Technology

BeFake, a social networking app that combines concepts from popular Gen Z app BeReal along with AI technology has netted itself $3 million in seed funding to create an AI-augmented social network. The app’s name, a clear reference to BeReal’s authentic photo sharing among friends, is meant to suggest it does the opposite. Instead of […]

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. Chinese ChatGPT alternatives just got approved for the general public The news: Baidu, one of China’s leading artificial-intelligence companies, has announced it’s opening up access to its ChatGPT-like large language model, Ernie Bot,…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. When I was growing up near the US Gulf Coast, it was more common for my school to get called off for a hurricane than for a snowstorm.  So even though I…

A UK parliamentary committee that’s investigating the opportunities and challenges unfolding around artificial intelligence has urged the government to reconsider its decision not to introduce legislation to regulate the technology in the short term — calling for an AI bill to be a priority for ministers. The government should be moving with “greater urgency” when […]

On Wednesday, Baidu, one of China’s leading artificial intelligence companies, announced it would open up access to its ChatGPT-like large language model, Ernie Bot, to the general public. It’s been a long time coming. Launched in mid-March, Ernie Bot was the first Chinese ChatGPT rival. Since then, many Chinese tech companies have followed suit and…

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more here. It’s now possible to link climate change to all kinds of extreme weather, from droughts to flooding to wildfires.  Hurricanes are no exception—scientists have found that warming temperatures are causing…

Biotech, pharmaceutical, and life sciences companies all hope AI will streamline drug development and make it more efficient, and 38% have already adopted the technology, according to Deloitte. QuantHealth aims to take part with a model that predicts risks and outcomes for clinical trials. The company’s AI-powered platform for drug discovery claims to reduce potential […]

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. Large language models aren’t people. Let’s stop testing them as if they are. In the past few years, multiple researchers claim to have shown that large language models can pass cognitive tests designed…

When Taylor Webb played around with GPT-3 in early 2022, he was blown away by what OpenAI’s large language model appeared to be able to do. Here was a neural network trained only to predict the next word in a block of text—a jumped-up autocomplete. And yet it gave correct answers to many of the…

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. There’s something so visceral about the phrase “pig-butchering scam.” The first time I came across it was in my reporting a year ago, when I was looking into how strange LinkedIn…