June 27, 2025

The Download: how to clean up AI data centers, and weight-loss drugs’ side effects

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. This battery recycling company is now cleaning up AI data centers In a sandy industrial lot outside Reno, Nevada, rows of battery packs that once propelled electric vehicles are now powering a small…

Helping cities build community

April 25, 2023
Owiso Makuku, MArch ’99, MCP ’99, knows what it means to stand out. Opinionated, driven, and half Kenyan, half Jewish, Makuku has long navigated spaces where she’s pegged as different or unconventional—especially once she began working in executive roles traditionally filled by white men. But drawing on her MIT training, she has made a career…

Reframing ageism

April 25, 2023
Among the Ojibwe of North America, an older person is referred to as a “great person” and young people are taught not to answer back when chastised by their elders, out of respect for their wisdom. But some of the Chukchi people living in Siberia adhered to a custom based on a very different view…

The preschool boost

April 25, 2023
Children who attend preschool at age four are significantly more likely to go to college, according to an empirical study led by MIT economist Parag Pathak. To conduct the study, Pathak and his colleagues followed more than 4,000 students who took part from 1997 to 2003 in a lottery the Boston public school system conducted…

The startup CEO remaking City Hall

April 25, 2023
If you think of Michelle Wu as the architect of Boston’s new city government, then Tiffany Chu ’10 might be the general contractor. As the chief of staff to Mayor Wu, Chu is in charge of figuring out how visions of urban transformation actually take shape. Take the Thursday afternoon in early February that found…

MIT’s Putnam dynasty continues

April 25, 2023
MIT took all five top spots in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition for the third year in a row and won the prize for the top woman for the fourth time in as many years. Seventy of the top 100 in the December event were MIT students, including 21 of the top 25. The…

A developer exploited an API flaw to provide free access to GPT-4

April 25, 2023

A developer is attempting to reverse-engineer APIs to grant anyone free access to popular AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 — legal ramifications be damned. The developer’s project, GPT4Free, blew up on GitHub over the past several days after links to it from Reddit went viral. At present, GPT4Free provides — or at least appears to […]

A developer exploited an API flaw to provide free access to GPT-4 by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch