As healthcare faces mounting pressures, from rising costs and an aging population to widening disparities, forward thinking innovations are more essential than ever. Accelerator programs have proven to be powerful launchpads for health tech companies, often combining resources, mentorship, and…
Everywhere I look, I see AI clones. On X and LinkedIn, “thought leaders” and influencers offer their followers a chance to ask questions of their digital replicas. OnlyFans creators are having AI models of themselves chat, for a price, with…
Declan would never have found out his therapist was using ChatGPT had it not been for a technical mishap. The connection was patchy during one of their online sessions, so Declan suggested they turn off their video feeds. Instead, his…
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. Can an AI doppelgänger help me do my job? —James O’Donnell Digital clones—AI models that replicate a specific…
Next week, we’ll publish our 2025 list of Innovators Under 35, highlighting smart and talented people who are working in many areas of emerging technology. This new class features 35 accomplished founders, hardware engineers, roboticists, materials scientists, and others who…
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 case against humans in space Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are bitter rivals in the commercial space…
For just the second time in nearly two decades, the United States has granted an export license to an American company planning to sell nuclear technology to India, MIT Technology Review has learned. The decision to greenlight Clean Core Thorium…
A lot of Americans don’t eat well. And they’re paying for it with their health. A diet high in sugar, sodium, and saturated fat can increase the risk of problems like diabetes, heart disease, and kidney disease, to name 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. Google’s still not giving us the full picture on AI energy use —Casey Crownhart Google just announced that…
Over the past 20 years building advanced AI systems—from academic labs to enterprise deployments—I’ve witnessed AI’s waves of success rise and fall. My journey began during the “AI Winter,” when billions were invested in expert systems that ultimately underdelivered. Flash…
Google just announced that a typical query to its Gemini app uses about 0.24 watt-hours of electricity. That’s about the same as running a microwave for one second—something that, to me, feels virtually insignificant. I run the microwave for so…
Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. Using AI to improve our health and well-being…
Across industries, enterprises are increasingly adopting an on-demand approach to compute, storage, and applications. They are favoring digital services that are faster to deploy, easier to scale, and better integrated with partner ecosystems. Yet, one critical pillar has lagged: the…
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. Introducing: the Security issue It would be naïve to think we are going back to a world without…
When Jitender was a child in New Delhi, both his parents worked as manual scavengers—a job that involved clearing the city’s sewers of solid waste by hand. Now, he is among almost 200 contractors involved in the Delhi government’s effort…
When I picked up my daughter from summer camp, we settled in for an eight-hour drive through the Appalachian mountains, heading from North Carolina to her grandparents’ home in Kentucky. With little to no cell service for much of the…
On a typical afternoon, MIT’s new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building hums with life. On the fourth floor, a jazz combo works through a set in a rehearsal suite as engineers adjust microphone levels in a nearby control booth.…
Growing up in South Central Los Angeles, Junior Peña learned to keep his eyes down and his schedule full. In his neighborhood, a glance could invite trouble, and many kids—including his older brother—were pulled into gang culture. He knew early…
As I write in late July, we’re contending with a major tax increase on the annual returns from MIT’s endowment as well as other investments and assets. This new tax burden will strain the resources we use to support research,…
Textiles account for 5% of landfill space—and clothing made with polyester can take up to 200 years to decompose. Massachusetts tackled the problem by banning disposal of clothing and fabrics in 2022. And Infinite Threads, a spinoff of the Undergraduate…
Art restoration takes steady hands and a discerning eye. For centuries, conservators have identified areas needing repair and then mixed the exact shades needed to fill in one area at a time. Restoring a single painting can take anywhere from…
The wildfires that swept through Los Angeles County in January 2025 left an indelible mark on the Southern California landscape. The Eaton and Palisades fires raged for 24 days, killing 29 people and destroying 16,000 structures, with losses estimated 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. In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses Google has just…
In October, a new academic conference will debut that’s unlike any other. Agents4Science is a one-day online event that will encompass all areas of science, from physics to medicine. All of the work shared will have been researched, written, and…
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are bitter rivals in the commercial space race, but they agree on one thing: Settling space is an existential imperative. Space is the place. The final frontier. It is our human destiny to transcend our…
Last year, I added my DNA profile to a private genealogical database, FamilyTreeDNA, and clicked “Yes” to allow the police to search my genes. In 2018, police in California announced they’d caught the Golden State Killer, a man who had eluded…
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. On the ground in Ukraine’s largest Starlink repair shop Starlink is absolutely critical to Ukraine’s ability to continue…
Google has just released a technical report detailing how much energy its Gemini apps use for each query. In total, the median prompt—one that falls in the middle of the range of energy demand—consumes 0.24 watt-hours of electricity, the equivalent…
I remember using a princess toothbrush when I was little. The handle was purple, teal, and sparkly. Like most of the other pieces of plastic that have ever been made, it’s probably still out there somewhere, languishing in a landfill.…
