The Download: AI agents for science, and the “censorship-industrial complex”

August 10, 2026
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 for science needs reasoning, not just data —Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and the cofounder of Schmidt Sciences, and Suhas Mahesh, who leads the AI for science work…

AI for science needs reasoning, not just data

August 10, 2026
Every few decades, someone announces that science has reached its end. In 1903, the revered physicist Albert Michelson wrote that the “facts of physical science have all been discovered.” In the 1980s, Stephen Hawking predicted that theoretical physics might be finished by the end of the century. With the explosive arrival of artificial intelligence, the…

These startups are chasing the next big thing in LLMs

August 10, 2026
MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. Way back in the summer of 2017, AI researchers at Google put out a paper called “Attention Is All You Need,” in which they described a new…