July 4, 2025

The Download: India’s AI independence, and predicting future epidemics

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. Inside India’s scramble for AI independence Despite its status as a global tech hub, India lags far behind the likes of the US and China when it comes to homegrown AI. That gap…

Technology

How new tech is helping people circumvent digital authoritarianism

September 18, 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. I want to talk about the battle that’s raging every day between people who want to censor online content and those who want to protect…

Migrating to the cloud transforms business

September 15, 2023
In 2017, BP took on a cloud-first approach that committed to building any new hardware or system builds on the cloud. Just a year prior, only 2% of BP applications lived on the cloud. At the close of 2022, 90% of BP applications had migrated to cloud environments, changing product and service integration and BP’s…

The Download: talking driverless cars, and updated covid vaccines

September 15, 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. This driverless car company is using chatbots to make its vehicles smarter The news: Self-driving car startup Wayve can now interrogate its vehicles, asking them questions about their driving decisions—and getting answers back…

AI can help screen for cancer—but there’s a catch

September 15, 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 just had a birthday, and you know what that means—I’m newly eligible for a screening colonoscopy. (#milestones!). I’ve been thinking about cancer screening a lot recently, because…

This driverless car company is using chatbots to make its vehicles smarter

September 14, 2023
Self-driving car startup Wayve can now interrogate its vehicles, asking them questions about their driving decisions—and getting answers back. The idea is to use the same tech behind ChatGPT to help train driverless cars. The company combined its existing self-driving software with a large language model, creating a hybrid model it calls LINGO-1. LINGO-1 synchs…

AI just beat a human test for creativity. What does that even mean?

September 14, 2023
AI is getting better at passing tests designed to measure human creativity. In a study published in Nature Scientific Reports today, AI chatbots achieved higher average scores than humans in the Alternate Uses Task, a test commonly used to assess this ability.  This study will add fuel to an ongoing debate among AI researchers about…

Integrating sustainability into business strategy

September 14, 2023
Multiple factors are driving organizations to prioritize sustainability. Regulations are requiring organizations to meet emissions disclosure requirements. Investors are increasingly incorporating sustainability into decision-making processes. Consumers are demanding environmentally and ethically sustainable products. Employees, particularly millennials and Generation Z, want to work for organizations whose morals and ethics reflect their own. According to the Deloitte…

The Download: climate heroes, and a new way to track diseases

September 14, 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. Meet the climate innovators of tomorrow A lot of bright minds are working on solutions to climate change. You can find some of them in the latest edition of our annual 35 Innovators…