Technology

How the Rubin Observatory will help us understand dark matter and dark energy

February 4, 2025
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 from the series here. We can put a good figure on how much we know about the universe: 5%. That’s how much of what’s floating about in the cosmos is…

Roundtables: What DeepSeek’s Breakout Success Means for AI

February 3, 2025
What DeepSeek’s Breakout Success Means for AI Speakers: Charlotte Jee, news editor, Will Douglas Heaven, senior AI editor, and Caiwei Chen, China reporter. The tech world is abuzz over a new open-source reasoning AI model developed by DeepSeek, a Chinese startup. The company claims that this new model, called DeepSeek R1, matches or even surpasses…

The Download: following DeepSeek’s lead, and OpenAI’s new research agent

February 3, 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. How DeepSeek ripped up the AI playbook—and why everyone’s going to follow its lead When the Chinese firm DeepSeek dropped a large language model called R1 two weeks ago, it sent shock waves…

OpenAI’s new agent can compile detailed reports on practically any topic

February 3, 2025
OpenAI has launched a new agent capable of conducting complex, multi-step online research into everything from scientific research to personalized bike recommendations at what it claims is the same level as a human research analyst. The tool, called Deep Research, is powered by a version of OpenAI’s o3 reasoning model that’s been optimized for web…

Tana snaps up $25M, with its AI-powered knowledge graph for work racking up a 160k+ waitlist

February 3, 2025

An app that helps people and teams in the working world simplify their to-do lists — ideally by organising and doing some of the work for them — has remained one of the unsolved goals in business technology. Leaning into AI, on top of battle scars from once building Google Wave, a startup called Tana […]

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Here are the apps battling to be become the ‘TikTok for Bluesky’

February 1, 2025

TikTok’s potential U.S. ban has sparked a flurry of development within the open social web community. Several new applications are being built that could one day serve as a TikTok replacement for those who favor the open source, decentralized social network Bluesky and the technology that powers it, the AT Protocol. Though the TikTok ban […]

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DeepSeek might not be such good news for energy after all

January 31, 2025
In the week since a Chinese AI model called DeepSeek became a household name, a dizzying number of narratives have gained steam, with varying degrees of accuracy: that the model is collecting your personal data (maybe); that it will upend AI as we know it (too soon to tell—but do read my colleague Will’s story…

OpenAI releases its new o3-mini reasoning model for free

January 31, 2025
On Thursday, Microsoft announced that it’s rolling OpenAI’s reasoning model o1 out to its Copilot users, and now OpenAI is releasing a new reasoning model, o3-mini, to people who use the free version of ChatGPT. This will mark the first time that the vast majority of people will have access to one of OpenAI’s reasoning…

Following the lead of DeepSeek, OpenAI makes its reasoning model free

January 31, 2025
OpenAI is feeling the heat from DeepSeek. On Thursday, it announced that it’s rolling its reasoning model o1 out to Microsoft Copilot users, and now it’s releasing a new reasoning model, o3-mini, to people who use the free version of ChatGPT. This will mark the first time that the vast majority of people will have…

How DeepSeek ripped up the AI playbook—and why everyone’s going to follow it

January 31, 2025
When the Chinese firm DeepSeek dropped a large language model called R1 last week, it sent shockwaves through the US tech industry. Not only did R1 match the best of the homegrown competition, it was built for a fraction of the cost—and given away for free.  The US stock market lost $1 trillion, President Trump…