April 23, 2025

Roundtables: Brain-Computer Interfaces: From Promise to Product

Recorded on April 23, 2025 Brain-Computer Interfaces: From Promise to Product Speakers: David Rotman, editor at large, and Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have been crowned the 11th Breakthrough Technology of 2025 by MIT Technology Review‘s readers. BCIs are electrodes implanted into the brain to send neural commands to computers, primarily to assist…

April 2025

Patreon tests a native live video feature where creators can stream 24/7

April 16, 2025
Patreon is finally experimenting with a native livestreaming, a new feature that could attract more creators and help them earn more money. The capability is rolling out to select testers this week and will become more widely available this summer.  Similar to other platforms, Patreon’s new livestream feature comes with a live chat where fans […]

The Download: how AI is changing music, and a US city’s AI experiment

April 16, 2025
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 is coming for music, too While large language models that generate text have exploded in the last three years, a different type of AI, based on what are called diffusion models, is…

A dev built a test to see how AI chatbots respond to controversial topics

April 16, 2025
A pseudonymous developer has created what they’re calling a “free speech eval,” SpeechMap, for the AI models powering chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and X’s Grok. The goal is to compare how different models treat sensitive and controversial subjects, the developer told TechCrunch, including political criticism and questions about civil rights and protest. AI companies have […]

A year after Elon Musk’s takeover, UK revenues for X plummeted

April 16, 2025
X has not been fairing well in the U.K., previously a major source of revenue for the social network prior to Elon Musk’s arrival. Still named Twitter UK Ltd, revenues and profits for X’s UK entity collapsed by over 60% in the year after Musk took it over and changed its moderation controls, according to […]

Jurassic Patent: How Colossal Biosciences is attempting to own the “woolly mammoth”

April 16, 2025
Colossal Biosciences not only wants to bring back the woolly mammoth—it wants to patent it, too. MIT Technology Review has learned the Texas startup is seeking a patent that would give it exclusive legal rights to create and sell gene-edited elephants containing ancient mammoth DNA. Colossal, which calls itself “the de-extinction company,” hopes to use…

Google used AI to suspend over 39M ad accounts suspected of fraud

April 16, 2025
Google on Wednesday said it suspended 39.2 million advertiser accounts on its platform in 2024 — more than triple the number from the previous year — in its latest crackdown on ad fraud. By leveraging large language models (LLMs) and using signals such as business impersonation and illegitimate payment details, the search giant said it could suspend […]

AI is coming for music, too

April 16, 2025
Artificial intelligence was barely a term in 1956, when top scientists from the field of computing arrived at Dartmouth College for a summer conference. The computer scientist John McCarthy had coined the phrase in the funding proposal for the event, a gathering to work through how to build machines that could use language, solve problems…

What is vibe coding, exactly?

April 16, 2025
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. When OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy excitedly took to X back in February to post about his new hobby, he probably had no idea he was about…