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. Yann LeCun’s new venture is a contrarian bet against large language models Yann LeCun is a Turing Award recipient and a top AI researcher, but he has long been a contrarian figure in…
Every year, MIT Technology Review publishes a list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies. In fact, the 2026 version is out today. This marks the 25th year the newsroom has compiled this annual list, which means its journalists and editors have now identified 250 technologies as breakthroughs. A few years ago, editor at large David Rotman revisited…
For decades, space stations have been largely staffed by professional astronauts and operated by a handful of nations. But that’s about to change in the coming years, as companies including Axiom Space and Sierra Space launch commercial space stations that will host tourists and provide research facilities for nations and other firms. The first of…
The billionaire investor Peter Thiel (or maybe his ghostwriter) once said, “We were promised flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” That quip originally appeared in a manifesto for Thiel’s venture fund in 2011. All good investment firms have a manifesto, right? This one argued for making bold bets on risky, world-changing technologies rather than…
How large is a large language model? Think about it this way. In the center of San Francisco there’s a hill called Twin Peaks from which you can view nearly the entire city. Picture all of it—every block and intersection, every neighborhood and park, as far as you can see—covered in sheets of paper. Now…
Commercial nuclear reactors all work pretty much the same way. Atoms of a radioactive material split, emitting neutrons. Those bump into other atoms, splitting them and causing them to emit more neutrons, which bump into other atoms, continuing the chain reaction. That reaction gives off heat, which can be used directly or help turn water…
In sprawling stretches of farmland and industrial parks, supersized buildings packed with racks of computers are springing up to fuel the AI race. These engineering marvels are a new species of infrastructure: supercomputers designed to train and run large language models at mind-bending scale, complete with their own specialized chips, cooling systems, and even energy…
For decades, lithium-ion batteries have powered our phones, laptops, and electric vehicles. But lithium’s limited supply and volatile price have led the industry to seek more resilient alternatives. A sodium-ion battery works much like a lithium-ion one: It stores and releases energy by shuttling ions between two electrodes. But unlike lithium, a somewhat rare element…