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. An AI companion site is hosting sexually charged conversations with underage celebrity bots Botify AI, a site for chatting with AI companions that’s backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, hosts bots…

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. This week I’ve been working on a story about a brain of glass. About five years ago, archaeologists found shiny black glass fragments inside the skull of a…

Botify AI, a site for chatting with AI companions that’s backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, hosts bots resembling real actors that state their age as under 18, engage in sexually charged conversations, offer “hot photos,” and in some instances describe age-of-consent laws as “arbitrary” and “meant to be broken.” When MIT Technology…

OpenAI has just released GPT-4.5, a new version of its flagship large language model. The company claims it is its biggest and best model for all-round chat yet. “It’s really a step forward for us,” says Mia Glaese, a research scientist at OpenAI. Since the releases of its so-called reasoning models o1 and o3, OpenAI…

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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. Amazon’s first quantum computing chip makes its debut The news: Amazon Web Services has announced Ocelot, its first-generation quantum computing chip. While the chip has only rudimentary computing capability, the company says it…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Flames erupted last Tuesday amid the burned wreckage of the battery storage facility at Moss Landing Power Plant. It happened after a major fire there burned for days and then went quiet…

Amazon Web Services today announced Ocelot, its first-generation quantum computing chip. While the chip has only rudimentary computing capability, the company says it is a proof-of-principle demonstration—a step on the path to creating a larger machine that can deliver on the industry’s promised killer applications, such as fast and accurate simulations of new battery materials.…

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says everyone should be using an AI tutor. Here’s what it is and how to access the technology.