Oleh Kovalskyy thinks that Starlink terminals are built as if someone assembled them with their feet. Or perhaps with their hands behind their back. To demonstrate this last image, Kovalskyy—a large, 47-year-old Ukrainian, clad in sweatpants and with tattoos stretching…
NASA and IBM have released a new open-source machine learning model to help scientists better understand and predict the physics and weather patterns of the sun. Surya, trained on over a decade’s worth of NASA solar data, should help give…
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 churches use data and AI as engines of surveillance On a Sunday morning in a Midwestern megachurch,…
Despite decades of green certifications, better material sourcing, and the use of more sustainable materials such as mass timber, the built environment is still responsible for a third of global emissions worldwide. According to a 2024 UN report, the building…
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 make clean energy progress under Trump in the states—blue and red alike —Joshua A. Basseches is…
When the US Food and Drug Administration approved over-the-counter hearing-aid software for Apple’s AirPods Pro in September 2024, with a device price point right around $200, I was excited. I have mild to medium hearing loss and tinnitus, and my…
On a Sunday morning in a Midwestern megachurch, worshippers step through sliding glass doors into a bustling lobby—unaware they’ve just passed through a gauntlet of biometric surveillance. High-speed cameras snap multiple face “probes” per second, isolating eyes, noses, and mouths…
How do you want your AI to treat you? It’s a serious question, and it’s one that Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has clearly been chewing on since GPT-5’s bumpy launch at the start of the month. He faces a trilemma.…
The second Trump administration is proving to be more disastrous for the climate and the clean energy economy than many had feared. Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act repealed most of the clean energy incentives in former president Joe…
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 we should thank pigeons for our AI breakthroughs People looking for precursors to artificial intelligence often point…
In 1943, while the world’s brightest physicists split atoms for the Manhattan Project, the American psychologist B.F. Skinner led his own secret government project to win World War II. Skinner did not aim to build a new class of larger,…
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. Taiwan’s “silicon shield” could be weakening Taiwanese politics increasingly revolves around one crucial question: Will China invade? China’s…
June had no idea that GPT-5 was coming. The Norwegian student was enjoying a late-night writing session last Thursday when her ChatGPT collaborator started acting strange. “It started forgetting everything, and it wrote really badly,” she says. “It was like…
There is no word for art in most Native American languages. Instead, the closest terms speak not to objecthood but to action and intention. In Lakota, “wówačhiŋtȟaŋka” implies deep thought or reflection, while “wóčhekiye” suggests offering or prayer. Art is…
One winter afternoon in a conference room in Taipei, a pair of twentysomething women dragged their friend across the floor. Lying on the ground in checkered pants and a brown sweatshirt, she was pretending to be either injured or dead.…
This time five years ago, we were in the throes of the covid-19 pandemic. By August 2020, we’d seen school closures, national lockdowns, and widespread panic. That year, the coronavirus was responsible for around 3 million deaths, according to the World…
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…
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…
The propensity for AI systems to make mistakes and for humans to miss those mistakes has been on full display in the US legal system as of late. The follies began when lawyers—including some at prestigious firms—submitted documents citing cases…
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 quantum radar could image buried objects Physicists have created a new type of radar that could help…
Physicists have created a new type of radar that could help improve underground imaging, using a cloud of atoms in a glass cell to detect reflected radio waves. The radar is a type of quantum sensor, an emerging technology 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. GPT-5 is here. Now what? At long last, OpenAI has released GPT-5. The new system abandons the distinction…
At long last, OpenAI has released GPT-5. The new system abandons the distinction between OpenAI’s flagship models and its o series of reasoning models, automatically routing user queries to a fast nonreasoning model or a slower reasoning version. It 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. Five ways that AI is learning to improve itself Last week, Mark Zuckerberg declared that Meta aims to…
In the spring of 2021, climate scientists were stumped. The global economy was just emerging from the covid-19 lockdowns, but for some reason the levels of methane—a greenhouse gas emitted mainly through agriculture and fossil-fuel production—had soared in the atmosphere…
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg declared that Meta is aiming to achieve smarter-than-human AI. He seems to have a recipe for achieving that goal, and the first ingredient is human talent: Zuckerberg has reportedly tried to lure top researchers to Meta…
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 has finally released open-weight language models The news: OpenAI has finally released its first open-weight large language…
OpenAI has finally released its first open-weight large language models since 2019’s GPT-2. These new “gpt-oss” models are available in two different sizes and score similarly to the company’s o3-mini and o4-mini models on several benchmarks. Unlike the models available…
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. These protocols will help AI agents navigate our messy lives A growing number of companies are launching AI…
OpenAI has given itself a dual mandate. On the one hand, it’s a tech giant rooted in products, including of course ChatGPT, which people around the world reportedly send 2.5 billion requests to each day. But its original mission is…
A growing number of companies are launching AI agents that can do things on your behalf—actions like sending an email, making a document, or editing a database. Initial reviews for these agents have been mixed at best, though, because they…
