Technology

A year or so ago, Xiao Li was seeing floods of Nvidia chip deals on WeChat. A real estate contractor turned data center project manager, he had pivoted to AI infrastructure in 2023, drawn by the promise of China’s AI craze.  At that time, traders in his circle bragged about securing shipments of high-performing Nvidia…

OpenAI has released a new image generator that’s designed less for typical surrealist AI art and more for highly controllable and practical creation of visuals—a sign that OpenAI thinks its tools are ready for use in fields like advertising and graphic design.  The image generator, which is now part of the company’s GPT-4o model, was…

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. Ethically sourced “spare” human bodies could revolutionize medicine Many challenges in medicine stem, in large part, from a common root cause: a severe shortage of ethically-sourced human bodies. There might be a way…

Why do we hear about medical breakthroughs in mice, but rarely see them translate into cures for human disease? Why do so few drugs that enter clinical trials receive regulatory approval? And why is the waiting list for organ transplantation so long? These challenges stem in large part from a common root cause: a severe…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. This week’s edition of The Algorithm is brought to you not by your usual host, James O’Donnell, but Eileen Guo, an investigative reporter at MIT Technology Review.  A few weeks ago, when…

The only technology with an on-ramp to AGI.

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. Why handing over total control to AI agents would be a huge mistake —Margaret Mitchell, Avijit Ghosh, Sasha Luccioni, Giada Pistilli all work for Hugging Face, an open source AI company. AI agents…

AI agents have set the tech industry abuzz. Unlike chatbots, these groundbreaking new systems operate outside of a chat window, navigating multiple applications to execute complex tasks, like scheduling meetings or shopping online, in response to simple user commands. As agents are developed to become more capable, a crucial question emerges: How much control are…

OpenAI says over 400 million people use ChatGPT every week. But how does interacting with it affect us? Does it make us more or less lonely? These are some of the questions OpenAI set out to investigate, in partnership with the MIT Media Lab, in a pair of new studies.  They found that only a…

Gen AI isn’t like other technology, so it’s easy to miss the real risks of deploying it across your content. Understand three potential blindspots so you can sidestep the risks of gen AI and maximize the rewards.