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. Geoffrey Hinton, AI pioneer and figurehead of doomerism, wins Nobel Prize Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist whose pioneering work on deep learning in the 1980s and 90s underpins all of the most powerful…

Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist whose pioneering work on deep learning in the 1980s and 90s underpins all of the most powerful AI models in the world today, has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Speaking on the phone to the Academy minutes after the announcement,…

We are in the early stages of a geopolitical competition for the future of artificial intelligence. The winners will dominate the global economy in the 21st century. But what’s been too often left out of the conversation is that AI’s huge demand for concentrated and consistent amounts of power represents a chance to scale the…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Chatting with an AI chatbot is so 2022. The latest hot AI toys take advantage of multimodal models, which can handle several things at the same time, such as images, audio, and…

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 break free of Spotify’s algorithm Since the heyday of radio, records, cassette tapes, and MP3 players, the branding of sound has evolved from broad genres like rock and hip-hop to “paranormal…

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. People are using Google study software to make AI podcasts—and they’re weird and amazing Google’s new AI podcasting tool, called Audio Overview, has become a surprise viral hit. The podcasting feature was launched…

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. On September 28, California became the second US state to officially recognize the importance of mental privacy in state law. That pink, jelly-like, throbbing mass under your skull—a.k.a.…

“All right, so today we are going to dive deep into some cutting-edge tech,” a chatty American male voice says. But this voice does not belong to a human. It belongs to Google’s new AI podcasting tool, called Audio Overview, which has become a surprise viral hit.  The podcasting feature was launched in mid-September as…

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-generated images can teach robots how to act Generative AI models can produce images in response to prompts within seconds, and they’ve recently been used for everything from highlighting their own inherent bias…