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. Forcing LLMs to be evil during training can make them nicer in the long run Large language models…
A new study from Anthropic suggests that traits such as sycophancy or evilness are associated with specific patterns of activity in large language models—and turning on those patterns during training can, paradoxically, prevent the model from adopting the related traits.…
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 decades-old frozen embryos are changing the shape of families This week we welcomed a record-breaking baby to…
This week we welcomed a record-breaking baby to the world. Thaddeus Daniel Pierce, who arrived over the weekend, developed from an embryo that was frozen in storage for 30 and a half years. You could call him the world’s oldest…
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 two people shaping the future of OpenAI’s research —Will Douglas Heaven For the past couple of years,…
For the past couple of years, OpenAI has felt like a one-man brand. With his showbiz style and fundraising glitz, CEO Sam Altman overshadows all other big names on the firm’s roster. Even his bungled ouster ended with him back…
Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. The Trump administration recently declared war on so-called…
This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s “America Undone” series, examining how the foundations of US success in science and innovation are currently under threat. You can read the rest here. The mechanism that allows the US federal government to…
Amsterdam tried using algorithms to fairly assess welfare applicants, but bias still crept in. Why did Amsterdam fail? And more important, can this ever be done right? Hear from MIT Technology Review editor Amanda Silverman, investigative reporter Eileen Guo, and Lighthouse…
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. Exclusive: A record-breaking baby has been born from an embryo that’s over 30 years old A baby boy…
A baby boy born over the weekend holds the new record for the “oldest baby.” Thaddeus Daniel Pierce, who arrived on July 26, developed from an embryo that had been in storage for 30 and a half years. “We had…
OpenAI is launching Study Mode, a version of ChatGPT for college students that it promises will act less like a lookup tool and more like a friendly, always-available tutor. It’s part of a wider push by the company to get…
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 startup wants to use the Earth as a massive battery Texas-based startup Quidnet Energy just completed a…
A number of the executive orders and announcements coming from the White House since Donald Trump returned to office have painted an ambitious vision for America’s AI future—crushing competition with China, abolishing “woke” AI models that suppress conservative speech, jump-starting…
Texas-based startup Quidnet Energy just completed a test showing it can store energy for up to six months by pumping water underground. Using water to store electricity is hardly a new concept—pumped hydropower storage has been around for over 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. Chinese universities want students to use more AI, not less Just two years ago, students in China were…
Just two years ago, Lorraine He, now a 24-year-old law student, was told to avoid using AI for her assignments. At the time, to get around a national block on ChatGPT, students had to buy a mirror-site version from 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 nonprofits and academia are stepping up to salvage US climate programs Nonprofits are trying to preserve a…
It has been a grim few months for the Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) community. There had been some excitement when, a couple of years ago, a gene therapy for the disorder was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration…
Nonprofits are striving to preserve a US effort to modernize greenhouse-gas measurements, amid growing fears that the Trump administration’s dismantling of federal programs will obscure the nation’s contributions to climate change. The Data Foundation, a Washington, DC, nonprofit that advocates…
On Wednesday, President Trump issued three executive orders, delivered a speech, and released an action plan, all on the topic of continuing American leadership in AI. The plan contains dozens of proposed actions, grouped into three “pillars”: accelerating innovation, building…
Most Americans encounter the Federal Trade Commission only if they’ve been scammed: It handles identity theft, fraud, and stolen data. During the Biden administration, the agency went after AI companies for scamming customers with deceptive advertising or harming people by…
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 role should oil and gas companies play in climate tech? —Casey Crownhart After writing about Quaise, a…
Google DeepMind has unveiled new artificial-intelligence software that could help historians recover the meaning and context behind ancient Latin engravings. Aeneas can analyze words written in long-weathered stone to say when and where they were originally inscribed. It follows Google’s…
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. Navigating the rise of AI agents AI agents is a buzzy term that essentially refers to AI models…
What if we could permanently remove the toxic “forever chemicals” contaminating our water? That’s the driving force behind Michigan-based startup Enspired Solutions, founded by environmental toxicologist Denise Kay and chemical engineer Meng Wang. The duo left corporate consulting in the…
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 startup wants to use beams of energy to drill geothermal wells Geothermal startup Quaise certainly has an…
A beam of energy hit the slab of rock, which quickly began to glow. Pieces cracked off, sparks ricocheted, and dust whirled around under a blast of air. From inside a modified trailer, I peeked through the window as a…
Last month I gave a talk at SXSW London called “Five things you need to know about AI”—my personal picks for the five most important ideas in AI right now. I aimed the talk at a general audience, and it…
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. A major AI training data set contains millions of examples of personal data Millions of images of passports,…
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…