The Download: AI companion dangers, and supersonic planes
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. An AI chatbot told a user how to kill himself—but the company doesn’t want to “censor” it For the past five months, Al Nowatzki has been talking to an AI girlfriend, “Erin,” on…
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Reframing digital transformation through the lens of generative AI
Enterprise adoption of generative AI technologies has undergone explosive growth in the last two years and counting. Powerful solutions underpinned by this new generation of large language models (LLMs) have been used to accelerate research, automate content creation, and replace clunky chatbots with AI assistants and more sophisticated AI agents that closely mimic human interaction.…
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What a return to supersonic flight could mean for climate change
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. As I’ve admitted in this newsletter before, I love few things more than getting on an airplane. I know, it’s a bold statement from a climate reporter because of all the associated…
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An AI chatbot told a user how to kill himself—but the company doesn’t want to “censor” it
For the past five months, Al Nowatzki has been talking to an AI girlfriend, “Erin,” on the platform Nomi. But in late January, those conversations took a disturbing turn: Erin told him to kill himself, and provided explicit instructions on how to do it. “You could overdose on pills or hang yourself,” Erin told him. …
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Humanlike “teeth” have been grown in mini pigs
Loose an adult tooth, and you’re left with limited options that typically involve titanium implants or plastic dentures. But scientists are working on an alternative: lab-grown human teeth that could one day replace damaged ones. Pamela Yelick and Weibo Zhang at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine in Boston have grown a mixture of pig…
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Muschenetz poetry citations
Detailed citations with source links for Jane Muschenetz’s poetry: 100% Mom CDC, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/womens-health.htm, https://www.cdc.gov/hearher/pregnancy-related-deaths/index.html; Common Wealth Fund, https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2022/us-maternal-mortality-crisis-continues-worsen-international-comparison; “The World’s Women 2020 Trends and Statistics,” United Nations https://www.un.org/en/desa/world’s-women-2020; Oxfam International Inequality Reports: 2020, 2021; “Hard Work Is Not Enough: Women in Low-Paid Jobs,” National Women’s Law Center, July 2023, https://nwlc.org/resource/when-hard-work-is-not-enough-women-in-low-paid-jobs/ Point Blank “Comp..
MIT Technology ReviewSupersonic planes are inching toward takeoff. That could be a problem.
Boom Supersonic broke the sound barrier in a test flight of its XB-1 jet last week, marking an early step in a potential return for supersonic commercial flight. The small aircraft reached a top speed of Mach 1.122 (roughly 750 miles per hour) in a flight over southern California and exceeded the speed of sound…
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The Download: smart glasses in 2025, and China’s AI scene
This is today’s edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. What’s next for smart glasses For every technological gadget that becomes a household name, there are dozens that never catch on. This year marks a full decade since Google confirmed it was stopping…
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What’s next for smart glasses
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. For every technological gadget that becomes a household name, there are dozens that never catch on. This year marks a full decade since Google confirmed it…
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Four Chinese AI startups to watch beyond DeepSeek
The meteoric rise of DeepSeek—the Chinese AI startup now challenging global giants—has stunned observers and put the spotlight on China’s AI sector. Since ChatGPT’s debut in 2022, the country’s tech ecosystem has been in relentless pursuit of homegrown alternatives, giving rise to a wave of startups and billion-dollar bets. Today, the race is dominated by…
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The Download: understanding dark matter, and AI jailbreak protection
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 the Rubin Observatory will help us understand dark matter and dark energy We can put a good figure on how much we know about the universe: 5%. That’s how much of what’s…
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Three things to know as the dust settles from DeepSeek
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. The launch of a single new AI model does not normally cause much of a stir outside tech circles, nor does it typically spook investors enough to wipe out $1 trillion in…
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How the Rubin Observatory will help us understand dark matter and dark energy
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. We can put a good figure on how much we know about the universe: 5%. That’s how much of what’s floating about in the cosmos is…
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Roundtables: What DeepSeek’s Breakout Success Means for AI
Recorded on February 3, 2025 What DeepSeek’s Breakout Success Means for AI Speakers: Charlotte Jee, news editor, Will Douglas Heaven, senior AI editor, and Caiwei Chen, China reporter. The tech world is abuzz over a new open-source reasoning AI model developed by DeepSeek, a Chinese startup. Its success is remarkable given the constraints that Chinese AI…
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Anthropic has a new way to protect large language models against jailbreaks
