July 18, 2025

The Download: how to run an LLM, and a history of “three-parent babies”

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 to run an LLM on your laptop In the early days of large language models, there was a high barrier to entry: it used to be impossible to run anything useful on…

Technology

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…

What’s next for the world’s fastest supercomputers

September 21, 2023
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 our series here. It can be difficult to wrap your brain around the number-crunching capability of the world’s fastest supercomputer. But computer scientist Jack Dongarra, of the University…

New approaches to the tech talent shortage

September 21, 2023
We live in a tech-enabled world, but for organizations to advance world-changing innovations, they need skilled people who can build, install, and maintain the systems that underlie them. Finding that talent is one of the biggest ongoing problems — and opportunities — in tech. The IT staffing shortages brought on by covid-19 and the Great…

Make Machine Learning Work for You

September 20, 2023
The enthusiasm for AI and its applications is reaching a nadir, according to an August 2023 Gartner Hype Cycle press release, where generative AI is nearly perched atop the category of technologies at their “Peak of Inflated Expectations,” ready to plunge into the “Trough of Disillusionment.” A quick look at social media agrees, with some…