Adobe wants to make it easier for artists to blacklist their work from AI scraping
Adobe has announced a new tool to help creators watermark their artwork and opt out of having it used to train generative AI models. The web app, called Adobe Content Authenticity, allows artists to signal that they do not consent for their work to be used by AI models, which are generally trained on vast…
The Download: Geoffrey Hinton’s Nobel Prize, and multimodal 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. Geoffrey Hinton, AI pioneer and figurehead of doomerism, wins Nobel Prize Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist whose pioneering work on deep learning in the 1980s and 90s underpins all of the most powerful…
Why artificial intelligence and clean energy need each other
We are in the early stages of a geopolitical competition for the future of artificial intelligence. The winners will dominate the global economy in the 21st century. But what’s been too often left out of the conversation is that AI’s huge demand for concentrated and consistent amounts of power represents a chance to scale the…
Forget chat. AI that can hear, see and click is already here
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Chatting with an AI chatbot is so 2022. The latest hot AI toys take advantage of multimodal models, which can handle several things at the same time, such as images, audio, and…
The Download: how to find new music online, and climate friendly food
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 break free of Spotify’s algorithm Since the heyday of radio, records, cassette tapes, and MP3 players, the branding of sound has evolved from broad genres like rock and hip-hop to “paranormal…
The Download: Google’s AI podcasts, and protecting your brain data
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. People are using Google study software to make AI podcasts—and they’re weird and amazing Google’s new AI podcasting tool, called Audio Overview, has become a surprise viral hit. The podcasting feature was launched…
A new law in California protects consumers’ brain data. Some think it doesn’t go far enough.
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. On September 28, California became the second US state to officially recognize the importance of mental privacy in state law. That pink, jelly-like, throbbing mass under your skull—a.k.a.…
People are using Google study software to make AI podcasts—and they’re weird and amazing
“All right, so today we are going to dive deep into some cutting-edge tech,” a chatty American male voice says. But this voice does not belong to a human. It belongs to Google’s new AI podcasting tool, called Audio Overview, which has become a surprise viral hit. The podcasting feature was launched in mid-September as…
The Download: training robots with gen AI, and the state of 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. AI-generated images can teach robots how to act Generative AI models can produce images in response to prompts within seconds, and they’ve recently been used for everything from highlighting their own inherent bias…
These 15 companies are innovating in climate tech
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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. It’s finally here! We’ve just unveiled our 2024 list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch. This annual project is one the climate team at MIT Technology Review pours a lot of…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/10/03/1104910/15-climate-tech-companies/
AI-generated images can teach robots how to act
Generative AI models can produce images in response to prompts within seconds, and they’ve recently been used for everything from highlighting their own inherent bias to preserving precious memories. Now, researchers from Stephen James’s Robot Learning Lab in London are using image-generating AI models for a new purpose: creating training data for robots. They’ve developed…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/10/03/1104958/ai-generated-images-can-teach-robots-how-to-act/
The Download: 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch
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: 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch The urgency of addressing climate change has never been clearer. Emissions of planet-warming gases are at record highs, as are global temperatures. All that extra heat…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/10/02/1104844/the-download-15-climate-tech-companies-to-watch/
Europa Clipper set to look for life-friendly conditions around Jupiter
NASA is poised to launch Europa Clipper, a $5.2 billion mission to Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, as early as October 10. The spacecraft will blast off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. It will study Europa, a possible home for extraterrestrial life, through a series of flybys after reaching Jupiter…
2024 Climate Tech Companies to Watch: First Solar and its advanced solar panels
First Solar is expanding production of its thin-film solar cells and opening new factories to meet a surge of demand. Meanwhile, it’s investing in perovskites—tiny crystalline materials that many view as a key solar technology of the future. The world needs more electricity than ever, as the AI boom puts intense demand on data centers…
The Download: smart glasses, and tiny AI models
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 coolest thing about smart glasses is not the AR. It’s the AI. In case you missed the memo, we are barreling toward the next big consumer device category: smart glasses. At its…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/10/01/1104750/the-download-smart-glasses-and-tiny-ai-models/
Why bigger is not always better 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. In AI research, everyone seems to think that bigger is better. The idea is that more data, more computing power, and more parameters will lead to models that are more powerful.…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/10/01/1104744/why-bigger-is-not-always-better-in-ai/
The coolest thing about smart glasses is not the AR. It’s the AI.
This article is from The Debrief with Mat Honan, MIT Technology Review’s weekly newsletter from its editor in chief. To receive it every Friday, sign up here. In case you missed the memo, we are barreling toward the next big consumer device category: smart glasses. At its developer conference this week, Meta (née Facebook) introduced a positively mind-blowing…
The Download: how to break up with coal, and AI’s false climate promises
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 UK is done with coal. How’s the rest of the world doing? The UK is shutting down its final coal-fired power plant today, marking the end of an era for the country’s…
The UK is done with coal. How’s the rest of the world doing?
The UK is shutting down its final coal-fired power plant today, marking the end of an era for the country’s energy system. Once the backbone of the grid, coal has been steadily replaced with other, less polluting energy sources. Coal is the most emissions-intensive fuel powering the grid today, and moving away from it, even…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/09/30/1104591/uk-coal-global-shutdown/
Sorry, AI won’t “fix” climate change
In an essay last week, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, argued that the accelerating capabilities of AI will usher in an idyllic “Intelligence Age,” unleashing “unimaginable” prosperity and “astounding triumphs” like “fixing the climate.” It’s a promise that no one is in a position to make—and one that, when it comes to the topic…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/09/28/1104588/sorry-ai-wont-fix-climate-change/