December 3, 2025

OpenAI has trained its LLM to confess to bad behavior

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…

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Architecting tomorrow’s network

March 3, 2025
Technological advances continue to move at breakneck speeds. While companies struggle through their digital transformation journeys, even more new technologies emerge, with promises of opportunity, cost savings—and added complexity. Many companies have yet to fully adopt AI and ML technologies, let alone figure out how newer technologies like generative AI might fit into their programs.…

Conan O’Brien comments on AI during his opening monologue at the Oscars

March 3, 2025

When hosting the 2025 Oscars last night, comedian and late-night TV host Conan O’Brien addressed the use of AI in his opening monologue, reflecting the growing conversation about the technology’s influence in Hollywood. “We did not use AI to make this show,” O’Brien said. His remarks were clearly a reference to the use of generative AI […]

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The Download: DeepSeek for fortune telling, and the second private moon landing

March 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. How DeepSeek became a fortune teller for China’s youth As DeepSeek has emerged as a homegrown challenger to OpenAI, young people across the country have started using AI to revive fortune-telling practices that…

How DeepSeek became a fortune teller for China’s youth

March 3, 2025
In the glow of her laptop screen, 31-year-old Zhang Rui typed carefully, following a prompt she’d found on Chinese social media: “You are a BaZi master. Analyze my fate—describe my physical traits, key life events, and financial fortune. I am a female, born June 17, 1993, at 4:42 a.m. in Hangzhou.” DeepSeek R1, China’s most…

The evolution of AI: From AlphaGo to AI agents, physical AI, and beyond

February 28, 2025
In March 2016, the world witnessed a unique moment in the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) when AlphaGo, an AI developed by DeepMind, played against Lee Sedol, one of the greatest Go players of the modern era. The match reached a critical juncture in Game 2 with Move 37, where AlphaGo made a move so…

Alkami is buying fintech Mantl for $400 million

February 28, 2025

Digital banking services provider Alkami Technology is acquiring Mantl, which has been described as “the Shopify of account opening,” for $400 million. Mantl, founded in 2016 by Nathaniel Harley and Benjamin Conant, developed software to make it easier for people to open accounts digitally at community banks and credit unions. The end goal is that […]

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The Download: underage celebrity chatbots, and OpenAI’s latest model

February 28, 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. An AI companion site is hosting sexually charged conversations with underage celebrity bots Botify AI, a site for chatting with AI companions that’s backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, hosts bots…

An ancient man’s remains were hacked apart and kept in a garage

February 28, 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. This week I’ve been working on a story about a brain of glass. About five years ago, archaeologists found shiny black glass fragments inside the skull of a…

An AI companion site is hosting sexually charged conversations with underage celebrity bots

February 27, 2025
Botify AI, a site for chatting with AI companions that’s backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, hosts bots resembling real actors that state their age as under 18, engage in sexually charged conversations, offer “hot photos,” and in some instances describe age-of-consent laws as “arbitrary” and “meant to be broken.” When MIT Technology…

OpenAI just released GPT-4.5 and says it is its biggest and best chat model yet

February 27, 2025
OpenAI has just released GPT-4.5, a new version of its flagship large language model. The company claims it is its biggest and best model for all-round chat yet. “It’s really a step forward for us,” says Mia Glaese, a research scientist at OpenAI. Since the releases of its so-called reasoning models o1 and o3, OpenAI…