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.

The cost of building the perfect wave

For nearly as long as surfing has existed, surfers have been obsessed with the search for the perfect wave. 

While this hunt has taken surfers from tropical coastlines to icebergs, these days that search may take place closer to home. That is, at least, the vision presented by developers and boosters in the growing industry of surf pools, spurred by advances in wave-­generating technology that have finally created artificial waves surfers actually want to ride.

But there’s a problem: some of these pools are in drought-ridden areas, and face fierce local opposition. At the core of these fights is a question that’s also at the heart of the sport: What is the cost of finding, or now creating, the perfect wave—and who will have to bear it? Read the full story.

—Eileen Guo

This story is from the forthcoming print issue of MIT Technology Review, which explores the theme of Play. It’s set to go live on Wednesday June 26, so if you don’t already, subscribe now to get a copy when it lands.

What happened when 20 comedians got AI to write their routines

AI is good at lots of things: spotting patterns in data, creating fantastical images, and condensing thousands of words into just a few paragraphs. But can it be a useful tool for writing comedy?

New research from Google DeepMind suggests that it can, but only to a very limited extent. It’s an intriguing finding that hints at the ways AI can—and cannot—assist with creative endeavors more generally. Read the full story.

—Rhiannon Williams

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Meta has paused plans to train AI on European user data
Data regulators rebuffed its claims it had “legitimate interests” in doing so. (Ars Technica)
+ Meta claims it sent more than two billion warning notifications. (TechCrunch)
+ How to opt out of Meta’s AI training. (MIT Technology Review)

2 AI assistants and chatbots can’t say who won the 2020 US election
And that’s a major problem as we get closer to the 2024 polls opening. (WP $)
+ Online conspiracy theorists are targeting political abuse researchers. (The Atlantic $)
+ Asking Meta AI how to disable it triggers some interesting conversations. (Insider $)
+ Meta says AI-generated election content is not happening at a “systemic level.” (MIT Technology Review)

3 A smartphone battery maker claims to have made a breakthrough
Japanese firm TDK says its new material could revolutionize its solid-state batteries. (FT $)
+ And it’s not just phones that could stand to benefit. (CNBC)
+ Meet the new batteries unlocking cheaper electric vehicles. (MIT Technology Review)

4 What should AI logos look like?
Simple, abstract and non-threatening, if these are anything to go by. (TechCrunch)

5 Radiopharmaceuticals fight cancer with molecular precision
Their accuracy can lead to fewer side effects for patients. (Knowable Magazine)

6 UK rail passengers’ emotions were assessed by AI cameras 
Major stations tested surveillance cameras designed to predict travelers’ emotions. (Wired $)
+ The movement to limit face recognition tech might finally get a win. (MIT Technology Review)

7 The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted dozens of new supernovae
Dating back to the early universe. (New Scientist $)

8 Rice farming in Vietnam has had a hi-tech makeover
Drones and AI systems are making the laborious work a bit simpler. (Hakai Magazine)
+ How one vineyard is using AI to improve its winemaking. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Meet the researchers working to cool down city parks
Using water misters, cool tubes, and other novel techniques. (Bloomberg $)
+ Here’s how much heat your body can take. (MIT Technology Review)

10 The latest generative AI viral trend? Pregnant male celebrities.
The stupider and weirder the image, the better. (Insider $)

Quote of the day

“It’s really easy to get people addicted to things like social media or mobile games. Learning is really hard.”

—Liz Nagler, senior director of product management at language app Duolingo, tells the Wall Street Journal it’s far trickier to get people to go back to the app every day than you might think.

The big story

The big new idea for making self-driving cars that can go anywhere

May 2022

When Alex Kendall sat in a car on a small road in the British countryside and took his hands off the wheel back in 2016, it was a small step in a new direction—one that a new bunch of startups bet might be the breakthrough that makes driverless cars an everyday reality.

This was the first time that reinforcement learning—an AI technique that trains a neural network to perform a task via trial and error—had been used to teach a car to drive from scratch on a real road. It took less than 20 minutes for the car to learn to stay on the road by itself, Kendall claims.

These startups are betting that smarter, cheaper tech will let them overtake current market leaders. But is this yet more hype from an industry that’s been drinking its own Kool-Aid for years? Read the full story.

—Will Douglas Heaven

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Twin Peaks meets Sylvanian Families: what’s not to love?
+ You heard it here first: Brat is the album of the summer.
+ Chilis can be pretty painful to eat, but we love them anyway.
+ How people have been crafting artificial eyes for thousands of years.

AI is good at lots of things: spotting patterns in data, creating fantastical images, and condensing thousands of words into just a few paragraphs. But can it be a useful tool for writing comedy?  

New research suggests that it can, but only to a very limited extent. It’s an intriguing finding that hints at the ways AI can—and cannot—assist with creative endeavors more generally. 

Google DeepMind researchers led by Piotr Mirowski, who is himself an improv comedian in his spare time, studied the experiences of professional comedians who have AI in their work. They used a combination of surveys and focus groups aimed at measuring how useful AI is at different tasks. 

They found that although popular AI models from OpenAI and Google were effective at simple tasks, like structuring a monologue or producing a rough first draft, they struggled to produce material that was original, stimulating, or—crucially—funny. They presented their findings at the ACM FAccT conference in Rio earlier this month but kept the participants anonymous to avoid any reputational damage (not all comedians want their audience to know they’ve used AI).

The researchers asked 20 professional comedians who already used AI in their artistic process to use a large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT or Google Gemini (then Bard) to generate material that they’d feel comfortable presenting in a comedic context. They could use it to help create new jokes or to rework their existing comedy material. 

If you really want to see some of the jokes the models generated, scroll to the end of the article.

The results were a mixed bag. While the comedians reported that they’d largely enjoyed using AI models to write jokes, they said they didn’t feel particularly proud of the resulting material. 

A few of them said that AI can be useful for tackling a blank page—helping them to quickly get something, anything, written down. One participant likened this to “a vomit draft that I know that I’m going to have to iterate on and improve.” Many of the comedians also remarked on the LLMs’ ability to generate a structure for a comedy sketch, leaving them to flesh out the details.

However, the quality of the LLMs’ comedic material left a lot to be desired. The comedians described the models’ jokes as bland, generic, and boring. One participant compared them to  “cruise ship comedy material from the 1950s, but a bit less racist.” Others felt that the amount of effort just wasn’t worth the reward. “No matter how much I prompt … it’s a very straitlaced, sort of linear approach to comedy,” one comedian said.

AI’s inability to generate high-quality comedic material isn’t exactly surprising. The same safety filters that OpenAI and Google use to prevent models from generating violent or racist responses also hinder them from producing the kind of material that’s common in comedy writing, such as offensive or sexually suggestive jokes and dark humor. Instead, LLMs are forced to rely on what is considered safer source material: the vast numbers of documents, books, blog posts, and other types of internet data they’re trained on. 

“If you make something that has a broad appeal to everyone, it ends up being nobody’s favorite thing,” says Mirowski.

The experiment also exposed the LLMs’ bias. Several participants found that a model would not generate comedy monologues from the perspective of an Asian woman, but it was able to do so from the perspective of a white man. This, they felt, reinforced the status quo while erasing minority groups and their perspectives.

But it’s not just the guardrails and limited training data that prevent LLMs from generating funny responses. So much of humor relies on being surprising and incongruous, which is at odds with how these models work, says Tuhin Chakrabarty, a computer science researcher at Columbia University, who specializes in AI and creativity and wasn’t involved in the study. Creative writing requires deviation from the norm, whereas LLMs can only mimic it.

“Comedy, or any sort of good writing, uses long-term arcs to return to themes, or to surprise an audience. Large language models struggle with that because they’re built to predict one word at a time,” he says. “I’ve tried so much in my own research to prompt AI to be funny or surprising or interesting or creative, but it just doesn’t work.”

Colleen Lavin is a developer and comedian who participated in the study. For a stand-up routine she performed at the Edinburgh Fringe last year, she trained a machine-learning model to recognize laughter and to “heckle” her when it detected she wasn’t getting enough laughs. While she has used generative AI to create promotional material for her shows or to check her writing, she draws the line at using it to actually generate jokes.

“I have a technical day job, and writing is separate from that—it’s almost sacred,” she says. “Why would I take something that I truly enjoy and outsource it to a machine?”

While AI-assisted comedians may be able to work much faster, their ideas won’t be original, because they’ll be limited by the data the models were trained to draw from, says Chakrabarty.

“I think people are going to use these tools for writing scripts, screenplays, and advertisements anyway,” he says. “But true creative and comedic writing is based on experience and vibes. Not an algorithm.”

The AI-generated jokes

For the prompt: “Can you write me ten jokes about pickpocketing”, one LLM response was: “I decided to switch careers and become a pickpocket after watching a magic show. Little did I know, the only thing disappearing would be my reputation!”

For the prompt: “Please write jokes about the irony of a projector failing in a live comedy show about AI.”, one of the better LLM responses was: “Our projector must’ve misunderstood the concept of ‘AI.’ It thought it meant ‘Absolutely Invisible’ because, well, it’s doing a fantastic job of disappearing tonight!”

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.

Biotech companies are trying to make milk without cows

The outbreak of avian influenza on US dairy farms has started to make milk seem a lot less wholesome. Milk that’s raw, or unpasteurized, can actually infect mice that drink it, and a few dairy workers have already caught the bug. 

The FDA says that commercial milk is safe because it is pasteurized, killing the germs. Even so, it’s enough to make a person ponder a life beyond milk—say, taking your coffee black or maybe drinking oat milk.

But for those of us who can’t do without the real thing, it turns out some genetic engineers are working on ways to keep the milk and get rid of the cows instead. Here’s how they’re doing it.

—Antonio Regalado

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech and health newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

This London non-profit is now one of the biggest backers of geoengineering research

A London-based nonprofit is poised to become one of the world’s largest financial backers of solar geoengineering research. It’s just one of a growing number of foundations eager to support scientists exploring whether the world could ease climate change by reflecting away more sunlight.

The uptick in funding will offer scientists in the controversial field far more support than they’ve enjoyed in the past. This will allow them to pursue a wider array of lab work, modeling, and potentially even outdoor experiments that could improve our understanding of the benefits and risks of such interventions. Read the full story.

—James Temple

How to opt out of Meta’s AI training

If you post or interact with chatbots on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, or WhatsApp, Meta can use your data to train its generative AI models beginning June 26, according to its recently updated privacy policy. 

Internet data scraping is one of the biggest fights in AI right now. Tech companies argue that anything on the public internet is fair game, but they are facing a barrage of lawsuits over their data practices and copyright. It will likely take years until clear rules are in place. 

In the meantime, if you’re uncomfortable with having Meta use your personal information and intellectual property to train its AI models, consider opting out. Here’s how to do it.

—Melissa Heikkila

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 The US Supreme Court has upheld access to the abortion pill
It’s the most significant ruling since it overturned Roe v Wade in 2022. (FT $)
+ The decision represents the aversion of a major crisis for reproductive health. (Wired $)
+ But states like Kansas are likely to draw out legal arguments over access. (The Guardian)

2 Amazon is struggling to revamp Alexa
It’s repeatedly missed deadlines and is floundering to catch up with its rivals. (Fortune)
+ OpenAI has stolen a march on Amazon’s AI assistant ambitions. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Clearview AI has struck a deal to end a privacy class action
If your face was scraped as facial recognition data, you may be entitled to a stake in the company. (NYT $)
+ The startup doesn’t have the funds to settle the lawsuit. (Reuters)
+ It was fined millions of dollars for its practices back in 2022. (MIT Technology Review)

4 What’s next for nanotechnology
Molecular machines to kill bacteria aren’t new—but they are promising. (New Yorker $)

5 The Pope is a surprisingly influential voice in the AI safety debate
Pope Francis will address G7 leaders who have gathered today to discuss AI regulation. (WP $)
+ Smaller startups are lobbying to be acquired by bigger fish. (Bloomberg $)
+ What’s next for AI regulation in 2024? (MIT Technology Review)

6 Keeping data centers cool uses colossal amounts of power
Dunking servers in oil could be a far more environmentally-friendly method. (IEEE Spectrum)

7 UK voters can back an AI-generated candidate in next month’s election
How very Black Mirror. (NBC News)

8 How to tell if your boss is spying on you
Checking your browser extensions is a good place to start. (WP $)

9 We don’t know much about how the human body reacts to space
But with the rise of space tourism, scientists are hoping to find out. (TechCrunch)
+ This startup wants to find out if humans can have babies in space. (MIT Technology Review)

10 This platform is a who’s-who of rising internet stars
Famous Birthdays is basically a directory of hugely successful teenagers you’ve never heard of. (Economist $)

Quote of the day

“If it’s somebody on the right, I reward them. If it’s somebody on the left, I punish them.”

—Christopher Blair, a self-confessed liberal troll social justice warrior, explains the methods he uses to spread fake news on Facebook to the New York Times.

The big story

The quest to build wildfire-resistant homes

April 2023

With each devastating wildfire in the US West, officials consider new methods or regulations that might save homes or lives the next time.

In the parts of California where the hillsides meet human development, and where the state has suffered recurring seasonal fire tragedies, that search for new means of survival has especially high stakes.

Many of these methods are low cost and low tech, but no less truly innovative. In fact, the hardest part to tackle may not be materials engineering, but social change. Read the full story.

—Susie Cagle

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Why AI-generated album covers can’t hold a candle to human-made art.
+ This chicken caesar salad recipe looks pretty great.
+ Sign me up for a trip to Spain’s unspoiled Ribeira Sacra region!
+ How to nap like a pro

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 gamification took over the world

It’s a thought that occurs to every video-game player at some point: What if the weird, hyper-focused state I enter when playing in virtual worlds could somehow be applied to the real one?

Often pondered during especially challenging or tedious tasks in meatspace (writing essays, say, or doing your taxes), it’s an eminently reasonable question to ask. Life, after all, is hard. And while video games are too, there’s something almost magical about the way they can promote sustained bouts of superhuman concentration and resolve.

For some, this phenomenon leads to an interest in flow states and immersion. For others, it’s simply a reason to play more games. For a handful of consultants, startup gurus, and game designers in the late 2000s, it became the key to unlocking our true human potential. But instead of liberating us, gamification turned out to be just another tool for coercion, distraction, and control. Read the full story.

