The Download: AI training AI, and the future of robotaxis
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 people paid to train AI are outsourcing their work… to AI The news: Many people who are paid to train AI models may be themselves outsourcing that work to AI, a new…
The Download: AI training AI, and the future of robotaxis
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 people paid to train AI are outsourcing their work… to AI The news: Many people who are paid to train AI models may be themselves outsourcing that work to AI, a new…
The wild race to improve synthetic embryos
This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. This week, Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine is filling in for Jess Hamzelou. Something journalists and scientists have in common is that they hate getting scooped. And it’s especially annoying when the…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/23/1075439/the-wild-race-to-improve-synthetic-embryos/
The chip patterning machines that will shape computing’s next act
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When we talk about computing these days, we tend to talk about software and the engineers who write it. But we wouldn’t be anywhere without the hardware and the physical sciences that have enabled it to be created—disciplines like optics, materials science, and mechanical engineering. It’s thanks to advances in these areas that we can…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/23/1074321/chip-patterning-machines-shape-future/
The people paid to train AI are outsourcing their work… to AI
A significant proportion of people paid to train AI models may be themselves outsourcing that work to AI, a new study has found. It takes an incredible amount of data to train AI systems to perform specific tasks accurately and reliably. Many companies pay gig workers on platforms like Mechanical Turk to complete tasks that…
The Download: lab-grown chicken, and rewilding 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. Two companies can now sell lab-grown chicken in the US The news: The first cultivated, or lab-grown, meat has been approved for sale in the US. Two companies, Upside Foods and Eat Just,…
The hope and hype of seaweed farming for carbon removal
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Say, theoretically, that a pipe in your bathroom springs a leak. Bad situation, right? The good news is that there are pretty much only two things you need to do: turn the…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/22/1075387/seaweed-farming-carbon-removal/
What “rewilding” means—and what’s missing from this new movement
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In Colombia, there’s a national debate about what to do with Pablo Escobar’s feral “cocaine hippos.” To many, the 160 hippos—descendants of four illegally imported African hippopotamuses that escaped from the drug kingpin’s private zoo after his death in 1993—are agents of destruction. Each night, they collectively chomp through half a ton of vegetation, and…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/22/1074268/rewilding-movement-books/
Two companies can now sell lab-grown chicken in the US
The first cultivated, or lab-grown, meat has been approved for sale in the US. Two California-based companies, Upside Foods and Eat Just, both received a grant of inspection from the United States Department of Agriculture today. It’s the final approval needed for each company to begin commercial production and sales in the US. Animal agriculture…
Making data matter in real time
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As the world becomes increasingly networked and connected devices proliferate, organizations are producing a plethora of data. The potential to collect data is growing exponentially. From smart grids to mobile phones and from connected cars to the industrial internet of things, tens of billions of devices will act as sensors, delivering data to networks. Whether…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/21/1075155/making-data-matter-in-real-time/
The US city that scares Chinese Amazon sellers
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China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Want to know how to make Chinese Amazon sellers anxious? Put Chicago in the delivery address when you order. Why? Because in the last few years, many sellers have been slapped with massive lawsuits for…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/21/1075255/chicago-chinese-amazon-sellers-newsletter/
The iPad was meant to revolutionize accessibility. What happened?
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In December 2022, a few months after learning that he’d won an Iowa Arts Fellowship to attend the MFA program at the University of Iowa, David James “DJ” Savarese sat for a televised interview with a local news station. But in order to answer the anchorman’s questions, Savarese, a 30-year-old poet with autism who uses…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/21/1074249/ipad-accessibility-fail/
Scaling MLOps for the enterprise with multi-tenant systems
Multi-tenant systems are invaluable for modern, fast-paced businesses. These systems allow multiple users and teams to access and use them at the same time. Machine learning operations (MLOps) teams, in particular, benefit greatly from using multi-tenant systems. MLOps teams that don’t leverage multi-tenant systems can fall victim to inefficiency, inconsistency, duplicative work, and bumpy onboarding—adding…
Scaling MLOps for the enterprise with multi-tenant systems
Multi-tenant systems are invaluable for modern, fast-paced businesses. These systems allow multiple users and teams to access and use them at the same time. Machine learning operations (MLOps) teams, in particular, benefit greatly from using multi-tenant systems. MLOps teams that don’t leverage multi-tenant systems can fall victim to inefficiency, inconsistency, duplicative work, and bumpy onboarding—adding…
The counterfeit lawsuits that scoop up hundreds of Chinese Amazon sellers at once
Sun Qunming had no idea that the word “airbag” could be trademarked. Sun, who owns an e-commerce company of 13 people in Shenzhen, China, has been selling phone cases to Amazon buyers in Europe and the US since 2016. But last year, her business ground to a halt. One of her products has air-filled bumper…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/20/1075088/chinese-amazon-seller-counterfeit-lawsuit/
The Download: explaining the recent AI panic, and digital inequality in the US
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 existential risk became the biggest meme in AI Who’s afraid of the big bad bots? A lot of people, it seems. Hundreds of scientists, business leaders, and policymakers have recently made public…
How climate vulnerability and the digital divide are linked
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The Wi-Fi signal is weak outside the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in Anacostia, a historic African-American section of Washington, DC. The abolitionist leader’s former home sits serenely atop a grassy hill in the otherwise bustling neighborhood. It is one of Monica Sanders’s final stops on an overcast December afternoon. Facing the property, she holds…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/20/1074244/climate-vulnerability-digital-divide/
Meta’s AI leaders want you to know fears over AI existential risk are “ridiculous”
It’s a really weird time in AI. In just six months, the public discourse around the technology has gone from “Chatbots generate funny sea shanties” to “AI systems could cause human extinction.” Who else is feeling whiplash? My colleague Will Douglas Heaven asked AI experts why exactly people are talking about existential risk, and why…
How existential risk became the biggest meme in AI
Who’s afraid of the big bad bots? A lot of people, it seems. The number of high-profile names that have now made public pronouncements or signed open letters warning of the catastrophic dangers of artificial intelligence is striking. Hundreds of scientists, business leaders, and policymakers have spoken up, from deep learning pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/19/1075140/how-existential-risk-became-biggest-meme-in-ai/
The Download: building anti-aging hype, and exploring the universe with sound
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. Police got called to an overcrowded presentation on “rejuvenation” technology It’s not every day that police storm through the doors of a scientific session and eject half the audience. But that’s what happened…