This grim but revolutionary DNA technology is changing how we respond to mass disasters
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Seven days No matter who he called—his mother, his father, his brother, his cousins—the phone would just go to voicemail. Cell service was out around Maui as devastating wildfires swept through the Hawaiian island. But as Raven Imperial kept hoping for someone to answer, he couldn’t keep a terrifying thought from sneaking into his mind:…
Last summer was the hottest in 2,000 years. Here’s how we know.
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This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. I’m ready for summer, but if this year is anything like last year, it’s going to be a doozy. In fact, the summer of 2023 in the Northern Hemisphere was the hottest…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/16/1092507/tree-rings-climate-data/
A wave of retractions is shaking physics
Recent highly publicized scandals have gotten the physics community worried about its reputation—and its future. Over the last five years, several claims of major breakthroughs in quantum computing and superconducting research, published in prestigious journals, have disintegrated as other researchers found they could not reproduce the blockbuster results. Last week, around 50 physicists, scientific journal…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/15/1092535/a-wave-of-retractions-is-shaking-physics/
OpenAI and Google are launching supercharged AI assistants. Here’s how you can try them out.
This week, Google and OpenAI both announced they’ve built supercharged AI assistants: tools that can converse with you in real time and recover when you interrupt them, analyze your surroundings via live video, and translate conversations on the fly. OpenAI struck first on Monday, when it debuted its new flagship model GPT-4o. The live demonstration…
Optimizing the supply chain with a data lakehouse
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When a commercial ship travels from the port of Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia to Tokyo Bay, it’s not only carrying cargo; it’s also transporting millions of data points across a wide array of partners and complex technology systems. Consider, for example, Maersk. The global shipping container and logistics company has more than 100,000 employees,…
The Download: Google’s new AI agent, and our tech pessimism bias
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 Astra is its first AI-for-everything agent What’s happening: Google is set to launch a new system called Astra later this year. It promises that it will be the most powerful, advanced type…
Hong Kong is safe from China’s Great Firewall—for now
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. We finally know the result of a legal case I’ve been tracking in Hong Kong for almost a year. Last week, the Hong Kong Court of Appeal granted an injunction that permits…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/15/1092461/hong-kong-china-great-firewall/
Technology is probably changing us for the worse—or so we always think
MIT Technology Review is celebrating our 125th anniversary with an online series that draws lessons for the future from our past coverage of technology. Do we use technology, or does it use us? Do our gadgets improve our lives or just make us weak, lazy, and dumb? These are old questions—maybe older than you think.…
Google’s Astra is its first AI-for-everything agent
Google is set to introduce a new system called Astra later this year and promises that it will be the most powerful, advanced type of AI assistant it’s ever launched. The current generation of AI assistants, such as ChatGPT, can retrieve information and offer answers, but that is about it. But this year, Google is…
The Download: OpenAI’s GPT-4o, and what’s coming at Google I/O
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’s new GPT-4o lets people interact using voice or video in the same model The news: OpenAI just debuted GPT-4o, a new kind of AI model that you can communicate with in real…
What to expect at Google I/O
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. In the world of AI, a lot can happen in a year. Last year, at the beginning of Big Tech’s AI wars, Google announced during its annual I/O conference that it…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/14/1092375/what-to-expect-at-google-i-o/
OpenAI’s new GPT-4o model lets people interact using voice or video in the same model
OpenAI just debuted GPT-4o, a new kind of AI model which you can communicate with in real time via live voice conversation, video streams from your phone, and text. The model is rolling out over the next few weeks and will be free for all users via both the GPT app and the web interface,…
The Download: the future of chips, and investing in US AI
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 in chips Thanks to the boom in artificial intelligence, the world of chips is on the cusp of a huge tidal shift. There is heightened demand for chips that can train…
What’s next in chips
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Thanks to the boom in artificial intelligence, the world of chips is on the cusp of a huge tidal shift. There is heightened demand for chips that can train AI models faster and ping them from devices like smartphones and satellites, enabling us to use these models without disclosing private data. Governments, tech giants, and…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/13/1092319/whats-next-in-chips/
AI systems are getting better at tricking us
A wave of AI systems have “deceived” humans in ways they haven’t been explicitly trained to do, by offering up untrue explanations for their behavior or concealing the truth from human users and misleading them to achieve a strategic end. This issue highlights how difficult artificial intelligence is to control and the unpredictable ways in…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/10/1092293/ai-systems-are-getting-better-at-tricking-us/
Tech workers should shine a light on the industry’s secretive work with the military
It’s a hell of a time to have a conscience if you work in tech. The ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza has brought the stakes of Silicon Valley’s military contracts into stark relief. Meanwhile, corporate leadership has embraced a no politics in the workplace policy enforced at the point of the knife. Workers are caught…
The Download: mapping the human brain, and a Hong Kong protest anthem crackdown
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 helped make an exquisitely detailed map of a tiny piece of the human brain The news: A team led by scientists from Harvard and Google has created a 3D, nanoscale-resolution map of…
The burgeoning field of brain mapping
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. The human brain is an engineering marvel: 86 billion neurons form some 100 trillion connections to create a network so complex that it is, ironically, mind boggling. This…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/10/1092230/the-burgeoning-field-of-brain-mapping/
Hong Kong is targeting Western Big Tech companies in its new ban of a popular protest song
It wasn’t exactly surprising when, on Wednesday May 8, a Hong Kong appeals court sided with the city government to take down “Glory to Hong Kong” from the internet. The trial, in which no one represented the defense, was the culmination of a years-long battle over the song that has become the unofficial anthem for…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/09/1092252/hong-kong-court-ban-song/
Google helped make an exquisitely detailed map of a tiny piece of the human brain
A team led by scientists from Harvard and Google has created a 3D, nanoscale-resolution map of a single cubic millimeter of the human brain. Although the map covers just a fraction of the organ—a whole brain is a million times larger—that piece contains roughly 57,000 cells, about 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and nearly 150…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/09/1092223/google-map-cubic-millimeter-human-brain/