Technology

Judge rules Google illegally monopolized ad tech, opening door to potential breakup 

April 17, 2025
A federal judge has found that Google has violated antitrust laws by “willfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power” in the advertising technology market, rounding out a two-year saga after the U.S. and eight states filed its initial complaints against the Alphabet-owned company. The court will set a briefing schedule and hearing date to determine appropriate […]

How a 1980s toy robot arm inspired modern robotics

April 17, 2025
As a child of an electronic engineer, I spent a lot of time in our local Radio Shack as a kid. While my dad was locating capacitors and resistors, I was in the toy section. It was there, in 1984, that I discovered the best toy of my childhood: the Armatron robotic arm.  Described as…

These four charts sum up the state of AI and energy

April 17, 2025
While it’s rare to look at the news without finding some headline related to AI and energy, a lot of us are stuck waving our hands when it comes to what it all means. Sure, you’ve probably read that AI will drive an increase in electricity demand. But how that fits into the context of…

We need targeted policies, not blunt tariffs, to drive “American energy dominance”

April 17, 2025
President Trump and his appointees have repeatedly stressed the need to establish “American energy dominance.”  But the White House’s profusion of executive orders and aggressive tariffs, along with its determined effort to roll back clean-energy policies, are moving the industry in the wrong direction, creating market chaos and economic uncertainty that are making it harder…

US office that counters foreign disinformation is being eliminated, say officials 

April 16, 2025
The only office within the US State Department that monitors foreign disinformation is about to be eliminated, two State Department officials have told MIT Technology Review. The Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub is a small office in the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy that tracks and counters foreign disinformation campaigns.  In…

Adapting for AI’s reasoning era

April 16, 2025
Anyone who crammed for exams in college knows that an impressive ability to regurgitate information is not synonymous with critical thinking. The large language models (LLMs) first publicly released in 2022 were impressive but limited—like talented students who excel at multiple-choice exams but stumble when asked to defend their logic. Today’s advanced reasoning models are…

The Download: how AI is changing music, and a US city’s AI experiment

April 16, 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. AI is coming for music, too While large language models that generate text have exploded in the last three years, a different type of AI, based on what are called diffusion models, is…

Jurassic Patent: How Colossal Biosciences is attempting to own the “woolly mammoth”

April 16, 2025
Colossal Biosciences not only wants to bring back the woolly mammoth—it wants to patent it, too. MIT Technology Review has learned the Texas startup is seeking a patent that would give it exclusive legal rights to create and sell gene-edited elephants containing ancient mammoth DNA. Colossal, which calls itself “the de-extinction company,” hopes to use…