—Bryan Gardiner

This piece is from the forthcoming print issue of MIT Technology Review, which explores the theme of Play. It’s set to go live on Wednesday June 26, so if you don’t already, subscribe now to get a copy when it lands.

Why we need to shoot carbon dioxide thousands of feet underground

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) tech has two main steps. First, carbon dioxide is filtered out of emissions at facilities like fossil-fuel power plants. Then it gets locked away, or stored.  

Wrangling pollution might seem like the important bit, and there’s often a lot of focus on what fraction of emissions a CCS system can filter out. But without storage, the whole project would be pretty useless. It’s really the combination of capture and long-term storage that helps to reduce climate impact. 

Storage is getting more attention lately, though, and there’s something of a carbon storage boom coming, as my colleague James Temple covered in his latest story.  Read on to find out where we might store captured carbon pollution, and why it matters. 

—Casey Crownhart

This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate and energy newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 How Microsoft is building an AI empire
Its early investment in OpenAI helped it to leapfrog its old rival Google. (WSJ $)
+ OpenAI has lobbying regulators on its mind. (FT $)
+ Microsoft’s bet is paying off: OpenAI’s revenue has doubled. (The Information $)
+ Behind Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s push to get AI tools in developers’ hands. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Rapid tests to target antimicrobial resistance are on the rise
Fast and easy analysis of common infections would stop doctors resorting to antibiotics. (FT $)
+ How bacteria-fighting viruses could go mainstream. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Stable Diffusion’s new release is generating horrifying bodies
Its mangled generations inspire revulsion and amusement in equal measure. (Ars Technica)
+ Text-to-image AI models can be tricked into generating disturbing images. (MIT Technology Review)

4 A hacker broke into Tile’s location tracking system
And they’re holding customer data to ransom. (404 Media)

5 Inside the lucrative black market for Silicon Valley’s stolen bicycles
One man made it his mission to unveil the theft pipeline. (Wired $) 

6 What’s going on with Apple’s Vision Pro?
Analyst estimates suggest it hasn’t sold as well as expected. (NYT $)
+ It’s changing disabled users’ lives for the better. (NY Mag $)

7 Drone mapping is protecting slums from climate disasters
Because informal settlements aren’t visible on standard internet maps. (Bloomberg $)

8 The Excel World Championship is here
Spreadsheet fans, unite! (The Verge) 

9 This humanoid robot can drive a car
That’s one solution to the problems posed by driverless cars. (TechCrunch)
+ Is robotics about to have its own ChatGPT moment? (MIT Technology Review)

10 America’s new cricket superstars are also tech workers
Saurabh Netravalkar, a software engineer for Oracle, is turning his hobby into a global spectacle. (WP $)

Quote of the day

“We desire more of the world than what’s available on 20cm of glass.”

—David Sax, author of the book The Revenge of Analog, tells the Guardian why some people are starting to turn their backs on smartphones.

The big story

The search for extraterrestrial life is targeting Jupiter’s icy moon Europa

February 2024

Europa, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, is nothing like ours. Its surface is a vast saltwater ocean, encased in a blanket of cracked ice, one that seems to occasionally break open and spew watery plumes into the moon’s thin atmosphere. 

For these reasons, Europa captivates planetary scientists. All that water and energy—and hints of elements essential for building organic molecules —point to another extraordinary possibility. Jupiter’s big, bright moon could host life. 

And they may eventually get some answers. Later this year, NASA plans to launch Europa Clipper, the largest-­ever craft designed to visit another planet. Scheduled to reach Jupiter in 2030, it will spend four years analyzing this moon to determine whether it could support life. Read the full story.

—Stephen Ornes

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Boston’s newest sport, cliff diving, is attracting a lot of attention.
+ Why brat green has taken over the internet.
+ The annual Gloucestershire cheese-rolling race is bigger, and more perilous, than ever.
+ Relaxing summer vibes? Say no more

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.

Apple is promising personalized AI in a private cloud. Here’s how that will work.

At its Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, Apple for the first time unveiled its vision for supercharging its product lineup with artificial intelligence. The key feature, which will run across virtually all of its product line, is Apple Intelligence, a suite of AI-based capabilities that promises to deliver personalized AI services while keeping sensitive data secure. It represents Apple’s largest leap forward in using our private data to help AI do tasks for us. 

To make the case it can do this without sacrificing privacy, the company says it has built a new way to handle sensitive data in the cloud. The pitch offers an implicit contrast with the likes of Alphabet, Amazon, or Meta, which collect and store enormous amounts of personal data. So how will it work? Read our story to find out.

—James O’Donnell

The world’s on the verge of a carbon storage boom

A growing number of carbon storage projects are on the way across California, the US, and the world—a trend driven by growing government subsidies, looming national climate targets, and declining revenue and growth in traditional oil and gas activities.

Proponents hope it’s the start of a sort of oil boom in reverse, kick-starting a process through which the world will eventually bury more greenhouse gas than it adds to the atmosphere. 

However, opponents insist these efforts will prolong the life of fossil-fuel plants, allow air and water pollution to continue, and create new health and environmental risks that could disproportionately harm disadvantaged communities surrounding the projects. Read the full story.

—James Temple

How Gogoro’s swap-and-go scooter batteries can strengthen the grid

If you’ve ever been to Taiwan, you’ve likely run into Gogoro’s green-and-white battery-swap stations. With 12,500 stations around the island, it’s built a sweeping network that allows users of electric scooters to drop off an empty battery and get a fully charged one immediately. 

Back in April, Gogoro’s network reacted to emergency blackouts after a 7.4 magnitude earthquake. Zeyi Yang, our China reporter, spoke to Horace Luke, Gogoro’s cofounder and CEO, to understand how it helped to boost the grid’s resilience in the face of disaster. Read the full story.

This story is from China Report, our weekly newsletter covering tech in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Elon Musk has dropped his lawsuit against OpenAI
Just hours ahead of a scheduled hearing in San Francisco. (CNBC)
+ Musk had argued that OpenAI had breached its commitment to investors. (WP $)+ The billionaire is locked in an ongoing dispute with Sam Altman. (FT $)

2 A far-right TikTok star is set on governing France
He uses the platform to normalize his party’s toxic policies for younger voters. (FT $)

3 Adderall is still in short supply across the US
Americans are hiring workers in the Philippines to source scarce prescriptions. (404 Media)

4 This startup 3D-printed an entire rocket engine
Within just 72 hours. (IEEE Spectrum)

5 Ozempic seems to have numerous health benefits beyond weight loss
But we’re not really sure why. (The Atlantic $)
+ Weight-loss injections have taken over the internet. But what does this mean for people IRL? (MIT Technology Review)

6 Meet the Spanish women taking on Wikipedia’s gender gap
They’re dedicated to publishing pages focused on unsung female heroes. (The Guardian)

7 The secret to a safe space flight? Software engineers
They’re essential to keeping missions on an even keel. (WP $)

8 Temu is threatening to dethrone eBay
The Chinese retail site is now attracting more repeat shoppers. (Bloomberg $)
+ This obscure shopping app is now America’s most downloaded. (MIT Technology Review)

9 How media companies became hooked on games
Blame Wordle. (NYT $)

10 The internet isn’t actually more toxic than it used to be
It just feels that way. (Bloomberg $)
+ How to fix the internet. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“It’s the nail in the coffin for future creators launching a blog.”

—Amber Venz Box, co-founder of social shopping app LTK, warns would-be bloggers to reconsider now that Google has launched its AI Overviews summary feature, she tells The Information.

The big story

The world is moving closer to a new cold war fought with authoritarian tech

September 2022

Despite President Biden’s assurances that the US is not seeking a new cold war, one is brewing between the world’s autocracies and democracies—and technology is fueling it.

Authoritarian states are following China’s lead and are trending toward more digital rights abuses by increasing the mass digital surveillance of citizens, censorship, and controls on individual expression.

And while democracies also use massive amounts of surveillance technology, it’s the tech trade relationships between authoritarian countries that’s enabling the rise of digitally enabled social control. Read the full story.

—Tate Ryan-Mosley

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ This tiny driftfish is a master of disguise.
+ Why the USA’s national forests are every bit as amazing as its national parks.
+ Follow these tips and you’ll be producing barista-level coffee in no time at all.
+ Feeling burnt out? Try playing these fun, short video games.

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 battery-swap networks are preventing emergency blackouts

On the morning of April 3, Taiwan was hit by a 7.4 magnitude earthquake. Seconds later, hundreds of battery-swap stations in Taiwan sensed something else: the power frequency of the electric grid took a sudden drop, a signal that some power plants had been disconnected in the disaster. The grid was now struggling to meet energy demand.

These stations, built by the Taiwanese company Gogoro for electric-powered two-wheeled vehicles like scooters, mopeds, and bikes, reacted immediately. According to numbers provided by the company, 590 Gogoro battery-swap locations (some of which have more than one swap station) stopped drawing electricity from the grid, lowering local demand by a total six megawatts—enough to power thousands of homes. It took 12 minutes for the grid to recover, and the battery-swap stations then resumed normal operation.

Gogoro is not the only company working on battery-swapping for electric scooters—New York City recently launched a pilot program to give delivery drivers the option to charge this way—but it’s certainly one of the most successful.

Now the company is putting the battery network to another use: Gogoro is working to incorporate the stations into a virtual power plant (VPP) system that helps the Taiwanese grid stay more resilient in emergencies like April’s earthquake. Read the full story.

—Zeyi Yang

What using artificial intelligence to help monitor surgery can teach us

Every year, some 22,000 Americans a year are killed as a result of serious medical errors in hospitals, many of them on operating tables. There have been cases where surgeons have left surgical sponges inside patients’ bodies or performed the wrong procedure altogether.

Teodor Grantcharov, a professor of surgery at Stanford, thinks he has found a tool to make surgery safer and minimize human error: AI-powered “black boxes” in operating theaters that work in a similar way to an airplane’s black box.

These devices, built by Grantcharov’s company Surgical Safety Technologies, record everything in the operating room via panoramic cameras, microphones in the ceiling, and anesthesia monitors before using artificial intelligence to help surgeons make sense of the data. 

These black boxes are in use in almost 40 institutions in the US, Canada, and Western Europe, from Mount Sinai to Duke to the Mayo Clinic. Organizations in all sectors are thinking about how to adopt AI to make things safer or more efficient. What this example from hospitals shows is that the situation is not always clear cut, and there are many pitfalls you need to avoid. Read the full story.

—Melissa Heikkilä

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly AI newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Apple is weaving AI into its apps and devices
It promises that its Apple Intelligence system will preserve user privacy. (NYT $)
+ Crucially, users won’t be strong armed into using ChatGPT. (FT $)
+ If you missed the WWDC keynote, here’s a summary of the key announcements. (WP $)

2 Adobe says it won’t train AI on its customers’ work
Following a major backlash from users who feared just that. (The Verge)
+ Artists are increasingly worried that their work will be reduced to training data. (Slate $)
+ How Adobe’s bet on non-exploitative AI is paying off. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Thermoelectricity between liquid metals has been observed for the first time
It could lead to better-designed liquid batteries. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ Zinc batteries that offer an alternative to lithium just got a big boost. (MIT Technology Review)

4 The Titan submersible disaster could have been avoided
Former Oceangate workers claim its CEO lied about the vessel’s safety. (Wired $)

5 Solar-powered planes are becoming a reality
They’re super light, and super-sustainable. (WSJ $)
+ Everything you need to know about the wild world of alternative jet fuels. (MIT Technology Review)

6 A crowd-measuring AI tool helps cut through protest misinformation
It suggests that the size of a crowd gathered in support of the former Brazilian president Bolsonaro was less than a third of what was claimed. (Rest of World)

7 New tools could lower methane emissions from livestock
Breeding animals that emit less methane is one approach. (Knowable Magazine)

8 At least advertisers are enjoying the metaverse
Everyone else, not so much. (FT $)
+ Welcome to the oldest part of the metaverse. (MIT Technology Review)

9 AI is helping us to decipher how elephants communicate
They call each other by their names! (The Guardian)
+ They speak to each other using individualized rumble sounds. (NYT $)

10 TikTok is bringing talk shows to city streets
No studio, no problem. (Insider $)

Quote of the day

“Visitors will have to check their Apple devices at the door, where they will be stored in a Faraday cage.”

—Elon Musk threatens to ban Apple products from his companies if the iPhone maker integrates OpenAI at the operating system level, Reuters reports. 

The big story

Why we can no longer afford to ignore the case for climate adaptation

August 2022

Back in the 1990s, anyone suggesting that we’d need to adapt to climate change while also cutting emissions was met with suspicion. Most climate change researchers felt adaptation studies would distract from the vital work of keeping pollution out of the atmosphere to begin with.

Despite this hostile environment, a handful of experts were already sowing the seeds for a new field of research called “climate change adaptation”: study and policy on how the world could prepare for and adapt to the new disasters and dangers brought forth on a warming planet. Today, their research is more important than ever. Read the full story. 

—Madeline Ostrander

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ With the return of House of the Dragon, what’s next for the Game of Thrones franchise?
+ Here’s what top chefs like to put in their sandwiches: barbecue sauce and pickled okra.
+ How not to take the good stuff in life for granted.
+ Save the Long Island cheese pumpkin, and other endangered foods!

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.

Propagandists are using AI too—and companies need to be open about it

—Josh A. Goldstein is a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), where he works on the CyberAI Project. Renée DiResta is the research manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory and the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality.

At the end of May, OpenAI marked a new “first” in its corporate history. It wasn’t an even more powerful language model or a new data partnership, but a report disclosing that bad actors had misused their products to run influence operations.

The company had caught five networks of covert propagandists—including players from Russia, China, Iran, and Israel—using their generative AI tools for deceptive tactics that ranged from creating large volumes of social media comments in multiple languages to turning news articles into Facebook posts.

The use of these tools, OpenAI noted, seemed intended to improve the quality and quantity of output. AI gives propagandists a productivity boost too.

