July 3, 2025

The Download: AI agents hype, and Google’s electricity plans

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. Don’t let hype about AI agents get ahead of reality —Yoav Shoham is a professor emeritus at Stanford University and cofounder of AI21 Labs. At Google’s I/O 2025 event in May, the company…

Technology

8,000 pregnant women may die in just 90 days because of US aid cuts

February 21, 2025
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. Yesterday marks a month since the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th US president. And what a month it has been. The Trump administration wasted no time…

The foundations of America’s prosperity are being dismantled

February 21, 2025
Ever since World War II, the US has been the global leader in science and technology—and benefited immensely from it. Research fuels American innovation and the economy in turn. Scientists around the world want to study in the US and collaborate with American scientists to produce more of that research. These international collaborations play a…

Spotify partners with ElevenLabs to expand its library of AI-narrated audiobooks

February 20, 2025

On Thursday, Spotify announced that it now accepts audiobooks narrated using ElevenLabs’ AI voice technology. Given that ElevenLabs is currently among the most recognized AI audio providers, this new partnership is expected to boost the quantity of AI-narrated audiobooks on the platform. To upload an audiobook narrated by AI, authors need to download the file […]

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The Download: Microsoft’s quantum chip, and explaining rising energy demand

February 20, 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. A new Microsoft chip could lead to more stable quantum computers Microsoft has announced that it’s made significant progress in its 20-year quest to make topological quantum bits, or qubits—a special approach to…

What’s driving electricity demand? It isn’t just AI and data centers.

February 20, 2025
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Electricity demand rose by 4.3% in 2024 and will continue to grow at close to 4% annually through 2027, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency.  If that sounds…

Karman+ digs up $20M to build an asteroid-mining autonomous spacecraft

February 19, 2025

Investors on the lookout for startups working at the frontiers of technology are casting their nets ever further into unchartered territory, sometimes literally as well as figuratively. In one of the latest examples, a startup called Karman+ with ambitions to build autonomous spacecraft that can travel to asteroids and then mine them for materials has […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A new Microsoft chip could lead to more stable quantum computers

February 19, 2025
Microsoft announced today that it has made significant progress in its 20-year quest to make topological quantum bits, or qubits—a special approach to building quantum computers that could make them more stable and easier to scale up.  Researchers and companies have been working for years to build quantum computers, which could unlock dramatic new abilities…

The Download: selling via AI, and Congress testing tech

February 19, 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. Your most important customer may be AI Imagine you run a meal prep company that teaches people how to make simple and delicious food. When someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation for meal…

Congress used to evaluate emerging technologies. Let’s do it again.

February 19, 2025
At about the time when personal computers charged into cubicle farms, another machine muscled its way into human resources departments and became a staple of routine employment screenings. By the early 1980s, some 2 million Americans annually found themselves strapped to a polygraph—a metal box that, in many people’s minds, detected deception. Most of those…