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

The Download: uncertainty over NASA’s moon rocket, and what’s next for nuclear

November 28, 2024
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 NASA’s giant moon rocket? NASA’s huge lunar rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), might be in trouble. As rival launchers like SpaceX’s Starship gather pace, some are questioning the need…

This startup is getting closer to bringing next-generation nuclear to the grid

November 28, 2024
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. This is a busy time of year for all of us, and that’s certainly true in the advanced nuclear industry. MIT Technology Review released our list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to…

What’s next for NASA’s giant moon rocket?

November 28, 2024
MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. NASA’s huge lunar rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), might be in trouble. As rival launchers like SpaceX’s Starship gather pace, some are questioning the need for…

The Download: the secret lives of AI characters, and commercializing space

November 27, 2024
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. These AI Minecraft characters did weirdly human stuff all on their own Left to their own devices, an army of AI characters didn’t just survive — they thrived. They developed in-game jobs, shared…

These AI Minecraft characters did weirdly human stuff all on their own

November 27, 2024
Left to their own devices, an army of AI characters didn’t just survive — they thrived. They developed in-game jobs, shared memes, voted on tax reforms and even spread a religion. The experiment played out on the open-world gaming platform Minecraft, where up to 1000 software agents at a time used large language models (LLMs)…

Accelerating generative AI deployment with microservices

November 26, 2024
In this exclusive webcast, we delve into the transformative potential of portable microservices for the deployment of generative AI models. We explore how startups and large organizations are leveraging this technology to streamline generative AI deployment, enhance customer service, and drive innovation across domains, including chatbots, document analysis, and video generation. Our discussion focuses on…

The Download: rethinking AI benchmarks, and the ethics of AI agents

November 26, 2024
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 way we measure progress in AI is terrible Every time a new AI model is released, it’s typically touted as acing its performance against a series of benchmarks. OpenAI’s GPT-4o, for example,…

We need to start wrestling with the ethics of AI agents

November 26, 2024
Generative AI models have become remarkably good at conversing with us, and creating images, videos, and music for us, but they’re not all that good at doing things for us.  AI agents promise to change that. Think of them as AI models with a script and a purpose. They tend to come in one of…

The way we measure progress in AI is terrible

November 26, 2024
Every time a new AI model is released, it’s typically touted as acing its performance against a series of benchmarks. OpenAI’s GPT-4o, for example, was launched in May with a compilation of results that showed its performance topping every other AI company’s latest model in several tests. The problem is that these benchmarks are poorly…

The Download: Trump’s tariffs, and the DOJ’s proposals for Google

November 25, 2024
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 Trump’s tariffs could drive up the cost of batteries, EVs, and more President-elect Donald Trump’s “America First” plan to enact huge tariffs on imported goods threatens to jack up the cost and…