Technology

The race to clean up heavy-duty trucks

July 25, 2024
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Truckers have to transport massive loads long distances, every single day, under intense time pressure—and they rely on the semi-trucks they drive to get the job done. Their diesel engines spew not…

AI trained on AI garbage spits out AI garbage

July 24, 2024
AI models work by training on huge swaths of data from the internet. But as AI is increasingly being used to pump out web pages filled with junk content, that process is in danger of being undermined. New research published in Nature shows that the quality of the model’s output gradually degrades when AI trains…

The Download: Chinese LLMs, and transforming heavy-duty trucking

July 24, 2024
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 access Chinese LLM chatbots across the world Hundreds of Chinese large language models have been released since the government started permitting AI companies to open up their models for the general…

Why Chinese companies are betting on open-source AI

July 24, 2024
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. I’ve talked a lot about Chinese large language models in this newsletter, and I’ve managed to try out quite a few of them in the past year. But many people, especially those…

The Download: AI’s self-regulation promises, and predicting the weather

July 23, 2024
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 companies promised to self-regulate one year ago. What’s changed? One year ago, seven leading AI companies—Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI—committed with the White House to a set voluntary commitments…

How’s AI self-regulation going?

July 23, 2024
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Yesterday, on July 21, President Joe Biden announced he is stepping down from the race against Donald Trump in the US presidential election. But AI nerds may remember that exactly a…

How to access Chinese LLM chatbots across the world

July 23, 2024
MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done. Hundreds of Chinese large language models have been released since the government started permitting AI companies to open up their models for the general public to play around with in the summer of 2023.  For users in the West, finding these Chinese models and trying them…

AI companies promised the White House to self-regulate one year ago. What’s changed?

July 22, 2024
One year ago, on July 21, 2023, seven leading AI companies—Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI—committed with the White House to a set of eight voluntary commitments on how to develop AI in a safe and trustworthy way. These included promises to do things like improve the testing and transparency around AI systems,…