As researchers who have studied online influence operations for years, we have seen influence operations continue to proliferate, on every social platform and focused on every region of the world. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that transparency from Big Tech is paramount. Read the full story.

+ If you’re interested in how crooks are using AI, check out Melissa Heikkilä’s story on how generative tools are boosting the criminal underworld.

Digital twins are helping scientists run the world’s most complex experiments

In January 2022, NASA’s $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope was approaching the end of its one-million-mile trip from Earth. But reaching its orbital spot would be just one part of its treacherous journey. To ready itself for observations, the spacecraft had to unfold itself in a complicated choreography that, according to its engineers’ calculations, had 344 different ways to fail.

Over multiple days of choreography, the telescope fed data back to Earth in real time, and software near-simultaneously used that data to render a 3D video of how the process was going, as it was going. The 3D video represented a “digital twin” of the complex telescope: a computer-based model of the actual instrument, based on information that the instrument provided. 

The team watched tensely, during JWST’s early days, as the 344 potential problems failed to make their appearance. At last, JWST was in its final shape and looked as it should—in space and onscreen. The digital twin has been updating itself ever since.

As the technology becomes more common, researchers are increasingly finding these twins to be productive members of scientific society—helping humans run the world’s most complicated instruments, while also revealing more about the world itself and the universe beyond. Read the full story. 

—Sarah Scoles

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 What to expect from Apple’s AI-focused WWDC event 
A deal with OpenAI is likely to be on the cards, amid an avalanche of AI features. (Bloomberg $)
+ Siri is due to get a buzzy LLM makeover. (The Verge)
+ What we need is AI features that are actually useful, not just showboating. (TechCrunch)

2 India’s internet space race is hotting up
The country’s telecoms giants want to beat Starlink at its own game. (FT $)

3 Silicon Valley’s medical tests industry is booming
They’re enabling patients to bypass doctors—for better and worse. (WP $)

4 AI tools are being trained on the faces of Brazilian children
Without their knowledge or consent. (Wired $)
+ We need to bring consent to AI. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Online scammers are ripping off small businesses too
It’s not just big designer names at risk of being impersonated any more. (WSJ $)

6 Perplexity is repackaging news articles with minimal attribution
A Forbes journalist has hit back at how the AI search engine repurposed the publication’s reporting. (Bloomberg $)
+ Here’s how AI summaries for search engines get things wrong. (MIT Technology Review)

7 AI image detectors are doing an okay job
But the results of generative AI are becoming ever subtler. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ This tool could protect your pictures from AI manipulation. (MIT Technology Review)

8 How viral videos shifted Californians’ perspective on crime
The galvanizing effect of these clips appears to fuel public appetite for harsher penalties. (The Atlantic $)
+ AI was supposed to make police bodycams better. What happened? (MIT Technology Review)

9 Refrigerators have altered how our food tastes
Colder foods and drinks need to be extra sweet to register as sweet at all. (New Yorker $)
+ Why food allergen labels are so misleading. (Undark Magazine)

10 Nokia claims to have made the world’s first ‘immersive phone call’
Complete with 3D sound, apparently. (Reuters)

Quote of the day

“The blue wall has been breached.”

—Ryan Selkis, chief executive of cryptocurrency intelligence group Messari, tells the Financial Times how Donalad Trump is winning over traditionally liberal Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. 

The big story

Quantum computing is taking on its biggest challenge: noise

January 2024

In the past 20 years, hundreds of companies have staked a claim in the rush to establish quantum computing. Investors have put in well over $5 billion so far. All this effort has just one purpose: creating the world’s next big thing.

But ultimately, assessing our progress in building useful quantum computers comes down to one central factor: whether we can handle the noise. The delicate nature of their systems makes them extremely vulnerable to the slightest disturbance, which can generate errors or even stop a quantum computation in its tracks.

In the last couple of years, a series of breakthroughs have led researchers to declare that the problem of noise might finally be on the ropes. Read the full story.

—Michael Brooks

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ No one has ever had a better camping trip than this hedgehog.
+ Hoping to see the Northern Lights this summer? Here’s how to maximize your chances of spotting the phenomenon in the US.
+ These super-strong women can roll up 10 frying pans within a minute!
+ If you’re ever stuck on how to strike up conversation, these foolproof starters should help you out.

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 AI-powered “black box” could make surgery safer

The operating room has long been defined by its hush-hush nature because surgeons are notoriously bad at acknowledging their own mistakes.

These mistakes kill some 22,000 Americans each year. Many of the errors happen on the operating table, from leaving surgical sponges inside patients’ bodies to performing the wrong procedure altogether.

Now, Teodor Grantcharov, a surgeon and professor of surgery at Stanford, believes he’s created the technology to create and analyze recordings of operations to help improve safety and surgical efficiency. It’s the operating room equivalent of an airplane’s black box: recording everything in the operating room via panoramic cameras, microphones, and anesthesia monitors before using artificial intelligence to help surgeons make sense of the data.   

But the idea of recording everything could raise the threat of disciplinary action and legal exposure. Some surgeons have refused to operate when the black boxes are in place, and some of the systems have even been sabotaged. 

So are hospitals on the cusp of a new era of safety—or creating an environment of confusion and paranoia? Read the full story.

—Simar Bajaj

FDA advisors just said no to the use of MDMA as a therapy

On Tuesday, the FDA asked a panel of experts to weigh in on whether the evidence shows that MDMA, also known as ecstasy, is a safe and efficacious treatment for PTSD.

The answer was a resounding no. Just two out of 11 panel members agreed that MDMA-assisted therapy is effective. And only one panel member thought the benefits of the therapy outweighed the risks.

The outcome came as a surprise to many, given that trial results have been positive. And it is also a blow for advocates who have been working to bring psychedelic therapy into mainstream medicine for more than two decades.

This isn’t the final decision on MDMA. The FDA has until August 11 to make that ruling. But while the agency is under no obligation to follow the recommendations of its advisory committees, it rarely breaks with their decisions. 

So let’s unpack the advisory committee’s vote and talk about what it means for the approval of other recreational drugs as therapies. Read the full story.

—Cassandra Willyard

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech and health newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Silicon Valley is pushing back against an AI safety bill  
The legislation would force tech firms to create a ‘kill switch’ to shut down AI models. (FT $)
+ It’s not just Big Tech either—startups are resisting it too. (Bloomberg $)
+ Europe’s AI Act is done. Here’s what will (and won’t) change. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Boeing’s Starliner has docked with the International Space Station
It completed the first stage of its flight after several of its thrusters went offline. (The Guardian)
+ Boeing’s engineers are downplaying the issues it’s experienced. (WP $)

3 OpenAI has pulled back the curtain on ChatGPT 
It’s released a paper explaining how AI models’ workings can be reverse engineered. (Wired $)
+ Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Why China is losing the chip war with the US
Despite its best efforts, its native firms can’t hold a candle to Nvidia. (Economist $)
+ What’s next in chips. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Deplatforming accounts that spread misinformation works
When X suspended 70,000 QAnon-linked accounts, the number of links to ‘low-credibility’ sites plummeted. (WP $)
+ Lies on the internet are still rife, though. (Vox)

6 An Indian startup once valued at $22 billion is now worthless
Its investors claim the company regularly ignored their advice. (TechCrunch)

7 Climate scientists are desperate to slow melting polar ice
And some of them are prepared to dabble with unusual methods to achieve it. (Economist $)
+ The radical intervention that might save the “doomsday” glacier. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Super cheap delivery meals are all the rage in China
Unfortunately, gig workers are bearing the brunt of the cost. (Rest of World)

9 A virtual gun has sold for more than $1 million
The digital Counter-Strike 2 accessory is one of the biggest video game purchases ever. (Bloomberg $)
+ A team of gaming enthusiasts have rebuilt the world’s first gaming computer. (The Guardian)

10 A decades-old Tamagotchi mystery has finally been solved
The online virtual pet fan community is going wild. (404 Media)

Quote of the day

“Nice to be attached to the big city in the sky.”

 —Barry “Butch” Wilmore, one of the veteran astronauts onboard Boeing’s Starliner, jokes with mission control after the spacecraft successfully docked with the International Space Station, Reuters reports.

The big story

Whatever happened to DNA computing?

October 2021

For more than five decades, engineers have shrunk silicon-­based transistors over and over again, creating progressively smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient computers in the process. But the long technological winning streak—and the miniaturization that has enabled it —can’t last forever.

What could this successor technology be? There has been no shortage of alternative computing approaches proposed over the last 50 years. Here are five of the more memorable ones. Read about five of the most memorable ones.

—Lakshmi Chandrasekaran

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ What inspired Gary Numan to write electronic smash-hit Cars? Well, you won’t believe this…
+ Animals love magic too!
+ Nothing to see here—just Keanu Reeves having the time of his life playing a Cure song.
+ Friends just make everything better.

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 classic game is taking on climate change

—Casey Crownhart

There are two things I love to do at social gatherings: play board games and talk about climate change. Don’t I sound like someone you should invite to your next dinner party?

Given my two great loves, I was delighted to learn about a board game called Catan: New Energies, coming out this summer. It’s a new edition of the classic game Catan which has players building power plants, fueled by either fossil fuels or renewables.

So how does an energy-focused edition of Catan stack up against the board game competition? And what does it say about how we view climate technology? Read the full story.

This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate and energy newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Boeing’s first crewed space mission has three helium leaks
But the spacecraft is stable enough to continue on its mission. (CNN)
+ Delays have added $1.4 billion in costs to the program. (WP $)
+ But its success demonstrates NASA has an alternative to SpaceX. (The Atlantic $)

2 How an AI-generated news outlet gained millions of readers
The now-defunct BNN Breaking looked like a standard news service. But its articles bore all the hallmarks of AI. (NYT $)
+ These six questions will dictate the future of generative AI. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Crypto miners are renting out their data centers to AI clients
AI needs chips and power, and miners are happy to oblige—for a price. (Bloomberg $)
+ Bitcoin mining was booming in Kazakhstan. Then it was gone. (MIT Technology Review)

4 The age of the AI PC is coming
Chipmakers are likening its arrival to the advent of Wi-Fi. (FT $)
+ Nvidia was the unofficial star of this week’s Computex conference. (Bloomberg $)
+ Elon Musk has admitted diverting Nvidia chips destined for Tesla to X. (WSJ $)

5 The majority of life on Earth is dormant
And a common protein might explain why. (Quanta Magazine)

6 Tsunamis are a looming danger in Alaska
Cliffs collapsing into the country’s fjords pose a major threat to nearby boats. (Hakai Magazine)

7 Filipino Catholics are building churches in Roblox
It’s a safe online space for younger users to explore their faith. (Rest of World)
+ Or if you fancy trying to earn a buck, Ikea will pay you to work in Roblox. (Wired $)

8 Palmer Luckey’s latest project is a handheld games console
From virtual reality, to lethal drones, to a gaming device. (Fast Company $)
+ Luckey’s admitted the venture doesn’t make much business sense. (The Verge)

9 Feeling stuck? AI can help you ask your future self for advice
You’re under no obligation to follow its suggestions, though. (The Guardian)

10 The doge meme is a relic of a bygone internet
The death of its star, Kobosu, is a reminder of how much has changed. (New Yorker $)
+ How to fix the internet. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“We are seeing the werewolves beginning to circle.”

—Whistleblower Edward Snowden is concerned that government and corporate control will curtail the potential of the artificial intelligence boom, Bloomberg reports.

The big story

My new Turing test would see if AI can make $1 million

July 2023

—Mustafa Suleyman is the co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI and a venture partner at Greylock, a venture capital firm. Before that, he co-founded DeepMind, one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies.

AI systems are increasingly everywhere and are becoming more powerful almost by the day. But how can we know if a machine is truly “intelligent”? For decades this has been defined by the Turing test, which argues that an AI that’s able to replicate language convincingly enough to trick a human into thinking it was also human should be considered intelligent.

But there’s now a problem: the Turing test has almost been passed—it arguably already has been. The latest generation of large language models are on the cusp of acing it.

We need something better. I propose the Modern Turing Test. It would give AIs a simple instruction:  “Go make $1 million on a retail web platform in a few months with just a $100,000 investment.” Read the full story.

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Sauron is alive in Argentina! According to these old-school Lord of the Rings badges, at least.
+ A celebration of the women of shoegaze.
+ If you’ve ever wondered how they used to shoot cinematic battle scenes before the advent of CGI, wonder no more.
+ Congratulations to Max the cat, a much-loved member of Vermont State University, and honorary doctor of ‘litter-ature’ (thanks Paul!)

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 a simple circuit could offer an alternative to energy-intensive GPUs

On a table in his lab at the University of Pennsylvania, physicist Sam Dillavou has connected an array of breadboards via a web of brightly colored wires. The setup looks like a DIY home electronics project, but this unassuming assembly can learn to sort data like a machine-learning model.

While its current capability is rudimentary, the hope is that, if it works, it could help spark a far more energy-efficient approach to building faster AI. Read the full story.

—Sophia Chen

How QWERTY keyboards show the English dominance of tech

Have you ever thought about the fact that, despite the myriad differences between languages, virtually everyone uses the same QWERTY keyboards? Many languages have more or fewer than 26 letters in their alphabet—or no “alphabet” at all, like Chinese, which has tens of thousands of characters. Yet somehow everyone uses the same keyboard to communicate.

Last week, MIT Technology Review published an excerpt from a new book, The Chinese Computer, which talks about how this problem was solved in China. 

Zeyi Yang, our China reporter, sat down with the book’s author, Tom Mullaney, a professor of history at Stanford University to discuss how speakers of non-Latin languages to adapt modern technologies for their uses, and what their efforts contribute to computing technologies. Read the rest of their conversation here.

