December 23, 2025

How social media encourages the worst of AI boosterism

Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, summed it up in three words: “This is embarrassing.”   Hassabis was replying on X to an overexcited post by Sébastien Bubeck, a research scientist at the rival firm OpenAI, announcing that two mathematicians had used OpenAI’s latest large language model, GPT-5, to find solutions to 10 unsolved problems in…

Technology

How I learned to stop worrying and love AI slop

December 23, 2025
Lately, everywhere I scroll, I keep seeing the same fish-eyed CCTV view: a grainy wide shot from the corner of a living room, a driveway at night, an empty grocery store. Then something impossible happens. JD Vance shows up at the doorstep in a crazy outfit. A car folds into itself like paper and drives…

Welcome to Kenya’s Great Carbon Valley: a bold new gamble to fight climate change

December 22, 2025
The earth around Lake Naivasha, a shallow freshwater basin in south-central Kenya, does not seem to want to lie still.  Ash from nearby Mount Longonot, which erupted as recently as the 1860s, remains in the ground. Obsidian caves and jagged stone towers preside over the steam that spurts out of fissures in the soil and…

The Download: China’s dying EV batteries, and why AI doomers are doubling down

December 19, 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. China figured out how to sell EVs. Now it has to bury their batteries. In the past decade, China has seen an EV boom, thanks in part to government support. Buying an electric…

China figured out how to sell EVs. Now it has to bury their batteries.

December 18, 2025
In August 2025, Wang Lei decided it was finally time to say goodbye to his electric vehicle. Wang, who is 39, had bought the car in 2016, when EVs still felt experimental in Beijing. It was a compact Chinese brand. The subsidies were good, and the salesman talked about “supporting domestic innovation.” At the time,…

Take our quiz on the year in health and biotechnology

December 18, 2025
In just a couple of weeks, we’ll be bidding farewell to 2025. And what a year it has been! Artificial intelligence is being incorporated into more aspects of our lives, weight-loss drugs have expanded in scope, and there have been some real “omg” biotech stories from the fields of gene therapy, IVF, neurotech, and more.   …

The Download: the worst technology of 2025, and Sam Altman’s AI hype

December 18, 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. The 8 worst technology flops of 2025 Welcome to our annual list of the worst, least successful, and simply dumbest technologies of the year. We like to think there’s a lesson in every…

The 8 worst technology flops of 2025

December 18, 2025
Welcome to our annual list of the worst, least successful, and simply dumbest technologies of the year. This year, politics was a recurring theme. Donald Trump swept back into office and used his executive pen to reshape the fortunes of entire sectors, from renewables to cryptocurrency. The wrecking-ball act began even before his inauguration, when…

Can AI really help us discover new materials?

December 18, 2025
Judging from headlines and social media posts in recent years, one might reasonably assume that AI is going to fix the power grid, cure the world’s diseases, and finish my holiday shopping for me. But maybe there’s just a whole lot of hype floating around out there. This week, we published a new package called…