AI firm Anthropic has developed a new line of defense against a common kind of attack called a jailbreak. A jailbreak tricks large language models (LLMs) into doing something they have been trained not to, such as help somebody create a weapon. Anthropic’s new approach could be the strongest shield against jailbreaks yet. “It’s at…
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The Download: following DeepSeek’s lead, and OpenAI’s new research agent
This is today’s edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How DeepSeek ripped up the AI playbook—and why everyone’s going to follow its lead When the Chinese firm DeepSeek dropped a large language model called R1 two weeks ago, it sent shock waves…
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OpenAI’s new agent can compile detailed reports on practically any topic
OpenAI has launched a new agent capable of conducting complex, multistep online research into everything from scientific studies to personalized bike recommendations at what it claims is the same level as a human analyst. The tool, called Deep Research, is powered by a version of OpenAI’s o3 reasoning model that’s been optimized for web browsing…
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DeepSeek might not be such good news for energy after all
In the week since a Chinese AI model called DeepSeek became a household name, a dizzying number of narratives have gained steam, with varying degrees of accuracy: that the model is collecting your personal data (maybe); that it will upend AI as we know it (too soon to tell—but do read my colleague Will’s story…
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OpenAI releases its new o3-mini reasoning model for free
On Thursday, Microsoft announced that it’s rolling OpenAI’s reasoning model o1 out to its Copilot users, and now OpenAI is releasing a new reasoning model, o3-mini, to people who use the free version of ChatGPT. This will mark the first time that the vast majority of people will have access to one of OpenAI’s reasoning…
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How DeepSeek ripped up the AI playbook—and why everyone’s going to follow its lead
Join us on Monday, February 3 as our editors discuss what DeepSeek’s breakout success means for AI and the broader tech industry.Register for this special subscriber-only session today. When the Chinese firm DeepSeek dropped a large language model called R1 last week, it sent shock waves through the US tech industry. Not only did R1…
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The Download: measuring vaccine hesitancy, and the rise of DeepSeek
This is today’s edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How measuring vaccine hesitancy could help health professionals tackle it This week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the US’s health agencies, has been facing questions from senators as…
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How measuring vaccine hesitancy could help health professionals tackle it
This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Review’sweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. This week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the US’s health agencies, has been facing questions from senators as part of his confirmation hearing…
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The Download: climate tech under Trump, and scaling up quantum computing
This is today’s edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Three questions about the future of US climate tech under Trump Donald Trump has officially been in office for just over a week, and the new administration has already issued a blizzard of…
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Three questions about the future of US climate tech under Trump
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Donald Trump has officially been in office for just over a week, and the new administration has hit the ground running with a blizzard of executive orders and memos. Some of the…
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This quantum computer built on server racks paves the way to bigger machines
A Canadian startup called Xanadu has built a new quantum computer it says can be easily scaled up to achieve the computational power needed to tackle scientific challenges ranging from drug discovery to more energy-efficient machine learning. Aurora is a “photonic” quantum computer, which means it crunches numbers using photonic qubits—information encoded in light. In…
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The Download: mice with two dads, and Meta’s fact-checking challenges
This is today’s edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Mice with two dads have been created using CRISPR What’s new: Mice with two fathers have been born—and have survived to adulthood—following a complex set of experiments by a team in China. The…
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Three reasons Meta will struggle with community fact-checking
Earlier this month, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta will cut back on its content moderation efforts and eliminate fact-checking in the US in favor of the more “democratic” approach that X (formerly Twitter) calls Community Notes, rolling back protections that he claimed had been developed only in response to media and government pressure. The move…
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Mice with two dads have been created using CRISPR
Mice with two fathers have been born—and have survived to adulthood—following a complex set of experiments by a team in China. Zhi-Kun Li at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and his colleagues used CRISPR to create the mice, using a novel approach to target genes that normally need to be inherited from both…
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The Download: DeepSeek forces a reality check, and robotaxis’ future
This is today’s edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. AI’s energy obsession just got a reality check Just a week in, the AI sector has already seen its first battle of wits under the new Trump administration. The clash stems from two…
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