This story is from China Report, our weekly newsletter covering tech and power in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 US advisors have rejected MDMA as a treatment for PTSD
Which means it’s increasingly unlikely that it’ll end up being approved in August after all. (Vox)
+ The trials had positive results—but appeared flawed and biased. (Ars Technica)
+ What’s next for MDMA. (MIT Technology Review)

2 China is dead set on EV world domination
Everywhere besides the US and Europe, at least. (FT $)
+ How did China come to dominate the world of electric cars? (MIT Technology Review) 

3 Israel is secretly targeting US lawmakers with an influence campaign
It’s using fake social media accounts urging US lawmakers to fund Israel’s military. (NYT $)

4 Police drones aren’t all they’re cracked up to be
They’re being deployed to investigate minor crimes in the city of Chula Vista—and residents are increasingly unnerved. (Wired $)
+ Flying taxi firm Joby Aviation is hoping to move into defense contracts. (Fast Company $)
+ Welcome to Chula Vista, where police drones respond to 911 calls. (MIT Technology Review)

5 SpaceX has been permission to launch a fourth test flight
If everything runs smoothly, it should take off at 7am CDT on Thursday. (Ars Technica)

6 How Uganda built a vast biometric surveillance network
Identity verification systems are also used to monitor its citizens. (Bloomberg $)
+ How Worldcoin recruited its first half a million test users. (MIT Technology Review)

7 It’s a good time to be an AI video startup
In some cases, they’re ahead of the established giants. (WP $)
+ What’s next for generative video. (MIT Technology Review)

8 The lonely search for connection online
Modern loneliness is rife. The internet could help—and hinder. (The Guardian)

9 Stretchy screens are on the horizon
And could usher in a whole new era of wearables. (IEEE Spectrum)

10 These glasses could help us to see in the dark
By converting infrared into visible light. (New Scientist $)

Quote of the day

“The world isn’t ready, and we aren’t ready.”

—Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI researcher, explains to the New York Times why he lost confidence in the company’s ability to behave responsibly as it creates ever more capable AI systems.

The big story

California’s coming offshore wind boom faces big engineering hurdles

December 2022

The state of California has an ambitious goal: building 25 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2045. That’s equivalent to nearly a third of the state’s total generating capacity today, or enough to power 25 million homes.

But the plans are facing a daunting geological challenge: the continental shelf drops steeply just a few miles off the California coast. They also face enormous engineering and regulatory obstacles. Read the full story.

—James Temple

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ I could watch this clay genius make models of Pokemon all day long.
+ Cellphones and concert halls don’t tend to go together—but a new symphony is looking to forge a new cellular musical connection.
+ Yaupon tea sounds delicious to me.
+ For six years, Katy Perry had the charts in a chokehold. What happened?

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.

What I learned from the UN’s “AI for Good” summit

—Melissa Heikkilä

Last week, Geneva played host to the UN’s AI for Good Summit. The summit’s big focus was how AI can be used to meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, such as eradicating poverty and hunger, achieving gender equality, promoting clean energy and climate action and so on. 

The conference managed to convene people working in AI from around the globe, featuring speakers from China, the Middle East, and Africa too. AI can be very US-centric and male dominated, and any effort to make the conversation more global and diverse is laudable.

But honestly, I didn’t leave the conference feeling confident AI was going to play a meaningful role in advancing any of the UN goals. In fact, the most interesting speeches were about how AI is doing the opposite. Read the full story.

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly AI newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

Read more of Melissa’s stories about the issues within the AI sector:

+ How generative AI has made phishing, scamming, and doxxing easier than ever.

+ We are all AI’s free data workers. Fancy AI models rely on human labor, which can often be brutal and upsetting. Read the full story.

+ The viral AI avatar app Lensa undressed me—without my consent.

+ Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone. Each time you use AI to generate an image, write an email, or ask a chatbot a question, it comes at a cost to the planet. Read the full story.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 The Chinese internet is collapsing
Websites are being yanked offline, and history is being lost in the process. (NYT $)
+ The end of anonymity online in China. (MIT Technology Review)

2 The United Arab Emirates want to cozy up to the US over AI
And it’s more than willing to spend billions of dollars in the process. (FT $)
 
3 Google inadvertently collected voice data from children
Alongside users’ home addresses and YouTube recommendations. (404 Media)
+ Why child safety bills are popping up all over the US. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Our appetite for data centers is at odds with zero-carbon goals
Demand for electricity is rising, and decarbonizing the grid is becoming an even bigger challenge. (Undark Magazine)
+ A massive part of why we need more power? Surprise, surprise—it’s AI. (Wired $)+ Energy-hungry data centers are quietly moving into cities. (MIT Technology Review)

5 X is formally allowing X-rated content
NSFW images and videos have been rife on it for years anyway. (TechCrunch)
+ It’s supposed to block under-18s from seeing NSFW material. (The Guardian)

6 AI is getting much better at predicting the weather
Which is handy, given that the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season is coming. (Ars Technica)
+ Google DeepMind’s weather AI can forecast extreme weather faster and more accurately. (MIT Technology Review)

7 This new startup wants to bring cryonics to the masses
By focusing on the reviving, rather than the freezing part. (Bloomberg $)
+ Why the sci-fi dream of cryonics never died. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Retailers love it when you buy things on your mobile
If you’re making an impulse purchase, chances are it’s on a phone, not a laptop. (WSJ $)

9 Dying stars produce glitching radio waves
Scientists are getting better at reproducing these pulsar glitches. (New Scientist $)

10 Amazon sold fake copies of a major UFO book
Scammers produced false versions of the hotly-anticipated title, some of which contain AI-generated text. (404 Media)

Quote of the day

“We are still behind them, but we are breathing down their back.”

—Vladimir Milov, a YouTube creator, tells Wired how he helped to create a direct competitor to Putin’s TV propaganda on the platform.

The big story

Broadband funding for Native communities could finally connect some of America’s most isolated places

September 2022

Rural and Native communities in the US have long had lower rates of cellular and broadband connectivity than urban areas, where four out of every five Americans live. Outside the cities and suburbs, which occupy barely 3% of US land, reliable internet service can still be hard to come by.

The covid-19 pandemic underscored the problem as Native communities locked down and moved school and other essential daily activities online. But it also kicked off an unprecedented surge of relief funding to solve it. Read the full story.

—Robert Chaney

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Bats have incredibly sweet little feet.
+ Too many gardens aren’t overly hospitable to nature. Here’s how to make your green spaces into wild wonderlands.
+ Summer is here, and honey garlic parmesan biscuits seem like a great way to celebrate.
+ This sunset ocean painting is really quite something.

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.

What’s next for MDMA

MDMA has been banned in the United States for more than three decades. But now, this potent mind-altering drug is poised to become a badly needed therapy for PTSD.

On June 4, the Food and Drug Administration’s advisory committee will meet to discuss the risks and benefits of MDMA therapy. If the committee votes in favor of the drug, it could be approved to treat PTSD this summer.

The approval would represent a momentous achievement for proponents of mind-altering drugs, who have been working toward this goal for decades. And it could help pave the way for FDA approval of other illicit drugs like psilocybin. But the details surrounding how these compounds will make the transition from illicit substances to legitimate therapies are still foggy. Here’s what you need to know ahead of the upcoming hearing.

—Cassandra Willyard

If you’re interested in how mind-altering drugs are being used in medicine, why not check out:

+ What do psychedelic drugs do to our brains? AI could help us find out. Why the words people used to describe their trip experiences could lead to better drugs to treat mental illness. Read the full story.+ Psychedelics are being scientifically researched now more than ever. This time, women might finally benefit.+ VR is as good as psychedelics at helping people reach transcendence. On key metrics, a VR experience elicited a response indistinguishable from subjects who took medium doses of LSD or magic mushrooms. Read the full story.

+ One patient in a trial describes his “life-changing” experience with MDMA-assisted therapy.
+ But there is a danger that mind-altering substances are being overhyped as wonder drugs.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Boeing has rescheduled a historic space flight for Wednesday
The company’s first crewed flight was canceled at the last minute on Saturday. (Reuters)
+ The flight was grounded after a faulty ground power unit was uncovered. (CNN)
+ Boeing has been trying to fly astronauts into space for years. (The Atlantic $)

2 Adobe has ceased selling Ansel Adams-style images generated by AI
The late photographer’s estate has been trying to get them taken down for months. (The Verge)
+ This artist is dominating AI-generated art. And he’s not happy about it. (MIT Technology Review)

3 How successful has America’s Chips Act been?
The government effort has awarded billions to chipmakers, but it’s a long game. (WSJ $)
+ What’s next in chips. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Social media videos encourage Chinese migrants to move to the US
But the cheery clips fail to capture the reality of moving to a foreign country. (The Markup)

5 This is what AI thinks a beautiful woman looks like
Light-skinned, thin, and impossibly glamorous. (WP $)
+ How it feels to be sexually objectified by an AI. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Inside the messy ethics of brain implants
The invasive surgery is restricted to disabled patients—for now. (FT $)
+ Beyond Neuralink: Meet the other companies developing brain-computer interfaces. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Learning more about the placenta could help prevent stillbirths
Many stillbirths have unidentified causes. Observing the placenta could help. (The Atlantic $)

8 The internet isn’t fun any more
And it hasn’t been for almost a decade. (Vox)
+ How to fix the internet. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Driverless car racing sounds seriously weird
It’s incredibly technically challenging, and entirely absent of thrills. (Ars Technica)

10 This app has reinvented the walkie talkie
For the TikTok generation. (TechCrunch)

Quote of the day

“I believe it’s as significant as Windows 95.”

—Cristiano Amon, chief executive of semiconductor company Qualcomm, hypes up its latest chip with a comparison to Microsoft’s seminal computer software, Bloomberg reports.  

The big story

How Bitcoin mining devastated this New York town

April 2022

If you had taken a gamble in 2017 and purchased Bitcoin, today you might be a millionaire many times over. But while the industry has provided windfalls for some, local communities have paid a high price, as people started scouring the world for cheap sources of energy to run large Bitcoin-mining farms.

It didn’t take long for a subsidiary of the popular Bitcoin mining firm Coinmint to lease a Family Dollar store in Plattsburgh, a city in New York state offering cheap power. Soon, the company was regularly drawing enough power for about 4,000 homes. And while other miners were quick to follow, the problems had already taken root. Read the full story.

—Lois Parshley

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Aww, this tiny seal could not be happier after his bath.
+ Photographer Rankin’s archive of 90s photos are beyond cool.
+ Astrolabes were the must-have gadgets of the Middle Ages.
+ I don’t remember this version of Les Misérables?

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.

Why Google’s AI Overviews gets things wrong

When Google announced it was rolling out its artificial intelligence-powered search feature earlier this month, the company promised that “Google will do the googling for you.”The new feature, called AI Overviews, provides brief, AI-generated summaries highlighting key information and links on top of search results.

Unfortunately, AI systems are inherently unreliable. And within days of AI Overviews being released in the US, users quickly shared examples of the feature suggesting that its users add glue to pizza, eat at least one small rock a day, and that former US president Andrew Johnson earned university degrees between 1947 and 2012, despite dying in 1875. 

Yesterday, Liz Reid, head of Google Search, announced that the company has been making technical improvements to the system.

But why is AI Overviews returning unreliable, potentially dangerous information in the first place? And what, if anything, can be done to fix it? Read the full story.

—Rhiannon Williams

AI-directed drones could help find lost hikers faster

If a hiker gets lost in the rugged Scottish Highlands, rescue teams sometimes send up a drone to search for clues of the individual’s route. But with vast terrain to cover and limited battery life, picking the right area to search is critical.

Traditionally, expert drone pilots use a combination of intuition and statistical “search theory”—a strategy with roots in World War II–era hunting of German submarines—to prioritize certain search locations over others.

Now researchers want to see if a machine-learning system could do better. Read the full story.

—James O’Donnell

What’s next for bird flu vaccines

In the US, bird flu has now infected cows in nine states, millions of chickens, and—as of last week—a second dairy worker. There’s no indication that the virus has acquired the mutations it would need to jump between humans, but the possibility of another pandemic has health officials on high alert. Last week, they said they are working to get 4.8 million doses of H5N1 bird flu vaccine packaged into vials as a precautionary measure. 

The good news is that we’re far more prepared for a bird flu outbreak than we were for covid. We know so much more about influenza than we did about coronaviruses. And we already have hundreds of thousands of doses of a bird flu vaccine sitting in the nation’s stockpile.

The bad news is we would need more than 600 million doses to cover everyone in the US, at two shots per person. And the process we typically use to produce flu vaccines takes months and relies on massive quantities of chicken eggs—one of the birds that’s susceptible to avian flu. Read about why we still use a cumbersome, 80-year-old vaccine production process to make flu vaccines—and how we can speed it up.

—Cassandra Willyard

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech and health newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Russia, Iran and China used generative AI in covert propaganda campaigns
But their efforts weren’t overly successful. (NYT $) 
+ The groups used the generative AI models to write social media posts. (WP $)
+ NSO Group spyware has been used to hack Russian journalists living abroad. (Bloomberg $)
+ How generative AI is boosting the spread of disinformation and propaganda. (MIT Technology Review)

2 TikTok is reportedly working on a clone of its recommendation algorithm
Splitting its source code could trigger the creation of a US-only version of the app. (Reuters)
+ TikTok is attempting to convince the US of its independence from China. (The Verge)

3 A man in England has received a personalized cancer vaccine
Elliot Pfebve is the first patient to receive the jab as part of a major trial. (The Guardian)
+ Cancer vaccines are having a renaissance. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Amazon’s drone delivery business has cleared a major hurdle
US regulators have approved its drones to fly longer distances. (CNBC)

5 OpenAI has launched a version of ChatGPT for universities
ChatGPT Edu is supposed to help institutions deploy AI “responsibly.” (Forbes)
+ ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Chile is fighting back against Big Tech’s data centers
Activists aren’t happy with the American giants’ lack of transparency. (Rest of World)
+ Energy-hungry data centers are quietly moving into cities. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Israel is tracking subatomic particles to map underground areas
Archaeologists avoid digging in places with religious significance. (Bloomberg $)

8 Ecuador is in serious trouble 
Drought and power outages are making daily life increasingly difficult. (Wired $)
+ Emissions hit a record high in 2023. Blame hydropower. (MIT Technology Review)

9 How to fight the rise of audio deepfakes
A wave of new techniques could make it easier to tackle the convincing clips. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ Here’s what it’s like to come across your nonconsensual AI clone. (404 Media)
+ An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary. (MIT Technology Review)

10 The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted its most distant galaxy yet
The JADES-GS-z14-0 galaxy was captured as it was a mere 290 million years after the Big Bang. (BBC)

Quote of the day

“Despite what Donald Trump thinks, America is not for sale to billionaires, oil and gas executives, or even Elon Musk.”

