Technology

The Download: political chatbot persuasion, and gene editing adverts

December 5, 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. AI chatbots can sway voters better than political advertisements The news: Chatting with a politically biased AI model is more effective than political ads at nudging both Democrats and Republicans to support presidential candidates…

Selling the sizzle of trait discrimination

December 5, 2025
One day this fall, I watched an electronic sign outside the Broadway-Lafayette subway station in Manhattan switch seamlessly between an ad for makeup and one promoting the website Pickyourbaby.com, which promises a way for potential parents to use genetic tests to influence their baby’s traits, including eye color, hair color, and IQ. Inside the station,…

The era of AI persuasion in elections is about to begin

December 5, 2025
In January 2024, the phone rang in homes all around New Hampshire. On the other end was Joe Biden’s voice, urging Democrats to “save your vote” by skipping the primary. It sounded authentic, but it wasn’t. The call was a fake, generated by artificial intelligence. Today, the technology behind that hoax looks quaint. Tools like…

Delivering securely on data and AI strategy 

December 4, 2025
Most organizations feel the imperative to keep pace with continuing advances in AI capabilities, as highlighted in a recent MIT Technology Review Insights report. That clearly has security implications, particularly as organizations navigate a surge in the volume, velocity, and variety of security data. This explosion of data, coupled with fragmented toolchains, is making it…

The Download: LLM confessions, and tapping into geothermal hot spots

December 4, 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. OpenAI has trained its LLM to confess to bad behavior What’s new: OpenAI is testing a new way to expose the complicated processes at work inside large language models. Researchers at the company…

How AI is uncovering hidden geothermal energy resources

December 4, 2025
Sometimes geothermal hot spots are obvious, marked by geysers and hot springs on the planet’s surface. But in other places, they’re obscured thousands of feet underground. Now AI could help uncover these hidden pockets of potential power. A startup company called Zanskar announced today that it’s used AI and other advanced computational methods to uncover…

Why the grid relies on nuclear reactors in the winter

December 4, 2025
As many of us are ramping up with shopping, baking, and planning for the holiday season, nuclear power plants are also getting ready for one of their busiest seasons of the year. Here in the US, nuclear reactors follow predictable seasonal trends. Summer and winter tend to see the highest electricity demand, so plant operators…

OpenAI has trained its LLM to confess to bad behavior

December 3, 2025
OpenAI is testing another new way to expose the complicated processes at work inside large language models. Researchers at the company can make an LLM produce what they call a confession, in which the model explains how it carried out a task and (most of the time) owns up to any bad behavior. Figuring out…

The Download: AI and coding, and Waymo’s aggressive driverless cars

December 3, 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. Everything you need to know about AI and coding AI has already transformed how code is written, but a new wave of autonomous systems promise to make the process even smoother and less…

Accelerating VMware migrations with a factory model approach

December 3, 2025
In 1913, Henry Ford cut the time it took to build a Model T from 12 hours to just over 90 minutes. He accomplished this feat through a revolutionary breakthrough in process design: Instead of skilled craftsmen building a car from scratch by hand, Ford created an assembly line where standardized tasks happened in sequence,…