Splashy breakthroughs are exciting, but people with spinal cord injuries need more
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 wrote about an external stimulator that delivers electrical pulses to the spine to help improve hand and arm function in people who are paralyzed. This…
That viral video showing a head transplant is a fake. But it might be real someday.
An animated video posted this week has a voice-over that sounds like a late-night TV ad, but the pitch is straight out of the far future. The arms of an octopus-like robotic surgeon swirl, swiftly removing the head of a dying man and placing it onto a young healthy body. This is BrainBridge, the animated…
Noise-canceling headphones use AI to let a single voice through
Modern life is noisy. If you don’t like it, noise-canceling headphones can reduce the sounds in your environment. But they muffle sounds indiscriminately, so you can easily end up missing something you actually want to hear. A new prototype AI system for such headphones aims to solve this. Called Target Speech Hearing, the system gives…
The Download: Nick Clegg on electoral misinformation, and AI’s carbon footprint
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. Meta says AI-generated election content is not happening at a “systemic level” Meta has seen strikingly little AI-generated misinformation around the 2024 elections despite major votes in countries such as Indonesia, Taiwan, and…
AI is an energy hog. This is what it means 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. Tech companies keep finding new ways to bring AI into every facet of our lives. AI has taken over my search engine results, and new virtual assistants from Google and OpenAI announced…
Meta says AI-generated election content is not happening at a “systemic level”
Meta has seen strikingly little AI-generated misinformation around the 2024 elections despite major votes in countries such as Indonesia, Taiwan, and Bangladesh, said the company’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, on Wednesday. “The interesting thing so far—I stress, so far—is not how much but how little AI-generated content [there is],” said Clegg during an…
The Download: how criminals use AI, and OpenAI’s Chinese data blunder
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 criminals are using AI Artificial intelligence has brought a big boost in productivity—to the criminal underworld. Generative AI provides a new, powerful tool kit that allows malicious actors to work far…
OpenAI’s latest blunder shows the challenges facing Chinese AI models
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. Last week’s release of GPT-4o, a new AI “omnimodel” that you can interact with using voice, text, or video, was supposed to be a big moment for OpenAI. But just days later,…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/22/1092763/openais-gpt4o-chinese-ai-data/
Five ways criminals are using AI
Artificial intelligence has brought a big boost in productivity—to the criminal underworld. Generative AI provides a new, powerful tool kit that allows malicious actors to work far more efficiently and internationally than ever before, says Vincenzo Ciancaglini, a senior threat researcher at the security company Trend Micro. Most criminals are “not living in some dark…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/21/1092625/five-ways-criminals-are-using-ai/
The Download: how to test AI, and treating paralysis
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. AI models can outperform humans in tests to identify mental states Humans are complicated beings. The ways we communicate are multilayered, and psychologists have devised many kinds of tests to measure our ability…
Join me at EmTech Digital this week!
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. I’m excited to spend this week in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’m visiting the mothership for MIT Technology Review’s annual flagship AI conference, EmTech Digital, on May 22-23. Between the world leaders gathering in Seoul…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/21/1092721/join-me-at-emtech-digital-this-week/
AI models can outperform humans in tests to identify mental states
Humans are complicated beings. The ways we communicate are multilayered, and psychologists have devised many kinds of tests to measure our ability to infer meaning and understanding from interactions with each other. AI models are getting better at these tests. New research published today in Nature Human Behavior found that some large language models (LLMs)…
The Download: GPT-4o’s polluted Chinese training data, and astronomy’s AI challenge
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-4o’s Chinese token-training data is polluted by spam and porn websites Soon after OpenAI released GPT-4o last Monday, some Chinese speakers started to notice that something seemed off about this newest version of…
Astronomers are enlisting AI to prepare for a data downpour
In deserts across Australia and South Africa, astronomers are planting forests of metallic detectors that will together scour the cosmos for radio signals. When it boots up in five years or so, the Square Kilometer Array Observatory will look for new information about the universe’s first stars and the different stages of galactic evolution. But…
GPT-4o’s Chinese token-training data is polluted by spam and porn websites
Soon after OpenAI released GPT-4o on Monday, May 13, some Chinese speakers started to notice something seemed off about this newest version of the chatbot: the tokens it uses to parse text were full of spam and porn phrases. On May 14, Tianle Cai, a PhD student at Princeton University studying inference efficiency in large…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/17/1092649/gpt-4o-chinese-token-polluted/
The Download: cuddly robots to help dementia, and what Daedalus taught 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 cuddly robots could change dementia care Companion animals can stave off some of the loneliness, anxiety, and agitation that come with Alzheimer’s disease, according to studies. Sadly, people with Alzheimer’s aren’t always…
How cuddly robots could change dementia care
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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. Last week, I scoured the internet in search of a robotic dog. I wanted a belated birthday present for my aunt, who was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/17/1092604/how-cuddly-robots-could-change-dementia-care/
Roundtables: Why Thermal Batteries are So Hot Right Now
Recorded on May 16, 2024 Why Thermal Batteries are So Hot Right Now Speakers: Casey Crownhart, climate reporter and Amy Nordrum, executive editor Thermal batteries could be a key part of cleaning up heavy industry, and our readers chose them as the 11th breakthrough on MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2024. Learn what…
Unlocking the trillion-dollar potential of generative AI
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Generative AI is poised to unlock trillions in annual economic value across industries. This rapidly evolving field is changing the way we approach everything from content creation to software development, promising never-before-seen efficiency and productivity gains. In this session, experts from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, discuss the drivers fueling the massive…
The Download: rapid DNA analysis for disasters, and supercharged AI assistants
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 grim but revolutionary DNA technology is changing how we respond to mass disasters Last August, a wildfire tore through the Hawaiian island of Maui. The list of missing residents climbed into the…