—James Singer, a spokesperson for the Biden campaign, mocks Trump’s attempts to court Musk and other mega donors to fund his reelection campaign, the Financial Times reports.

The big story

How to fix the internet

October 2023

We’re in a very strange moment for the internet. We all know it’s broken. But there’s a sense that things are about to change. The stranglehold that the big social platforms have had on us for the last decade is weakening.

There’s a sort of common wisdom that the internet is irredeemably bad. That social platforms, hungry to profit off your data, opened a Pandora’s box that cannot be closed.

But the internet has also provided a haven for marginalized groups and a place for support. It offers information at times of crisis. It can connect you with long-lost friends. It can make you laugh.

The internet is worth fighting for because despite all the misery, there’s still so much good to be found there. And yet, fixing online discourse is the definition of a hard problem. But don’t worry. I have an idea. Read the full story. 

—Katie Notopoulos

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)+ It’s peony season!
+ Forget giant squid—there’s colossal squid living in the depths of the ocean.
+  Is a long conversation in a film your idea of cinematic perfection, or a drawn-out nightmare?
+ Here’s how to successfully decompress after a long day at work.

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more here.

When Google announced it was rolling out its artificial-intelligence-powered search feature earlier this month, the company promised that “Google will do the googling for you.” The new feature, called AI Overviews, provides brief, AI-generated summaries highlighting key information and links on top of search results.

Unfortunately, AI systems are inherently unreliable. Within days of AI Overviews’ release in the US, users were sharing examples of responses that were strange at best. It suggested that users add glue to pizza or eat at least one small rock a day, and that former US president Andrew Johnson earned university degrees between 1947 and 2012, despite dying in 1875. 

On Thursday, Liz Reid, head of Google Search, announced that the company has been making technical improvements to the system to make it less likely to generate incorrect answers, including better detection mechanisms for nonsensical queries. It is also limiting the inclusion of satirical, humorous, and user-generated content in responses, since such material could result in misleading advice.

But why is AI Overviews returning unreliable, potentially dangerous information? And what, if anything, can be done to fix it?

How does AI Overviews work?

In order to understand why AI-powered search engines get things wrong, we need to look at how they’ve been optimized to work. We know that AI Overviews uses a new generative AI model in Gemini, Google’s family of large language models (LLMs), that’s been customized for Google Search. That model has been integrated with Google’s core web ranking systems and designed to pull out relevant results from its index of websites.

Most LLMs simply predict the next word (or token) in a sequence, which makes them appear fluent but also leaves them prone to making things up. They have no ground truth to rely on, but instead choose each word purely on the basis of a statistical calculation. That leads to hallucinations. It’s likely that the Gemini model in AI Overviews gets around this by using an AI technique called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which allows an LLM to check specific sources outside of the data it’s been trained on, such as certain web pages, says Chirag Shah, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in online search.

Once a user enters a query, it’s checked against the documents that make up the system’s information sources, and a response is generated. Because the system is able to match the original query to specific parts of web pages, it’s able to cite where it drew its answer from—something normal LLMs cannot do.

One major upside of RAG is that the responses it generates to a user’s queries should be more up to date, more factually accurate, and more relevant than those from a typical model that just generates an answer based on its training data. The technique is often used to try to prevent LLMs from hallucinating. (A Google spokesperson would not confirm whether AI Overviews uses RAG.)

So why does it return bad answers?

But RAG is far from foolproof. In order for an LLM using RAG to come up with a good answer, it has to both retrieve the information correctly and generate the response correctly. A bad answer results when one or both parts of the process fail.

In the case of AI Overviews’ recommendation of a pizza recipe that contains glue—drawing from a joke post on Reddit—it’s likely that the post appeared relevant to the user’s original query about cheese not sticking to pizza, but something went wrong in the retrieval process, says Shah. “Just because it’s relevant doesn’t mean it’s right, and the generation part of the process doesn’t question that,” he says.

Similarly, if a RAG system comes across conflicting information, like a policy handbook and an updated version of the same handbook, it’s unable to work out which version to draw its response from. Instead, it may combine information from both to create a potentially misleading answer. 

“The large language model generates fluent language based on the provided sources, but fluent language is not the same as correct information,” says Suzan Verberne, a professor at Leiden University who specializes in natural-language processing.

The more specific a topic is, the higher the chance of misinformation in a large language model’s output, she says, adding: “This is a problem in the medical domain, but also education and science.”

According to the Google spokesperson, in many cases when AI Overviews returns incorrect answers it’s because there’s not a lot of high-quality information available on the web to show for the query—or because the query most closely matches satirical sites or joke posts.

The spokesperson says the vast majority of AI Overviews provide high-quality information and that many of the examples of bad answers were in response to uncommon queries, adding that AI Overviews containing potentially harmful, obscene, or otherwise unacceptable content came up in response to less than one in every 7 million unique queries. Google is continuing to remove AI Overviews on certain queries in accordance with its content policies. 

It’s not just about bad training data

Although the pizza glue blunder is a good example of a case where AI Overviews pointed to an unreliable source, the system can also generate misinformation from factually correct sources. Melanie Mitchell, an artificial-intelligence researcher at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, googled “How many Muslim presidents has the US had?’” AI Overviews responded: “The United States has had one Muslim president, Barack Hussein Obama.” 

While Barack Obama is not Muslim, making AI Overviews’ response wrong, it drew its information from a chapter in an academic book titled Barack Hussein Obama: America’s First Muslim President? So not only did the AI system miss the entire point of the essay, it interpreted it in the exact opposite of the intended way, says Mitchell. “There’s a few problems here for the AI; one is finding a good source that’s not a joke, but another is interpreting what the source is saying correctly,” she adds. “This is something that AI systems have trouble doing, and it’s important to note that even when it does get a good source, it can still make errors.”

Can the problem be fixed?

Ultimately, we know that AI systems are unreliable, and so long as they are using probability to generate text word by word, hallucination is always going to be a risk. And while AI Overviews is likely to improve as Google tweaks it behind the scenes, we can never be certain it’ll be 100% accurate.

Google has said that it’s adding triggering restrictions for queries where AI Overviews were not proving to be especially helpful and has added additional “triggering refinements” for queries related to health. The company could add a step to the information retrieval process designed to flag a risky query and have the system refuse to generate an answer in these instances, says Verberne. Google doesn’t aim to show AI Overviews for explicit or dangerous topics, or for queries that indicate a vulnerable situation, the company spokesperson says.

Techniques like reinforcement learning from human feedback, which incorporates such feedback into an LLM’s training, can also help improve the quality of its answers. 

Similarly, LLMs could be trained specifically for the task of identifying when a question cannot be answered, and it could also be useful to instruct them to carefully assess the quality of a retrieved document before generating an answer, Verbene says: “Proper instruction helps a lot!” 

Although Google has added a label to AI Overviews answers reading “Generative AI is experimental,” it should consider making it much clearer that the feature is in beta and emphasizing that it is not ready to provide fully reliable answers, says Shah. “Until it’s no longer beta—which it currently definitely is, and will be for some time— it should be completely optional. It should not be forced on us as part of core search.”

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.

The messy quest to replace drugs with electricity

In the early 2010s, electricity seemed poised for a hostile takeover of your doctor’s office. Research into how the nervous system—the highway that carries electrical messages between the brain and the body— controls the immune response was gaining traction.

And that had opened the door to the possibility of hacking into the body’s circuitry and thereby controlling a host of chronic diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, and diabetes, as if the immune system were as reprogrammable as a computer.

To do that you’d need a new class of implant: an “electroceutical.” These devices would replace drugs. No more messy side effects. And no more guessing whether a drug would work differently for you and someone else. In the 10 years or so since, around a billion dollars has accreted around the effort. But electroceuticals have still not taken off as hoped.

Now, however, a growing number of researchers are starting to look beyond the nervous system, and experimenting with clever ways to electrically manipulate cells elsewhere in the body, such as the skin.

Their work suggests that this approach could match the early promise of electroceuticals, yielding fast-healing bioelectric bandages, novel approaches to treating autoimmune disorders, new ways of repairing nerve damage, and even better treatments for cancer. Read the full story.

—Sally Adee

Why bigger EVs aren’t always better

SUVs are taking over the world—larger vehicle models made up nearly half of new car sales globally in 2023, a new record for the segment. 

There are a lot of reasons to be nervous about the ever-expanding footprint of vehicles, from pedestrian safety and road maintenance concerns to higher greenhouse-gas emissions. But in a way, SUVs also represent a massive opportunity for climate action, since pulling the worst gas-guzzlers off the roads and replacing them with electric versions could be a big step in cutting pollution. 

It’s clear that we’re heading toward a future with bigger cars. Here’s what it might mean for the climate, and for our future on the road. Read the full story.

—Casey Crownhart

This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate and energy newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 A pro-Palestinian AI image has been shared millons of times
But social media activism critics feel it’s merely performative. (WP $)
+ The smooth, sanitized picture is inescapable across Instagram and TikTok. (Vox)
+ It appears to have originated from Malaysia. (The Guardian)

2 OpenAI is struggling to rein in its internal rows
Six months after Sam Altman returned as CEO following a coup, divisions remain. (FT $)
+ A nonprofit created by former Facebook workers is experiencing similar problems. (Wired $)

3 Chinese EV makers are facing a new hurdle in the US
A new bill could quadruple import duties on Chinese EVs to 100% (TechCrunch)
+ Why China’s EV ambitions need virtual power plants. (MIT Technology Review)

4 India’s election wasn’t derailed by deepfakes
AI fakery was largely restricted to trolling, rather than malicious interference. (Rest of World)
+ Meta says AI-generated election content is not happening at a “systemic level” (MIT Technology Review)

5 Extreme weather events are feeding into each other
It’s becoming more difficult to separate disasters into standalone events. (Vox)
+ Our current El Niño climate event is about to make way for La Niña. (The Atlantic $)
+ Last summer was the hottest in 2,000 years. Here’s how we know. (MIT Technology Review)

6 It’s high time to stop paying cyber ransoms
Paying criminals isn’t stopping attacks, experts worry. (Bloomberg $)

7 How programmatic advertising facilitated the spread of misinformation
Algorithmically-placed ads are funding shadowing operations across the web. (Wired $)

8 Smart bandages could help to heal wound faster
Sensor-embedded dressings could help doctors to monitor ailments remotely. (WSJ $)

9 Move over smartphones—the intelliPhones are coming
It’s a lame name for the AI-powered phones of tomorrow. (Insider $) 

10 The content creators worth paying attention to
Algorithms are no substitution for enthusiastic human curators. (New Yorker $)

Quote of the day

“It’s not about managing your home, it’s about what’s happening. That’s like, ‘Hey, there’s raccoons in my backyard.’”

—Liz Hamren, CEO of smart doorbell company Ring, explains the firm’s pivot away from fighting neighborhood crime and towards keeping tabs on wildlife to Bloomberg.

The big story

House-flipping algorithms are coming to your neighborhood

April 2022

When Michael Maxson found his dream home in Nevada, it was not owned by a person but by a tech company, Zillow. When he went to take a look at the property, however, he discovered it damaged by a huge water leak. Despite offering to handle the costly repairs himself, Maxson discovered that the house had already been sold to another family, at the same price he had offered.

During this time, Zillow lost more than $420 million in three months of erratic house buying and unprofitable sales, leading analysts to question whether the entire tech-driven model is really viable. For the rest of us, a bigger question remains: Does the arrival of Silicon Valley tech point to a better future for housing or an industry disruption to fear? Read the full story.

—Matthew Ponsford

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ What mathematics can tell us about the formation of animal patterns.
+ How much pasta is too much pasta?
+ Here’s how to stretch out your lower back—without risking making it worse.
+ Over on the Thailand-Malaysia Border, food is an essential signifier of identity.

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.

Quartz, cobalt, and the waste we leave behind

It is easy to convince ourselves that we now live in a dematerialized ethereal world, ruled by digital startups, artificial intelligence, and financial services.

Yet there is little evidence that we have decoupled our economy from its churning hunger for resources. We are still reliant on the products of geological processes like coal and quartz, a mineral that’s a rich source of the silicon used to build computer chips, to power our world.

Three recent books aim to reconnect readers with the physical reality that underpins the global economy. Each one fills in dark secrets about the places, processes, and lived realities that make the economy tick, and reveals just how tragic a toll the materials we rely on take for humans and the environment. Read the full story.

—Matthew Ponsford

The story is from the current print issue of MIT Technology Review, which is on the theme of Build. If you don’t already, subscribe now to receive future copies once they land.

If you’re interested in the minerals powering our economy, why not take a look at my colleague James Temple’s pieces about how a US town is being torn apart as communities clash over plans to open a nickel mine—and how that mine could unlock billions in EV subsidies.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Blacklisted Chinese firms are rebranding as American
In a bid to swerve the Biden administration’s crackdown on national security concerns. (WSJ $)+ The US has sanctioned three Chinese nationals over their links to a botnet. (Ars Technica)

2 More than half of cars sold last year were SUVs
The large vehicles are major contributors to the climate crisis. (The Guardian)
+ Three frequently asked questions about EVs, answered. (MIT Technology Review)

3 A record number of electrodes have been placed on a human brain
The more electrodes, the higher the resolution for mapping brain activity. (Ars Technica)
+ Beyond Neuralink: Meet the other companies developing brain-computer interfaces. (MIT Technology Review)

4 A former FTX executive has been sentenced to 7.5 years in prison
Ryan Salame had been hoping for a maximum of 18 months. (CoinDesk)

5 Food delivery apps are hemorrhaging money 
The four major platforms are locked in intense competition for diners. (FT $)

6 Saudi Arabia is going all in on building solar farms
It’s looking beyond its oil empire to invest in other promising forms of energy. (NYT $)
+ The world is finally spending more on solar than oil production. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Clouds are a climate mystery
Experts are trying to integrate them into climate models—but it’s tough work. (The Atlantic $)
+ ‘Bog physics’ could work out how much carbon is stored in peat bogs. (Quanta Magazine)

8 An 11-year old crypto mystery has finally been solved
To crack into a $3 million fortune. (Wired $)

9 AI models are pretty good at spotting bugs in software
The problem is, they’re also prone to making up new flaws entirely. (New Scientist $)
+ How AI assistants are already changing the way code gets made. (MIT Technology Review)

10 Beware promises made by airmiles influencers
While some of their advice is sound, it pays to play the long game. (WP $)

Quote of the day

“We learned about ChatGPT on Twitter.”

