Technology

The Download: Google’s Gemini is here, and Sundar Pichai talks AI

December 7, 2023
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 Gemini model looks amazing—but could signal peak AI hype Hype about Gemini, Google DeepMind’s long-rumored response to OpenAI’s GPT-4, has been building for months. Now, the company has finally revealed…

How carbon removal technology is like a time machine

December 7, 2023
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. If you could go back in time, what would you change about your life, or the world? The idea of giving myself some much-needed advice is appealing (don’t cut your own bangs…

Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Gemini and the coming age of AI

December 6, 2023
Google released the first phase of its next-generation AI model, Gemini, today. Gemini reflects years of efforts from inside Google, overseen and driven by its CEO Sundar Pichai. (You can read all about Gemini in our report from Melissa Heikkila and Will Douglas Heaven here.)  Pichai, who previously oversaw Chrome and Android, is famously product-obsessed.…

Google DeepMind’s new Gemini model looks amazing—but could signal peak AI hype

December 6, 2023
Hype about Gemini, Google DeepMind’s long-rumored response to OpenAI’s GPT-4, has been building for months. Today the company finally revealed what it has been working on in secret all this time. Was the hype justified? Yes—and no.  Gemini is Google’s biggest AI launch yet, its push to take on competitors OpenAI and Microsoft in the…

The Download: AI coding assistants, and China’s app disputes

December 6, 2023
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. Millions of coders are now using AI assistants. How will that change software? Two weeks into the coding class he was teaching at Duke University in North Carolina this spring, Noah Gift told…

How AI assistants are already changing the way code gets made

December 6, 2023
Two weeks into the coding class he was teaching at Duke University in North Carolina this spring, Noah Gift told his students to throw out the course materials he’d given them. Instead of working with Python, one of the most popular entry-level programming languages, the students would now be using Rust, a language that was…

Chinese apps are letting public juries settle customer disputes

December 6, 2023
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Have you ordered food delivery lately?  If you have, you probably know that particular feeling of frustration when you have to wait too long for your order or, when you finally receive…

The Download: Big Tech’s AI stranglehold, and gene-editing treatments

December 5, 2023
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. Make no mistake—AI is owned by Big Tech —By Amba Kak, Sarah Myers West and Meredith Whittaker, members of the AI Now Institute Until late November, when the epic saga of OpenAI’s board…