What to expect from the coming year in AI
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Happy new year! I hope you had a relaxing break. I spent it up in the Arctic Circle skiing, going to the sauna, and playing card games with my family by…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/09/1086336/what-to-expect-from-the-coming-year-in-ai/
The Download: Introducing MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2024
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: MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2024 The start of a new year offers a great opportunity to reflect while also thinking about what’s to come. That is especially true for…
Four lessons from 2023 that tell us where AI regulation is going
This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review’s weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. In the US and elsewhere, 2023 was a blockbuster year for artificial intelligence and AI regulation, and this next year is guaranteed to bring even…
10 Breakthrough Technologies 2024
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/08/1085094/10-breakthrough-technologies-2024/
The Download: producing rare earth minerals, and future AI regulation
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 race to produce rare earth materials Abandoning fossil fuels and adopting lower-carbon technologies are our best options for warding off the accelerating threat of climate change. And access to rare earth elements,…
These AI-powered apps can hear the cause of a cough
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. This week I came across a paper that uses AI in a way that I hadn’t heard of before. Researchers developed a smartphone app that can…
The race to produce rare earth materials
Abandoning fossil fuels and adopting lower-carbon technologies are our best options for warding off the accelerating threat of climate change. Access to rare earth elements, key ingredients in many of these technologies, will partly determine which countries will meet their goals for lowering emissions or increasing the proportion of electricity generated from non-fossil-fuel sources. But…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/05/1084791/rare-earth-materials-clean-energy/
Irene T. Cheng, SM ’78
“Thinking big, aiming high, and making a difference were rules of the road embedded during my time at MIT,” says Irene Cheng, SM ’78, who went on to a successful Wall Street career as a managing director at Lazard Asset Management after earning a graduate degree in chemical engineering from the Institute. “I was helped…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/04/1084010/irene-t-cheng-sm-78/
The Download: what’s next for AI, and quantum computing challenges
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’s next for AI in 2024 This time last year our AI writers did something reckless. In an industry where nothing stands still, they had a go at predicting the future. Turns out,…
The hidden climate cost of everything around us
?w=3000
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. The world is building and making things as never before, from roads and hospitals to vehicles and furniture. That’s good news for people who benefit from new goods and infrastructure, but it’s…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/04/1086064/material-climate-cost/
Quantum computing is taking on its biggest challenge: noise
?w=1500
In the past 20 years, hundreds of companies, including giants like Google, Microsoft, and IBM, have staked a claim in the rush to establish quantum computing. Investors have put in well over $5 billion so far. All this effort has just one purpose: creating the world’s next big thing. Quantum computers use the counterintuitive rules…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/04/1084783/quantum-computing-noise-google-ibm-microsoft/
What’s next for AI in 2024
?w=3000
This time last year we did something reckless. In an industry where nothing stands still, we had a go at predicting the future. How did we do? Our four big bets for 2023 were that the next big thing in chatbots would be multimodal (check: the most powerful large language models out there, OpenAI’s GPT-4…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/04/1086046/whats-next-for-ai-in-2024/
The Download: greener cement, and the biggest tech stories of 2023
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 electricity could help tackle a surprising climate villain Cement hides in plain sight—it’s used to build everything from roads and buildings to dams and basement floors. But it’s also a climate threat.…
The race is on to save coral reefs—by freezing them
As sweltering ocean temperatures make graveyards of coral reefs across the Caribbean and beyond, a team of scientists is scrambling to cool corals down. Way down. To -200 °C. The Coral Biobank Alliance, helmed in part by Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute biologist Mary Hagedorn, aims to cryopreserve or otherwise keep in captivity the roughly 1,000…
How electricity could help tackle a surprising climate villain
?w=2000
Cement hides in plain sight—it’s used to build everything from roads and buildings to dams and basement floors. But there’s a climate threat lurking in those ubiquitous gray slabs. Cement production accounts for more than 7% of global carbon dioxide emissions—more than sectors like aviation, shipping, or landfills. Humans have been making cement, in one…
The Download: solving the mystery of hunger, and the climate-tech boom
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. We’ve never understood how hunger works. That might be about to change. When you’re starving, hunger is like a demon. It awakens the most ancient and primitive parts of the brain, then commandeers…
We’ve never understood how hunger works. That might be about to change.
?w=1500
You haven’t seen hungry until you’ve seen Brad Lowell’s mice. A few years ago, Lowell—a Harvard University neuroscientist—and a postdoc, Mike Krashes, figured out how to turn up the volume on the drive for food as high as it can go. They did it by stimulating a bundle of neurons in the hypothalamus, an area…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/02/1084713/how-does-hunger-work-appetite/
How machine learning might unlock earthquake prediction
?w=1500
In September 2017, about two minutes before a magnitude 8.2 earthquake struck Mexico City, blaring sirens alerted residents that a quake was coming. Such alerts, which are now available in the United States, Japan, Turkey, Italy, and Romania, among other countries, have changed the way we think about the threat of earthquakes. They no longer…
We need a moonshot for computing
In its final weeks, the Obama administration released a report that rippled through the federal science and technology community. Titled Ensuring Long-Term US Leadership in Semiconductors, it warned that as conventional ways of building chips brushed up against the laws of physics, the United States was at risk of losing its edge in the chip…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/28/1084686/computing-microelectronics-chips-act/
Six takeaways from a climate-tech boom
?w=3000
The surge of climate-tech startups seeking to reinvent clean energy and transform huge industrial markets is fueling optimism about our prospects for addressing climate change. Tens of billions are pouring into these venture-backed companies in just about every field you can imagine, from green steel to nuclear fusion. As I explain in “Climate tech is…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/27/1085892/six-takeaways-climate-tech-boom/