Technology

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. Two Nobel Prize winners want to cancel their own CRISPR patents in Europe In the decade-long fight to control CRISPR, the super-tool for modifying DNA, it’s been common for lawyers to try to…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Nuclear power is coming back to Three Mile Island. That nuclear power plant is typically associated with a very specific event. One of its reactors, Unit 2, suffered a partial meltdown in…

Recorded on September 25, 2024 Putting AI’s Climate Impact Into Perspective Speakers: David Rotman, Editor-at-large, Melissa Heikkilä, Senior AI Reporter, and James Temple, Sr Editor for Energy The rise of AI comes with a growing carbon footprint and an increased demand for electricity. Analysts project that AI could drive up data centers’ energy consumption by 160% this…

In the decade-long fight to control CRISPR, the super-tool for modifying DNA, it’s been common for lawyers to try to overturn patents held by competitors by pointing out errors or inconsistencies. But now, in a surprise twist, the team which earned the Nobel Prize for developing CRISPR is asking to cancel two of their own…

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2), a research nonprofit, is releasing a family of open-source multimodal language models, called Molmo, that it says perform as well as top proprietary models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.  The organization claims that its biggest Molmo model, which has 72 billion parameters, outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4o, which is estimated…

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 one developer won’t quit fighting to connect the US’s grids Michael Skelly hasn’t learned to take no for an answer. For much of the last 15 years, the energy entrepreneur has worked…

OpenAI is broadening access to Advanced Voice Mode, a feature of ChatGPT that allows you to speak more naturally with the AI model. It allows you to interrupt its responses mid-sentence, and can also sense and interpret your emotions based on your tone of voice and adjust its responses accordingly.  These features were teased back…

Every day across Hollywood, scores of film school graduates and production assistants work as script readers. Their job is to find the diamonds in the rough from the 50,000 or so screenplays pitched each year and flag any worth pursuing further. Each script runs anywhere from 100 to 150 pages, and it can take half…

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 the US can learn from the role of AI in other elections When the generative AI boom kicked off, one of the biggest concerns was that hyperrealistic deepfakes could be used to…