Technology

The Download: AI’s math solutions, and brewing beer with sunlight

July 26, 2024
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

July 26, 2024
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…

Roundtables: CRISPR Babies—Six years later

July 25, 2024
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…

Google DeepMind’s AI systems can now solve complex math problems

July 25, 2024
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…

The Download: US quantum computing, and AI garbage

July 25, 2024
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…

PsiQuantum plans to build the biggest quantum computing facility in the US

July 25, 2024
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…

The race to clean up heavy-duty trucks

July 25, 2024
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Truckers have to transport massive loads long distances, every single day, under intense time pressure—and they rely on the semi-trucks they drive to get the job done. Their diesel engines spew not…

AI trained on AI garbage spits out AI garbage

July 24, 2024
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…