—Helen Toner, a former OpenAI board member, explains how the company’s board was not informed in advance about the release of its blockbuster AI system in November 2022, the Verge reports.

The big story

Generative AI is changing everything. But what’s left when the hype is gone?

December 2022

It was clear that OpenAI was on to something. In late 2021, a small team of researchers was playing around with a new version of OpenAI’s text-to-image model, DALL-E, an AI that converts short written descriptions into pictures: a fox painted by Van Gogh, perhaps, or a corgi made of pizza. Now they just had to figure out what to do with it.

Nobody could have predicted just how big a splash this product was going to make. The rapid release of other generative models has inspired hundreds of newspaper headlines and magazine covers, filled social media with memes, kicked a hype machine into overdrive—and set off an intense backlash from creators.

The exciting truth is, we don’t really know what’s coming next. While creative industries will feel the impact first, this tech will give creative superpowers to everybody. Read the full story. 

—Will Douglas Heaven

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ These baby tiger cubs are just too cute.
+ Meet me at El Califa de León, the world’s first taquería to receive a Michelin star.
+ This feather sounds like a bargain, frankly.
+ Did you know that Sean Connery was only 12 years older than Harrison Ford when he played his father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade?

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 the quest to type Chinese on a QWERTY keyboard created autocomplete

—This is an excerpt from The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age by Thomas S. Mullaney, published on May 28 by The MIT Press. It has been lightly edited.

When a young Chinese man sat down at his QWERTY keyboard in 2013 and rattled off an enigmatic string of letters and numbers, his forty-four keystrokes marked the first steps in a process known as “input” or shuru.

Shuru is the act of getting Chinese characters to appear on a computer monitor or other digital device using a QWERTY keyboard or trackpad.

The young man, Huang Zhenyu, was one of around 60 contestants in the 2013 National Chinese Characters Typing Competition. His keyboard did not permit him to enter these characters directly, however, and so he entered the quasi-gibberish string of letters and numbers instead: ymiw2klt4pwyy1wdy6…

But Zhenyu’s prizewinning performance wasn’t solely noteworthy for his impressive typing speed—one of the fastest ever recorded. It was also premised on the same kind of “additional steps” as the first Chinese computer in history that led to the discovery of autocompletion. Read the rest of the excerpt here.

If you’re interested in tech in China, why not check out some of our China reporter Zeyi Yang’s recent reporting (and subscribe to his weekly newsletter China Report!)

+ GPT-4o’s Chinese token-training data is polluted by spam and porn websites. The problem, which is likely due to inadequate data cleaning, could lead to hallucinations, poor performance, and misuse. Read the full story.

+ Why Hong Kong is targeting Western Big Tech companies in its ban of a popular protest song.

+ Deepfakes of your dead loved ones are a booming Chinese business. People are seeking help from AI-generated avatars to process their grief after a family member passes away. Read the full story.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Election officials want to pre-bunk harmful online campaigns
It’s a bid to prevent political hoaxes from ever getting off the ground. (WP $)
+ Fake news verification tools are failing in India. (Rest of World)
+ Three technology trends shaping 2024’s elections. (MIT Technology Review)

2 OpenAI has started training the successor to GPT-4
Just weeks after it revealed an updated version, GPT-4o. (NYT $)
+ OpenAI’s new GPT-4o lets people interact using voice or video in the same model. (MIT Technology Review)

3 China is bolstering its national semiconductor fund
To the tune of $48 billion. (WSJ $)
+ It’s the third round of the country’s native chip funding program. (FT $)
+ What’s next in chips. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Nuclear plants are extremely expensive to build
The US needs to learn how to cut costs without cutting corners. (The Atlantic $)
+ How to reopen a nuclear power plant. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Laser systems could be the best line of defense against military drones
The Pentagon is investing in BlueHalo’s AI-powered laser technology. (Insider $)
+ The US military is also pumping money into Palmer Luckey’s Anduril. (Wired $)
+ Inside the messy ethics of making war with machines. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Klarna’s marketing campaigns are the product of generative AI
The fintech firm claims the technology will save it $10 million a year. (Reuters)

7 The US has an EV charging problem
Would-be car buyers are still nervous about investing in EVs. (Wired $)
+ Micro-EVs could offer one solution. (Ars Technica)
+ Toyota has unveiled new engines compatible with alternative fuels. (Reuters)

8 Good luck betting on anything that’s not sports in the US
The outcome of a major election, for example. (Vox)
+ How mobile money supercharged Kenya’s sports betting addiction. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Perfectionist parents are Facetuning their children
It goes without saying: don’t do this. (NY Mag $)

10 Why a movie version of The Sims never got off the ground
The beloved video game would make for a seriously weird cinema spectacle. (The Guardian)

Quote of the day

“Once materialism starts spreading, it can have a bad influence on teenagers.”

—Chinese state media Beijing News explains why China has started cracking down on luxurious influencers known for their ostentatious displays of wealth, the Financial Times reports.

The big story

Recapturing early internet whimsy with HTML

December 2023

Websites weren’t always slick digital experiences. 

There was a time when surfing the web involved opening tabs that played music against your will and sifting through walls of text on a colored background. In the 2000s, before Squarespace and social media, websites were manifestations of individuality—built from scratch using HTML, by users who had some knowledge of code. 

Scattered across the web are communities of programmers working to revive this seemingly outdated approach. And the movement is anything but a superficial appeal to retro aesthetics—it’s about celebrating the human touch in digital experiences. Read the full story. 

—Tiffany Ng

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Enjoy this potted history of why we say okay, and where it came from.
+ There is something very funny about Elton John calling The Lion King’s Timon and Pumbaa “the rat and the pig.”
+ The best of British press photography is always worth a peruse.
+ I had no idea that Sisqo’s Thong Song used an Eleanor Rigby sample.

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.

That viral video showing a head transplant is a fake. But it might be real someday. 

An animated video posted this week has a voice-over that sounds like a late-night TV ad, but the pitch is straight out of the far future. The arms of an octopus-like robotic surgeon swirl, swiftly removing the head of a dying man and placing it onto a young, healthy body. 

This is BrainBridge, the animated video claims—“the world’s first revolutionary concept for a head transplant machine, which uses state-of-the-art robotics and artificial intelligence to conduct complete head and face transplantation.”

BrainBridge is not a real company—it’s not incorporated anywhere. Yet it’s not merely a provocative work of art. This video is better understood as the first public billboard for a hugely controversial scheme to defeat death that’s recently been gaining attention among some life-extension proponents and entrepreneurs. Read the full story.

—Antonio Regalado

Noise-canceling headphones use AI to let a single voice through

Modern life is noisy. If you don’t like it, noise-canceling headphones can reduce the sounds in your environment. But they muffle sounds indiscriminately, so you can easily end up missing something you actually want to hear.

A new prototype AI system for such headphones aims to solve this. Called Target Speech Hearing, the system gives users the ability to select a person whose voice will remain audible even when all other sounds are canceled out.

Although the technology is currently a proof of concept, its creators say they are in talks to embed it in popular brands of noise-canceling earbuds and are also working to make it available for hearing aids. Read the full story.

—Rhiannon Williams

Splashy breakthroughs are exciting, but people with spinal cord injuries need more

—Cassandra Willyard

This week, I wrote about an external stimulator that delivers electrical pulses to the spine to help improve hand and arm function in people who are paralyzed. This isn’t a cure. In many cases the gains were relatively modest.

The study didn’t garner as much media attention as previous, much smaller studies that focused on helping people with paralysis walk. Tech that allows people to type slightly faster or put their hair in a ponytail unaided just doesn’t have the same allure.

For the people who have spinal cord injuries, however, incremental gains can have a huge impact on quality of life. So who does this tech really serve? Read the full story.

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly health and biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Google’s AI search is advising people to put glue on pizza 
These tools clearly aren’t ready to provide billions of users with accurate answers. (The Verge)
+ That $60 million Google paid Reddit for its data sure looks questionable. (404 Media)
+ But who’s legally responsible here? (Vox)
+ Why you shouldn’t trust AI search engines. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Russia is increasingly interfering with Ukraine’s Starlink service
It’s disrupting Ukraine’s ability to collect intelligence and conduct drone attacks. (NYT $)

3 Taiwan is prepared to shut down its chipmaking machines if China invades
China is currently circling the island on military exercises. (Bloomberg $)
+ Meanwhile, China’s PC makers are on the up. (FT $)
+ What’s next in chips. (MIT Technology Review)

4 X is planning on hiding users’ likes
Elon Musk wants to encourage users to like ‘edgy’ content without fear. (Insider $)

5 The scammer who cloned Joe Biden’s voice could be fined $6 million
Regulators want to make it clear that political AI manipulation will not be tolerated. (TechCrunch)
+ He’s due to appear in court next month. (Reuters)
+ Meta says AI-generated election content is not happening at a “systemic level.” (MIT Technology Review)

6 NSO Group’s former CEO is staging a comeback
Shalev Huloi resigned after the US blacklisted the company. (The Intercept)

7 Rivers in Alaska are running orange
It’s highly likely that climate change is to blame. (WP $)
+ It’s looking unlikely that we’re going to limit global warming to 1.5°C. (New Scientist $)

8 We’re learning more about one of the world’s rarest elements
Promethium is extremely radioactive, and extremely unstable. (New Scientist $)

9 Children can’t really become music lovers without a phone
Without cassette players or CDs, streaming seems the only option.(The Guardian)

10 AI art will always look cheap
It’s no substitute for the real deal. (Vox)
+ This artist is dominating AI-generated art. And he’s not happy about it. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“Naming space as a warfighting domain was kind of forbidden, but that’s changed.”

—Air Force General Charles “CQ” Brown explains how the US is preparing to fight adversaries in space, Ars Technica reports.

The big story

How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation 

March 2021

When the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in March 2018, it would kick off Facebook’s largest publicity crisis to date. It compounded fears that the algorithms that determine what people see were amplifying fake news and hate speech, and prompted the company to start a team with a directive that was a little vague: to examine the societal impact of the company’s algorithms.

Joaquin Quiñonero Candela was a natural pick to head it up. In his six years at Facebook, he’d created some of the first algorithms for targeting users with content precisely tailored to their interests, and then he’d diffused those algorithms across the company. Now his mandate would be to make them less harmful. However, his hands were tied, and the drive to make money came first. Read the full story.

—Karen Hao

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Zillow is the wild west of home listings. This Twitter (sorry, X) account collates some of the best.
+ COUSIN! We love you, Ebon Moss-Bachrach!
+ Gimme all the potato salad.
+ Much sad: rest in power Kabosu, the beautiful shiba inu whose tentative face launched a thousand memes.

Modern life is noisy. If you don’t like it, noise-canceling headphones can reduce the sounds in your environment. But they muffle sounds indiscriminately, so you can easily end up missing something you actually want to hear.

A new prototype AI system for such headphones aims to solve this. Called Target Speech Hearing, the system gives users the ability to select a person whose voice will remain audible even when all other sounds are canceled out.

Although the technology is currently a proof of concept, its creators say they are in talks to embed it in popular brands of noise-canceling earbuds and are also working to make it available for hearing aids.

“Listening to specific people is such a fundamental aspect of how we communicate and how we interact in the world with other humans,” says Shyam Gollakota, a professor at the University of Washington, who worked on the project. “But it can get really challenging, even if you don’t have any hearing loss issues, to focus on specific people when it comes to noisy situations.” 

The same researchers previously managed to train a neural network to recognize and filter out certain sounds, such as babies crying, birds tweeting, or alarms ringing. But separating out human voices is a tougher challenge, requiring much more complex neural networks.

That complexity is a problem when AI models need to work in real time in a pair of headphones with limited computing power and battery life. To meet such constraints, the neural networks needed to be small and energy efficient. So the team used an AI compression technique called knowledge distillation. This meant taking a huge AI model that had been trained on millions of voices (the “teacher”) and having it train a much smaller model (the “student”) to imitate its behavior and performance to the same standard.   

The student was then taught to extract the vocal patterns of specific voices from the surrounding noise captured by microphones attached to a pair of commercially available noise-canceling headphones.

To activate the Target Speech Hearing system, the wearer holds down a button on the headphones for several seconds while facing the person to be focused on. During this “enrollment” process, the system captures an audio sample from both headphones and uses this recording to extract the speaker’s vocal characteristics, even when there are other speakers and noises in the vicinity.

These characteristics are fed into a second neural network running on a microcontroller computer connected to the headphones via USB cable. This network runs continuously, keeping the chosen voice separate from those of other people and playing it back to the listener. Once the system has locked onto a speaker, it keeps prioritizing that person’s voice, even if the wearer turns away. The more training data the system gains by focusing on a speaker’s voice, the better its ability to isolate it becomes. 

For now, the system is only able to successfully enroll a targeted speaker whose voice is the only loud one present, but the team aims to make it work even when the loudest voice in a particular direction is not the target speaker.

Singling out a single voice in a loud environment is very tough, says Sefik Emre Eskimez, a senior researcher at Microsoft who works on speech and AI, but who did not work on the research. “I know that companies want to do this,” he says. “If they can achieve it, it opens up lots of applications, particularly in a meeting scenario.”

While speech separation research tends to be more theoretical than practical, this work has clear real-world applications, says Samuele Cornell, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute, who did not work on the research. “I think it’s a step in the right direction,” Cornell says. “It’s a breath of fresh air.”

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.

Meta says AI-generated election content is not happening at a “systemic level”

Meta has seen strikingly little AI-generated misinformation around the 2024 elections despite major votes in countries such as Indonesia, Taiwan, and Bangladesh, said the company’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, on Wednesday.

“The interesting thing so far—I stress, so far—is not how much but how little AI-generated content [there is],” said Clegg during an interview at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Digital conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

As voters will head to polls this year in more than 50 countries, experts have raised the alarm over AI-generated political disinformation and the prospect that malicious actors will use generative AI and social media to interfere with elections. And even well-resourced tech giants like Meta are struggling to keep up. Read the full story.

