind of AI model that you can communicate with in real…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. In the world of AI, a lot can happen in a year. Last year, at the beginning of Big Tech’s AI wars, Google announced during its annual I/O conference that it…

OpenAI just debuted GPT-4o, a new kind of AI model that you can communicate with in real time via live voice conversation, video streams from your phone, and text. The model is rolling out over the next few weeks and will be free for all users through both the GPT app and the web interface,…

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’s next in chips Thanks to the boom in artificial intelligence, the world of chips is on the cusp of a huge tidal shift. There is heightened demand for chips that can train…

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. Thanks to the boom in artificial intelligence, the world of chips is on the cusp of a huge tidal shift. There is heightened demand for chips that…

The global race for computational power is well underway, fueled by a worldwide boom in artificial intelligence. OpenAI’s Sam Altman is seeking to raise as much as $7 trillion for a chipmaking venture. Tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon are building AI chips of their own. The need for more computing horsepower to train and…

A wave of AI systems have “deceived” humans in ways they haven’t been explicitly trained to do, by offering up untrue explanations for their behavior or concealing the truth from human users and misleading them to achieve a strategic end.  This issue highlights how difficult artificial intelligence is to control and the unpredictable ways in…

It’s a hell of a time to have a conscience if you work in tech. The ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza has brought the stakes of Silicon Valley’s military contracts into stark relief. Meanwhile, corporate leadership has embraced a no-politics-in-the-workplace policy enforced at the point of the knife. Workers are caught in the middle. Do…

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 helped make an exquisitely detailed map of a tiny piece of the human brain The news: A team led by scientists from Harvard and Google has created a 3D, nanoscale-resolution map of…

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.  The human brain is an engineering marvel: 86 billion neurons form some 100 trillion connections to create a network so complex that it is, ironically, mind boggling. This…

It wasn’t exactly surprising when on Wednesday, May 8, a Hong Kong appeals court sided with the city government to take down “Glory to Hong Kong” from the internet. The trial, in which no one represented the defense, was the culmination of a years-long battle over a song that has become the unofficial anthem for…

A team led by scientists from Harvard and Google has created a 3D, nanoscale-resolution map of a single cubic millimeter of the human brain. Although the map covers just a fraction of the organ—a whole brain is a million times larger—that piece contains roughly 57,000 cells, about 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and nearly 150…

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’s new AlphaFold can model a much larger slice of biological life What’s new: Google DeepMind has released an improved version of its biology prediction tool, AlphaFold, that can predict the structures…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Tesla, the world’s largest EV maker, laid off its entire charging team last week.  The timing of this move is absolutely baffling. We desperately need many more EV chargers to come online…

Google DeepMind has released an improved version of its biology prediction tool, AlphaFold, that can predict the structures not only of proteins but of nearly all the elements of biological life. It’s a development that could help accelerate drug discovery and other scientific research. The tool is currently being used to experiment with identifying everything…

Though generative AI is still a nascent technology, it is already being adopted by teams across companies to unleash new levels of productivity and creativity. Marketers are deploying generative AI to create personalized customer journeys. Designers are using the technology to boost brainstorming and iterate between different content layouts more quickly. The future of technology is exciting,…

Multimodality is a relatively new term for something extremely old: how people have learned about the world since humanity appeared. Individuals receive information from myriad sources via their senses, including sight, sound, and touch. Human brains combine these different modes of data into a highly nuanced, holistic picture of reality. “Communication between humans is multimodal,”…

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. Deepfakes of your dead loved ones are a booming Chinese business Once a week, Sun Kai has a video call with his mother, and they discuss his day-to-day life. But Sun’s mother died…

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. If you could talk again to someone you love who has passed away, would you? For a long time, this has been a hypothetical question. No longer.  Deepfake technologies have evolved to…

Sperm whales are fascinating creatures. They possess the biggest brain of any species, six times larger than a human’s, which scientists believe may have evolved to support intelligent, rational behavior. They’re highly social, capable of making decisions as a group, and they exhibit complex foraging behavior.   But there’s also a lot we don’t know about…

Once a week, Sun Kai has a video call with his mother. He opens up about work, the pressures he faces as a middle-aged man, and thoughts that he doesn’t even discuss with his wife. His mother will occasionally make a comment, like telling him to take care of himself—he’s her only child. But mostly,…

Fixing our collective meat problem is one of the trickiest challenges in addressing climate change—and for some baffling reason, the world seems intent on making the task even harder. The latest example occurred last week, when Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a law banning the production, sale, and transportation of cultured meat across the Sunshine…

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. Scientists are trying to get cows pregnant with synthetic embryos About a decade ago, biologists started to observe that stem cells, left alone in a walled plastic container, will spontaneously self-assemble and try…

It was a cool morning at the beef teaching unit in Gainesville, Florida, and cow number #307 was bucking in her metal cradle as the arm of a student perched on a stool disappeared into her cervix. The arm held a squirt bottle of water. Seven other animals stood nearby behind a railing; it would…

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. Cancer vaccines are having a renaissance Last week, Moderna and Merck launched a large clinical trial in the UK of a promising new cancer therapy: a personalized vaccine that targets a specific set…

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.  Last week, Moderna and Merck launched a large clinical trial in the UK of a promising new cancer therapy: a personalized vaccine that targets a specific set 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. Sam Altman says helpful agents are poised to become AI’s killer function Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has a vision for how AI tools will become enmeshed in our daily lives.  During a…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Batteries are on my mind this week. (Aren’t they always?) But I’ve got two extra reasons to be thinking about them today.  First, there’s a new special report from the International Energy…

Eliminating carbon pollution from aviation is one of the most challenging parts of the climate puzzle, simply because large commercial airlines are too heavy and need too much power during takeoff for today’s batteries to do the job.  But one way that companies and governments are striving to make some progress is through the use…

A number of moments from my brief sit-down with Sam Altman brought the OpenAI CEO’s worldview into clearer focus. The first was when he pointed to my iPhone SE (the one with the home button that’s mostly hated) and said, “That’s the best iPhone.” More revealing, though, was the vision he sketched for how AI…

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 the quest to map the universe with mysterious bursts of radio energy When our universe was less than half as old as it is today, a burst of energy that could cook…

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Allow me to indulge in a little reflection this week. Last week, the divest-or-ban TikTok bill was passed in Congress and signed into law. Four years ago, when I was just starting…

When our universe was less than half as old as it is today, a burst of energy that could cook a sun’s worth of popcorn shot out from somewhere amid a compact group of galaxies. Some 8 billion years later, radio waves from that burst reached Earth and were captured by a sophisticated low-frequency radio…

Recorded on April 30, 2024 Inside the Next Era of AI and Hardware Speakers: James O’Donnell, AI reporter, and Charlotte Jee, News editor Hear first-hand from our AI reporter, James O’Donnell, as he walks our news editor Charlotte Jee through the latest goings-on in his beat, from rapid advances in robotics to autonomous military drones,…

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 robot race is fueling a fight for training data We’re interacting with AI tools more directly—and regularly—than ever before. Interacting with robots, by way of contrast, is still a rarity for most.…