AI companies have now mostly abandoned the once-standard practice of including medical disclaimers and warnings in response to health questions, new research has found. In fact, many leading AI models will now not only answer health questions but even ask…
Millions of images of passports, credit cards, birth certificates, and other documents containing personally identifiable information are likely included in one of the biggest open-source AI training sets, new research has found. Thousands of images—including identifiable faces—were found in 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. How to run an LLM on your laptop In the early days of large language models, there was…
This week we heard that eight babies have been born in the UK following an experimental form of IVF that involves DNA from three people. The approach was used to prevent women with genetic mutations from passing mitochondrial diseases to…
As countries across the world experience a resurgence in nuclear energy projects, the questions of where and how to dispose of nuclear waste remain as politically fraught as ever. The United States, for instance, has indefinitely stalled its only long-term…
Imagine AI so sophisticated it could read a customer’s mind? Or identify and close a cybersecurity loophole weeks before hackers strike? How about a team of AI agents equipped to restructure a global supply chain and circumnavigate looming geopolitical disruption?…
MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done. Simon Willison has a plan for the end of the world. It’s a USB stick, onto which he has loaded a couple of his favorite open-weight LLMs—models that have…
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. Researchers announce babies born from a trial of three-person IVF Eight babies have been born in the UK…
I’ll admit that I’ve rarely hesitated to point an accusing finger at air-conditioning. I’ve outlined in many stories and newsletters that AC is a significant contributor to global electricity demand, and it’s only going to suck up more power as…
Large language models (LLMs) excel at using textual reasoning to understand the context of a document and provide a logical answer about its contents. But these same LLMs often struggle to correctly answer even the simplest math problems. Textual reasoning…