February 6, 2025

The Download: AI companion dangers, and supersonic planes

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. An AI chatbot told a user how to kill himself—but the company doesn’t want to “censor” it For the past five months, Al Nowatzki has been talking to an AI girlfriend, “Erin,” on…

Technology

An inside look at Congress’s first AI regulation forum

September 25, 2023
This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review’s weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. Recently, I wrote a quick guide about what we might expect at Congress’s first AI Insight Forum. Well, now that meeting has happened, and we…

Akowe wants to fix Africa’s broken certificate system with blockchain

September 22, 2023
The crypto industry has long been criticized for its disconnection with the real world, but there are players who try to show that the underlying blockchain technology can solve some of our most pressing challenges in today’s society — especially in regions where basic infrastructure is lacking. Akowe, a Nairobi-based startup that is part of […]

Google’s Parisa Tabriz on how the company stays ahead of hackers

September 22, 2023
Google is constantly under attack. But while hackers have compromised gaming giants, casinos, and other technology giants in recent months, Google has so far remained largely unscathed. Parisa Tabriz, who is responsible for Chrome web browser security and Project Zero, credits much of this to the company’s approach to access control. “We’re evolving Google’s infrastructure […]

These scientists live like astronauts without leaving Earth

September 22, 2023
This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article. In January 2023, Tara Sweeney’s plane landed on Thwaites Glacier, a 74,000-square-mile mass of frozen water in West Antarctica. She arrived with an international research team to study the glacier’s geology and ice fabric, and how its ice melt might contribute to sea level…

The Download: inverse vaccines, and Microsoft’s big deal

September 22, 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. How inverse vaccines might tackle diseases like multiple sclerosis On the whole, typical vaccines prime the immune system to respond. But scientists are also working on “inverse vaccines” that teach the immune system…

How inverse vaccines might tackle diseases like multiple sclerosis

September 22, 2023
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. I’ve written about vaccines for years, but recently I stumbled across a concept I had never heard of before. Typical vaccines prime the immune system to respond. But…

Bolstering enterprise LLMs with machine learning operations foundations

September 21, 2023
Generative AI, particularly large language models (LLMs), will play a crucial role in the future of customer and employee experiences, software development, and more. Building a solid foundation in machine learning operations (MLOps) will be critical for companies to effectively deploy and scale LLMs, and generative AI capabilities broadly. In this uncharted territory, improper management…

The Download: what’s next for supercomputers, and electrifying everything

September 21, 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. What’s next for the world’s fastest supercomputers When the Frontier supercomputer came online last year, it marked the dawn of so-called exascale computing, with machines that can execute an exaflop—or a quintillion (1018)…

How electricity could clean up transportation, steel, and even fertilizer

September 21, 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. Have you ever repeated a word so many times it started to sound like gibberish? Try saying “peanut butter,” “roughhousing,” or “warbler” about 50 times, and you’ll be wondering whether the words…