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 US could really use an affordable electric truck On Monday, Ford announced plans for an affordable electric…
On Monday, Ford announced plans for an affordable electric truck with a 2027 delivery date and an expected price tag of about $30,000, thanks in part to a new manufacturing process that it says will help cut costs. This could…
“Manufacturing is the engine of society, and it is the backbone of robust, resilient economies,” says John Hart, head of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) and faculty co-director of the MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM). “With manufacturing a…
Is this movie review a rave or a pan? Is this news story about business or technology? Is this online chatbot conversation veering off into giving financial advice? Is this online medical information site giving out misinformation? These kinds of…
Artificial intelligence models that can discover drugs and write code still fail at puzzles a lay person can master in minutes. This phenomenon sits at the heart of the challenge of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Can today’s AI revolution produce…
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 Trump’s “golden dome” missile defense idea is another ripped straight from the movies Within a week of…
In 1940, a fresh-faced Ronald Reagan starred as US Secret Service agent Brass Bancroft in Murder in the Air, an action film centered on a fictional “superweapon” that could stop enemy aircraft midflight. A mock newspaper in the movie hails…
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. Meet the early-adopter judges using AI The propensity for AI systems to make mistakes that humans miss has…
Before OpenAI released GPT-5 last Thursday, CEO Sam Altman said its capabilities made him feel “useless relative to the AI.” He said working on it carries a weight he imagines the developers of the atom bomb must have felt. As…
My colleague Grace Huckins has a great story on OpenAI’s release of GPT-5, its long-awaited new flagship model. One of the takeaways, however, is that while GPT-5 may make for a better experience than the previous versions, it isn’t something…