Soon after OpenAI released GPT-4o on Monday, May 13, some Chinese speakers started to notice 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,…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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 as Raven Imperial…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…