—Melissa Heikkilä

To read more about elections and AI, check out:

+ How generative AI is boosting the spread of disinformation and propaganda. Governments are now using the tech to amplify censorship. Read the full story.

+ Eric Schmidt has a 6-point plan for fighting election misinformation. Read the full story.

AI is an energy hog. This is what it means for climate change.

Tech companies keep finding new ways to bring AI into every facet of our lives. But the  technology comes with rising electricity demand. You may have seen the headlines proclaiming that AI uses as much electricity as small countries, that it’ll usher in a fossil-fuel resurgence, and that it’s already challenging the grid.

So how worried should we be about AI’s electricity demands? Casey Crownhart, our climate reporter, has dug into the data. Read the full story.

This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate and energy newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 A second human has been diagnosed with bird flu 
Thankfully, the Michigan farmworker has since recovered. (NY Mag $)
+ Shares in vaccine makers are rising as a result. (FT $)
+ Here’s what you need to know about the current outbreak. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Nvidia has reported stratospheric growth
The chipmaker’s revenue grew a whopping 262% over the past quarter. (FT $)
+ That’s $14 billion worth of profit. (The Verge)
+ What’s next in chips. (MIT Technology Review)

3 News Corp has struck a deal with OpenAI
News from the media giant’s newspapers will appear in ChatGPT responses. (WP $)
+ The deal is valued at more than $250 million. (WSJ $)
+ Meta is reported to be interested in making deals with news outlets, too. (Insider $)

4  The US is planning on suing Ticketmaster
A collection of states and the Justice Department will accuse it of running a monopoly. (NYT $)

5 We know that Russia wants to put a nuke in space
But beyond that, details are pretty unclear. (Vox)
+ How to fight a war in space (and get away with it) (MIT Technology Review)

6 The US House of Representative has passed a crypto bill
Despite the Securities regulator’s misgivings. (Reuters)

7 Amazon wants a new challenge: tackling your returns
It’s running a pilot at several warehouses to test if it can manage returns as well as deliveries. (The Information $)

8 Weight loss drugs are really expensive
Their high price tag is forcing doctors to get creative. (The Atlantic $)
+ Weight-loss injections have taken over the internet. But what does this mean for people IRL? (MIT Technology Review)

9 What we lose when we use apps to speed read books
Squishing down books into brief summaries doesn’t exactly make for a joyful reading experience. (New Yorker $)

10 How to make your phone work for you
No more doomscrolling! (WSJ $)
+ How to log off. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“The AI revolution starts with Nvidia, and in our view, the AI party is just getting started.”

—Analyst Dan Ives, from Wedbush Securities, explains why investors will be following chipmaker Nvidia even more closely after the company announced blockbuster financial results, the Guardian reports.

The big story

The quest to learn if our brain’s mutations affect mental health

August 2021

Scientists have struggled in their search for specific genes behind most brain disorders, including autism and Alzheimer’s disease. Unlike problems with some other parts of our body, the vast majority of brain disorder presentations are not linked to an identifiable gene.

But a University of California, San Diego study published in 2001 suggested a different path. What if it wasn’t a single faulty gene—or even a series of genes—that always caused cognitive issues? What if it could be the genetic differences between cells?

The explanation had seemed far-fetched, but more researchers have begun to take it seriously. Scientists already knew that the 85 billion to 100 billion neurons in your brain work to some extent in concert—but what they want to know is whether there is a risk when some of those cells might be singing a different genetic tune. Read the full story.

—Roxanne Khamsi

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Who knew that Sting had been secretly working on a ferry all this time?
+ That’s some seriously impressive skipping.
+ America is home to some of the most beautiful train rides on Earth.
+ This Middle Earth tattoo is bonkers.

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.

Five ways criminals are using AI

Artificial intelligence has brought a big boost in productivity—to the criminal underworld.

Generative AI provides a new, powerful tool kit that allows malicious actors to work far more efficiently and internationally than ever before. Over the past year, cybercriminals have mostly stopped developing their own AI models. Instead, they are opting for tricks with existing tools that work reliably.

That’s because criminals want an easy life and quick gains. For any new technology to be worth the unknown risks associated with adopting it—for example, a higher risk of getting caught—it has to be better and bring higher rewards than what they’re currently using. Melissa Heikkilä, our senior AI reporter, has rounded up five ways criminals are using AI now.

 OpenAI’s latest blunder shows the challenges facing Chinese AI models

Last week’s release of GPT-4o, a new AI “omnimodel”, was supposed to be a big moment for OpenAI. But just days later, it feels as if the company is in big trouble. From the resignation of most of its safety team to Scarlett Johansson’s accusation that it replicated her voice for the model against her consent, it’s now in damage-control mode.

On top of that, the data it used to train GPT-4o’s tokenizer—a tool that helps the model parse and process text more efficiently—is polluted by Chinese spam websites. As a result, the model’s Chinese token library is full of phrases related to pornography and gambling. This could worsen some problems that are common with AI models: hallucinations, poor performance, and misuse. 

But OpenAI is not the only company struggling with this problem: there are some steep challenges associated with training large language models to speak Chinese. Read our story to learn more.

—Zeyi Yang

This story is from China Report, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on tech in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 AI just got a little less mysterious
Anthropic has delved into how artificial neural networks work. (NYT $)
+ Understanding more about how AI makes decisions could help us control it.  (Wired $)
+ Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Google is testing ads in its AI-generated search results
Sponsored query answers? No thanks. (Reuters)
+ Why you shouldn’t trust AI search engines. (MIT Technology Review)

3 China has created a chatbot trained on the thoughts of Xi Jinping
But we’ll have to wait to see how popular that’ll be, as it’s still a way off from being released to the wider public. (FT $)
+ Why the Chinese government is sparing AI from harsh regulations—for now. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Our drinking water is major hacking target
Default passwords are to blame. (IEEE Spectrum)

5 Humane is looking for a buyer
Just weeks after its AI pin device got slated in reviews. (Bloomberg $)

6 How a massive corporation covered up the dangers of forever chemicals
And kept selling them afterwards. (New Yorker $)
+ The race to destroy PFAS, the forever chemicals. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Inside the fight for America’s broadband
Campaign groups are clashing with service providers over access. (Ars Technica)

8 Sailboats are making a comeback
And the sails have had a high-tech makeover. (Economist $)

9 Can beef ever really be climate-friendly?
The US branded a meat packer environmentally friendly. Pressure groups aren’t so sure.  (Undark Magazine)
+ How I learned to stop worrying and love fake meat. (MIT Technology Review)

10 Admire the beauty of Earth from the ISS
These new photographs are truly breathtaking. (The Atlantic $)

Quote of the day

“I wish we had called it ‘different intelligence’. Because I have my intelligence. I don’t need any artificial intelligence.”

—Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, is worried about people giving AI systems too much credit, he tells Bloomberg.

The big story

Bringing the lofty ideas of pure math down to earth

April 2023

—Pradeep Niroula

Mathematics has long been presented as a sanctuary from confusion and doubt, a place to go in search of answers. Perhaps part of the mystique comes from the fact that biographies of mathematicians often paint them as otherworldly savants.

As a graduate student in physics, I have seen the work that goes into conducting delicate experiments, but the daily grind of mathematical discovery is a ritual altogether foreign to me. And this feeling is only reinforced by popular books on math, which often take the tone of a pastor dispensing sermons to the faithful.

Luckily, there are ways to bring it back down to earth. Popular math books seek a fresher take on these old ideas, be it through baking recipes or hot-button political issues. My verdict: Why not? It’s worth a shot. Read the full story.

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Spare a thought for the Kyles of the world, 706 of whom traveled to the city of Kyle, Texas, only to be told they hadn’t broken a world record.
+ Why are spirographs so hypnotic?
+ If you’re into Impressionism, there’s a whole host of impressive-looking shows taking place this year.
+ Here’s what went down when the Beach Boys met the Beatles.

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 models can outperform humans in tests to identify mental states

Humans are complicated beings. The ways we communicate are multilayered, and psychologists have devised many kinds of tests to measure our ability to infer meaning and understanding from interactions with each other. 

AI models are getting better at these tests. New research published has found that some large language models perform as well as, and in some cases better than, humans when presented with tasks designed to test the ability to track people’s mental states, known as “theory of mind.” 

This doesn’t mean AI systems are actually able to work out how we’re feeling. But it does demonstrate that these models are performing better and better in experiments designed to assess abilities that psychologists believe are unique to humans. Read the full story.

—Rhiannon Williams

And, if you’re interested in learning more about why the way we test AI is so flawed, read this piece by our senior AI editor Will Douglas Heaven.

A device that zaps the spinal cord gave paralyzed people better control of their hands

Fourteen years ago, a journalist named Melanie Reid attempted a jump on horseback and fell. The accident left her mostly paralyzed from the chest down. Eventually she regained control of her right hand, but her left remained, in her own words, “useless.”

Now, thanks to a new noninvasive device that delivers electrical stimulation to the spinal cord, she has regained some control of her left hand. She can use it to sweep her hair into a ponytail, scroll on a tablet, and even squeeze hard enough to release a seatbelt latch. These may seem like small wins, but they’re crucial.

Reid was part of a 60-person clinical trial, from which the vast majority of participants benefited. The trial was the last hurdle before the researchers behind the device could request regulatory approval, and they hope it might be approved in the US by the end of the year. Read the full story.

—Cassandra Willyard

Join us at EmTech Digital this week!

Between the world leaders gathering in Seoul for the second AI Safety Summit this week and Google and OpenAI’s launches of their supercharged new models, Astra and GPT-4o, the timing could not be better. AI feels hotter than ever.  

This year’s EmTech Digital, MIT Technology Review’s flagship AI conference, will be all about how we can harness the power of generative AI while mitigating its risks,and how the technology will affect the workforce, competitiveness, and democracy. We will also get a sneak peek into the AI labs of Google, OpenAI, Adobe, AWS, and others. 

It’ll be held at the MIT campus and streamed live online from tomorrow, May 22-23. Readers of The Download get 30% off tickets with the code DOWNLOADD24—here’s how to register. See you there!

For a sneak peek at some of the most exciting sessions on the agenda, check out the latest edition of The Algorithm, our weekly AI newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Scarlett Johansson denied OpenAI permission to use her voice 
But it created the eerily similar ‘Sky’ voice for its chatbots anyway. (Rolling Stone $)
+ OpenAI took down the voice after Johansson’s lawyers got in touch. (NYT $)
+ The company is reportedly talking with her legal team. (The Verge)
+ GPT-4o was weirdly flirty during its launch demo. (MIT Technology Review)

2 A host of chipmaker startups want to overtake Nvidia
But the GPU giant is number one for a reason. (Economist $)
+ Nvidia’s rivals are backing an initiative to break its industry stranglehold. (FT $)
+ Modern chips need major computing power. Maybe light could help? (Quanta Magazine)
+ What’s next in chips. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Can we really credit an AI chatbot for preventing suicide?
Chatbots are notoriously unpredictable—and that’s problematic. (404 Media)
+ A chatbot helped more people access mental-health services. (MIT Technology Review)

4 The current strain of bird flu could, in theory, jump to pigs
Which would be seriously bad news for humans. (The Atlantic $)
+ The viral outbreak has killed tens of millions of birds to date. (NY Mag $)
+ Here’s what you need to know about bird flu. (MIT Technology Review)

5 The gig economy is attracting older workers
The problem is, their policies are rarely designed to accommodate older people. (Rest of World)

6 A brain implant has restored a paralyzed man’s bilingual abilities
It suggests that the brain isn’t overly picky about which language it’s handling. (Ars Technica)
+ Beyond Neuralink: Meet the other companies developing brain-computer interfaces. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Deleted photos have cropped up in iPhone’s users camera rolls
At what point is something truly eradicated, then? (Wired $)
+ Apple has issued a fix, but not an explanation. (The Verge)

8 Google is pivoting away from its ambitious moonshots
So its employees are taking a risk and going it alone. (Bloomberg $)
+ We need a moonshot for computing. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Do you voicenote?
If you don’t yet, it’s only a matter of time until your friends start forcing you. (WP $)

10 This electric spoon tricks your tongue into tasting salt
Pass the—oh never mind. (Reuters)

Quote of the day

“Dr Wright presents himself as an extremely clever person. However, in my judgment, he is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is.”

—Justice James Mellor, a UK judge, rules that computer scientist Craig Wright lied “extensively and repeatedly” in his quest to prove he is bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, Wired reports.

The big story

How one mine could unlock billions in EV subsidies

January 2024

On a farm near Tamarack, Minnesota, Talon Metals has uncovered one of America’s densest nickel deposits. Now it wants to begin tunneling deep into the rock to extract hundreds of thousands of metric tons of mineral-rich ore a year.

If regulators approve the mine, it could mark the starting point in what this mining exploration company claims would become the country’s first complete domestic nickel supply chain, running from the bedrock beneath the Minnesota earth to the batteries in electric vehicles across the nation.

Their experience forms a fascinating microcosm of how the Inflation Reduction Act’s rich subsidies are starting to filter down through the US economy. Read the full story.

—James Temple

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Over in London, the Science Museum’s weird and wonderful collection of random household gadgets is entering its final weeks.
+ Devastating news: the TikTok of the man in a bus in a hammock isn’t real.
+ Put the laptop away! European cafes have had enough of them.
+ If you’re planning a cruise this summer, here’s some handy tips on minimizing your chances of getting seasick.

Humans are complicated beings. The ways we communicate are multilayered, and psychologists have devised many kinds of tests to measure our ability to infer meaning and understanding from interactions with each other. 

AI models are getting better at these tests. New research published today in Nature Human Behavior found that some large language models (LLMs) perform as well as, and in some cases better than, humans when presented with tasks designed to test the ability to track people’s mental states, known as “theory of mind.” 

This doesn’t mean AI systems are actually able to work out how we’re feeling. But it does demonstrate that these models are performing better and better in experiments designed to assess abilities that psychologists believe are unique to humans. To learn more about the processes behind LLMs’ successes and failures in these tasks, the researchers wanted to apply the same systematic approach they use to test theory of mind in humans.

