July 4, 2025

Inside India’s scramble for AI independence

In Bengaluru, India, Adithya Kolavi felt a mix of excitement and validation as he watched DeepSeek unleash its disruptive language model on the world earlier this year. The Chinese technology rivaled the best of the West in terms of benchmarks, but it had been built with far less capital in far less time.  “I thought:…

Technology

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…

Your most important customer may be AI

February 19, 2025
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 prep companies, yours is described as complicated and confusing. Why? Because the AI saw that in one of your ads there were chopped chives on the top of a…

Roundtables: Generative AI Search and the Changing Internet

February 18, 2025
Recorded on February 18, 2025 Generative AI Search and the Changing Internet Speakers: Mat Honan, editor in chief, and Niall Firth, executive editor. Generative AI search, one of MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2025, is ushering a new era of the internet. Despite fewer clicks, copyright fights, and sometimes iffy answers, AI could unlock new ways…

The Download: 4G on the moon, and parenting in the digital age

February 18, 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. Nokia is putting the first cellular network on the moon Later this month, Intuitive Machines, the private company behind the first commercial lander that touched down on the moon, will launch a second…

How to have a child in the digital age

February 18, 2025
When the journalist and culture critic Amanda Hess got pregnant with her first child, in 2020, the internet was among the first to know. “More brands knew about my pregnancy than people did,” she writes of the torrent of targeted ads that came her way. “They all called me mama.”  The internet held the promise…

Inside China’s electric-vehicle-to-humanoid-robot pivot

February 18, 2025
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. While DOGE’s efforts to shutter federal agencies dominate news from Washington, the Trump administration is also making more global moves. Many of these center on China. Tariffs on goods from the country…

Nokia is putting the first cellular network on the moon

February 18, 2025
Later this month, Intuitive Machines, the private company behind the first commercial lander that touched down on the moon, will launch a second lunar mission from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The plan is to deploy a lander, a rover, and hopper to explore a site near the lunar south pole that could harbor water ice,…

Are your noise-canceling headphones messing with your head?

February 17, 2025

We all know headphones can be bad for your hearing if you listen to sounds too loudly in such close proximity to your ears. But a BBC report suggests that a new health scare could be emerging around the noise-canceling feature that’s hugely popular in modern earphones. The article considers whether the technology could essentially […]

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The Download: ancient DNA’s modern uses, and an AI-artist collaboration

February 17, 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. Adventures in the genetic time machine An ancient-DNA revolution is turning the high-speed equipment used to study the DNA of living things on to specimens from the past.  The technology is being used…

This artist collaborates with AI and robots

February 17, 2025
Many artists worry about the encroachment of artificial intelligence on artistic creation. But Sougwen Chung, a nonbinary Canadian-Chinese artist, instead sees AI as an opportunity for artists to embrace uncertainty and challenge people to think about technology and creativity in unexpected ways.  Chung’s exhibitions are driven by technology; they’re also live and kinetic, with the…