How the US and its allies can rebuild economic security
A country’s economic security—its ability to generate both national security and economic prosperity—is grounded in it having significant technological capabilities that outpace those of its adversaries and complement those of its allies. Though this is a principle well known throughout history, the move over the last few decades toward globalization and offshoring of technologically advanced…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/07/30/1095439/usa-economic-security-competitiveness/
How the US and its allies can rebuild economic security
A country’s economic security—its ability to generate both national security and economic prosperity—is grounded in it having significant technological capabilities that outpace those of its adversaries and complement those of its allies. Though this is a principle well known throughout history, the move over the last few decades toward globalization and offshoring of technologically advanced…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/07/30/1095439/usa-economic-security-competitiveness/
The Download: the future of CRISPR babies, and investing in climate tech
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. Controversial CRISPR scientist promises “no more gene-edited babies” until society comes around He Jiankui, the Chinese biophysicist whose controversial 2018 experiment led to the birth of three gene-edited children, says he’s returned to…
From Meta CTO to climate tech investor: Mike Schroepfer on his big pivot
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As the pandemic locked down cities in early 2020, Mike Schroepfer, then the chief technology officer of Meta, found himself with more free time than he’d ever had in his career. In quiet moments that would have been filled with work travel, social events, or his children’s school activities, he reflected on how well humanity…
Controversial CRISPR scientist promises “no more gene-edited babies” until society comes around
He Jiankui, the Chinese biophysicist whose controversial 2018 experiment led to the birth of three gene-edited children, says he’s returned to work on the concept of altering the DNA of people at conception, but with a difference. This time around, he says, he will restrict his research to animals and nonviable human embryos. He will…
The Download: AI’s math solutions, and brewing beer with sunlight
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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 DeepMind’s new AI systems can now solve complex math problems AI models can easily generate essays and other types of text. However, they’re nowhere near as good at solving math problems, which…
How our genome is like a generative AI model
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. What does the genome do? You might have heard that it is a blueprint for an organism. Or that it’s a bit like a recipe. But building an…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/07/26/1095332/genome-is-like-generative-ai/
Roundtables: CRISPR Babies—Six years later
Recorded on July 25, 2024 CRISPR Babies: Six years later Speakers: He Jiankui, CRISPR Pioneer, Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine, and Mat Honan, editor in chief Gene editing can correct or improve the DNA of human embryos, essentially opening the door to “technological evolution” of our species. But in 2018, a premature attempt to…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/07/25/1095301/roundtables-crispr-babies-six-years-later/
A new tool for copyright holders can show if their work is in AI training data
Since the beginning of the generative AI boom, content creators have argued that their work has been scraped into AI models without their consent. But until now, it has been difficult to know whether specific text has actually been used in a training data set. Now they have a new way to prove it: “copyright…
Google DeepMind’s AI systems can now solve complex math problems
AI models can easily generate essays and other types of text. However, they’re nowhere near as good at solving math problems, which tend to involve logical reasoning—something that’s beyond the capabilities of most current AI systems. But that may finally be changing. Google DeepMind says it has trained two specialized AI systems to solve complex…
Beer, hydrogen, and heat: Why the US is still trying to make mirror-magnified solar energy work
The US is continuing its decades-long effort to commercialize a technology that converts sunlight into heat, funding a series of new projects using that energy to brew beer, produce low-carbon fuels, or keep grids running. On July 25, the Department of Energy will announce it is putting $33 million into nine pilot or demonstration projects…
The Download: US quantum computing, and AI garbage
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. PsiQuantum plans to build the biggest quantum computing facility in the US Quantum computing firm PsiQuantum is partnering with universities and a national lab to build the largest US-based quantum computing facility in…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/07/25/1095281/the-download-us-quantum-computing-ai-garbage/
PsiQuantum plans to build the biggest quantum computing facility in the US
Quantum computing firm PsiQuantum is partnering with universities and a national lab to build the largest US-based quantum computing facility, the company announced today. The firm, which has headquarters in California, says it aims to house a quantum computer containing up to one million quantum bits, or qubits, within the next 10 years. At the…
AI that feeds on a diet of AI garbage ends up spitting out nonsense
AI models work by training on huge swaths of data from the internet. But as AI is increasingly being used to pump out web pages filled with junk content, that process is in danger of being undermined. New research published in Nature shows that the quality of the model’s output gradually degrades when AI trains…
The Download: Chinese LLMs, and transforming heavy-duty trucking
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 to access Chinese LLM chatbots across the world Hundreds of Chinese large language models have been released since the government started permitting AI companies to open up their models for the general…
How battery-powered trailers could transform trucking
Semi-trucks move over 11 billion tons of freight in the US each year, spewing greenhouse-gas emissions and other pollutants along the highways as they go. Shifting these and other heavy-duty trucks to zero-emissions technologies will be a challenge—even more so than for smaller vehicles, since larger vehicles require bigger batteries and more powerful chargers. One…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/07/24/1095233/battery-trailers-trucking/
The Download: AI’s self-regulation promises, and predicting the weather
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 companies promised to self-regulate one year ago. What’s changed? One year ago, seven leading AI companies—Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI—committed with the White House to a set voluntary commitments…
How’s AI self-regulation going?
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Yesterday, on July 21, President Joe Biden announced he is stepping down from the race against Donald Trump in the US presidential election. But AI nerds may remember that exactly a…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/07/23/1095218/hows-ai-self-regulation-going/
AI companies promised the White House to self-regulate one year ago. What’s changed?
One year ago, on July 21, 2023, seven leading AI companies—Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI—committed with the White House to a set of eight voluntary commitments on how to develop AI in a safe and trustworthy way. These included promises to do things like improve the testing and transparency around AI systems,…
A new weather prediction model from Google combines AI with traditional physics
Google DeepMind researchers have built a new weather prediction model that combines machine learning with more conventional techniques, potentially yielding accurate forecasts at a fraction of the current cost. The model, called NeuralGCN and described in a paper in Nature today, bridges a divide that’s grown among weather prediction experts in the last several years. …