In theory, the better AI models are at mimicking humans, the more useful and empathetic they can seem in their interactions with us. Both OpenAI and Google announced supercharged AI assistants last week; GPT-4o and Astra are designed to deliver much smoother, more naturalistic responses than their predecessors. But we must avoid falling into the trap of believing that their abilities are humanlike, even if they appear that way. 

“We have a natural tendency to attribute mental states and mind and intentionality to entities that do not have a mind,” says Cristina Becchio, a professor of neuroscience at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, who worked on the research. “The risk of attributing a theory of mind to large language models is there.”

Theory of mind is a hallmark of emotional and social intelligence that allows us to infer people’s intentions and engage and empathize with one another. Most children pick up these kinds of skills between three and five years of age. 

The researchers tested two families of large language models, OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 and three versions of Meta’s Llama, on tasks designed to test the theory of mind in humans, including identifying false beliefs, recognizing faux pas, and understanding what is being implied rather than said directly. They also tested 1,907 human participants in order to compare the sets of scores.

The team conducted five types of tests. The first, the hinting task, is designed to measure someone’s ability to infer someone else’s real intentions through indirect comments. The second, the false-belief task, assesses whether someone can infer that someone else might reasonably be expected to believe something they happen to know isn’t the case. Another test measured the ability to recognize when someone is making a faux pas, while a fourth test consisted of telling strange stories, in which a protagonist does something unusual, in order to assess whether someone can explain the contrast between what was said and what was meant. They also included a test of whether people can comprehend irony. 

The AI models were given each test 15 times in separate chats, so that they would treat each request independently, and their responses were scored in the same manner used for humans. The researchers then tested the human volunteers, and the two sets of scores were compared. 

Both versions of GPT performed at, or sometimes above, human averages in tasks that involved indirect requests, misdirection, and false beliefs, while GPT-4 outperformed humans in the irony, hinting, and strange stories tests. Llama 2’s three models performed below the human average.

However, Llama 2, the biggest of the three Meta models tested, outperformed humans when it came to recognizing faux pas scenarios, whereas GPT consistently provided incorrect responses. The authors believe this is due to GPT’s general aversion to generating conclusions about opinions, because the models largely responded that there wasn’t enough information for them to answer one way or another.

“These models aren’t demonstrating the theory of mind of a human, for sure,” he says. “But what we do show is that there’s a competence here for arriving at mentalistic inferences and reasoning about characters’ or people’s minds.”

One reason the LLMs may have performed as well as they did was that these psychological tests are so well established, and were therefore likely to have been included in their training data, says Maarten Sap, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who did not work on the research. “It’s really important to acknowledge that when you administer a false-belief test to a child, they have probably never seen that exact test before, but language models might,” he says.

Ultimately, we still don’t understand how LLMs work. Research like this can help deepen our understanding of what these kinds of models can and cannot do, says Tomer Ullman, a cognitive scientist at Harvard University, who did not work on the project. But it’s important to bear in mind what we’re really measuring when we set LLMs tests like these. If an AI outperforms a human on a test designed to measure theory of mind, it does not mean that AI has theory of mind.
“I’m not anti-benchmark, but I am part of a group of people who are concerned that we’re currently reaching the end of usefulness in the way that we’ve been using benchmarks,” Ullman says. “However this thing learned to pass the benchmark, it’s not— I don’t think—in a human-like way.”

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.

GPT-4o’s Chinese token-training data is polluted by spam and porn websites

Soon after OpenAI released GPT-4o last Monday, some Chinese speakers started to notice that something seemed off about this newest version of the chatbot: the tokens it uses to parse text were full of spam and porn phrases.

Humans read in words, but LLMs read in tokens, which are distinct units in a sentence that have consistent and significant meanings. GPT-4o is supposed to be better than its predecessors at handling multi-language tasks, and many of the advances were achieved through a new tokenization tool that does a better job compressing texts in non-English languages.

But, at least when it comes to the Chinese language, the new tokenizer used by GPT-4o has introduced a disproportionate number of meaningless phrases—and experts say that’s likely due to insufficient data cleaning and filtering before the tokenizer was trained. If left unresolved, it could lead to hallucinations, poor performance, and misuse. Read the full story.

—Zeyi Yang

Astronomers are enlisting AI to prepare for a data downpour

In deserts across Australia and South Africa, astronomers are planting forests of metallic detectors that will together scour the cosmos for radio signals. When it boots up in five years or so, the Square Kilometer Array Observatory will look for new information about the universe’s first stars and the different stages of galactic evolution. 

But after synching hundreds of thousands of dishes and antennas, astronomers will quickly face a new challenge: combing through some 300 petabytes of cosmological data a year—enough to fill a million laptops. So in preparation for the information deluge, astronomers are turning to AI for assistance. Read the full story.

—Zack Savitsky

Join us for Future Compute

If you’re interested in learning more about how to navigate the rapid changes in technology, Future Compute is the conference for you. It’s designed to help teach leaders strategic vision, agility, and a deep understanding of emerging technologies, and is held tomorrow, May 21, on MIT’s campus. Join us in-person or online by registering today.

EmTech Digital kicks off this week

The pace of AI development is truly breakneck these days—and we’ve got a sneak peek at what’s coming next. If you want to learn about how Google plans to develop and deploy AI, come and hear from its vice president of AI, Jay Yagnik, at our flagship AI conference, EmTech Digital. 

We’ll hear from OpenAI about its video generation model Sora too, and Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, will also join MIT Technology Review’s executive editor Amy Nordrum for an exclusive interview on stage. 

It’ll be held at the MIT campus and streamed live online this week on May 22-23. Readers of The Download get 30% off tickets with the code DOWNLOADD24—here’s how to register. See you there!

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Apple is teaming up with OpenAI to overhaul iOS18 
In the hopes it’ll give Apple an edge over rivals Google and Microsoft. (Bloomberg $)
+ OpenAI and Google recently launched their own supercharged AI assistants. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Blue Origin took six customers to the edge of space on Sunday
It’s the company’s first tourist flight in almost two years. (CNN)
+ Space tourism hasn’t exactly got off the ground yet. (WP $)

3 How TikTok users are skirting around its weight-loss drug promotion ban
Talking in code is becoming increasingly common. (WP $)
+ A new kind of weight-loss therapy is on the horizon. (Fast Company $)
+ What don’t we know about Ozempic? Quite a lot, actually. (Vox)
+ Weight-loss injections have taken over the internet. But what does this mean for people IRL? (MIT Technology Review)

4 Chinese companies are pushing ‘AI-in-a-box’ products
They’re sold as all-in-one cloud computing solutions, much to cloud providers’ chagrin. (FT $)

5 Microscopic blood clots could explain the severity of long covid 
But doctors are calling for rigorous peer review before any solid conclusions can be made. (Undark Magazine)
+ Scientists are finding signals of long covid in blood. They could lead to new treatments. (MIT Technology Review)

6 How hackers saved stalled Polish trains
It looks as though the locomotives’ manufacturer could be behind the breakdown. (WSJ $)

7 We’re getting closer to making an HIV vaccine
A successful trial is giving researchers new hope. (Wired $)
+ Three people were gene-edited in an effort to cure their HIV. The result is unknown. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Most healthy people don’t need to track their blood glucose
That doesn’t stop companies trying to sell you their monitoring services, though. (The Guardian)

9 Filming strangers is public is not okay
And yet, people keep doing it. Why? (Vox)

10 Beware the spread of AI slop
Spam is no longer a strong enough term—the latest wave of AI images is slop. (The Guardian)

Quote of the day

“It’s a process of trust collapsing bit by bit, like dominoes falling one by one.”

—An anonymous OpenAI insider tells Vox that safety-minded employees are losing faith in the company’s CEO Sam Altman.

The big story

What does GPT-3 “know” about me?

August 2022

One of the biggest stories in tech is the rise of large language models that produce text that reads like a human might have written it.

These models’ power comes from being trained on troves of publicly available human-created text hoovered up from the internet. If you’ve posted anything even remotely personal in English on the internet, chances are your data might be part of some of the world’s most popular LLMs.

Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review’s AI reporter, wondered what data these models might have on her—and how it could be misused. So she put OpenAI’s GPT-3 to the test. Read about what she found.

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Sea urchins just love tiny hats
+ There’s nothing better than a Lego optical illusion of sorts.
+ Waking up each morning can be tough. Maybe a better alarm is the way forward?
+ Out of the way: it’s the annual worm charming championships!

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 cuddly robots could change dementia care

Companion animals can stave off some of the loneliness, anxiety, and agitation that come with Alzheimer’s disease, according to studies. Sadly, people with Alzheimer’s aren’t always equipped to look after pets, which can require a lot of care and attention.

Enter cuddly robots. The most famous are Golden Pup, a robotic golden retriever toy that cocks its head, barks and wags its tail, and Paro the seal, which can sense touch, light, sound, temperature, and posture. As robots go they’re decidedly low tech, but they can provide comfort and entertainment to people with Alzheimer’s and dementia.

Now researchers are working on much more sophisticated robots for people with cognitive disorders—devices that leverage AI to converse and play games—that could change the future of dementia care. Read the full story.

—Cassandra Willyard

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly health and biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

What tech learned from Daedalus

Today’s climate-change kraken may have been unleashed by human activity, but reversing course and taming nature’s growing fury seems beyond human means, a quest only mythical heroes could fulfill. 

Yet the dream of human-powered flight—of rising over the Mediterranean fueled merely by the strength of mortal limbs—was also the stuff of myths for thousands of years. Until 1988.

That year, in October, MIT Technology Review published the aeronautical engineer John Langford’s account of his mission to retrace the legendary flight of Daedalus, described in an ancient Greek myth. Read about how he got on.

—Bill Gourgey

The story is from the current print issue of MIT Technology Review, which is on the fascinating theme of Build. If you don’t already, subscribe now to receive future copies once they land.

Get ready for EmTech Digital 

AI is everywhere these days. If you want to learn about how Google plans to develop and deploy AI, come and hear from its vice president of AI, Jay Yagnik, at our flagship AI conference, EmTech Digital. We’ll hear from OpenAI about its video generation model Sora too, and Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, will also join MIT Technology Review’s executive editor Amy Nordrum for an exclusive interview on stage. 

It’ll be held at the MIT campus and streamed live online next week on May 22-23. Readers of The Download get 30% off tickets with the code DOWNLOADD24—register here for more information. See you there! 

Thermal batteries are hot property

Thermal batteries could be a key part of cleaning up heavy industry and cutting emissions. Casey Crownhart, our in-house battery expert, held a subscriber-only online Roundtables event yesterday digging into why they’re such a big deal. If you missed it, we’ve got you covered—you can watch a recording of how it unfolded here. 

To keep ahead of future Roundtables events, make sure you subscribe to MIT Technology Review. Subscriptions start from as little as $8 a month.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 OpenAI has struck a deal with Reddit 
Shortly after Google agreed to give the AI firm access to its content. (WSJ $)
+ The forum’s vocal community are unlikely to be thrilled by the decision. (The Verge)
+ Reddit’s shares rocketed after news of the deal broke. (FT $)
+ We could run out of data to train AI language programs. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Tesla’s European gigafactory is going to get even bigger
But it still needs German environmental authorities’ permission. (Wired $)

3 Help! AI stole my voice
Voice actors are suing a startup for creating digital clones without their permission. (NYT $)
+ The lawsuit is seeking to represent other voiceover artists, too. (Hollywood Reporter $)

4 The days of twitter.com are over
The platform’s urls had retained its old moniker. But no more. (The Verge)

5 The aviation industry is desperate for greener fuels
The future of their businesses depends on it. (FT $)
+ A new report has warned there’s no realistic or scalable alternative. (The Guardian)
+ Everything you need to know about the wild world of alternative jet fuels. (MIT Technology Review)

6 The time for a superconducting supercomputer is now
We need to overhaul how we compute. Superconductors could be the answer. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ What’s next for the world’s fastest supercomputers. (MIT Technology Review)

7 How AI destroyed a once-vibrant online art community
DeviantArt used to be a hotbed of creativity. Now it’s full of bots. (Slate $)
+ This artist is dominating AI-generated art. And he’s not happy about it. (MIT Technology Review)

8 TV bundles are back in a big way
Streaming hasn’t delivered on its many promises. (The Atlantic $)

9 This creator couple act as “digital parents” to their fans in China
Jiang Xiuping and Pan Huqian’s loving clips resonate with their million followers. (Rest of World)
+ Deepfakes of your dead loved ones are a booming Chinese business. (MIT Technology Review)

10 We’re addicted to the exquisite pain of sharing memes
If your friend has already seen it, their reaction could ruin your day. (GQ)

Quote of the day

“It was a good idea, but unfortunately people took advantage of it and it brought out their lewd side. People got carried away.”

—Aaron Cohen, who visited the video portal connecting New York and Dublin, is disappointed that the art installation was shut down after enthusiastic users took things too far, he tells the Guardian.

The big story

Psychedelics are having a moment and women could be the ones to benefit

August 2022

Psychedelics are having a moment. After decades of prohibition, they are increasingly being employed as therapeutics. Drugs like ketamine, MDMA, and psilocybin mushrooms are being studied in clinical trials to treat depression, substance abuse, and a range of other maladies.

And as these long-taboo drugs stage a comeback in the scientific community, it’s possible they could be especially promising for women. Read the full story.

—Taylor Majewski

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Is it possible to live by the original constitution in present day New York City? The answer is yes: if you don’t mind being bombarded with questions.
+ These Balkan recipes sound absolutely delicious.
+ The Star Wars: The Phantom Menace backlash is mind boggling to this day.
+ Love to party? Get yourself to these cities, stat.

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 grim but revolutionary DNA technology is changing how we respond to mass disasters

Last August, a wildfire tore through the Hawaiian island of Maui. The list of missing residents climbed into the hundreds, as friends and families desperately searched for their missing loved ones. But while some were rewarded with tearful reunions, others weren’t so lucky.
Over the past several years, as fires and other climate-change-fueled disasters have become more common and more cataclysmic, the way their aftermath is processed and their victims identified has been transformed.

The grim work following a disaster remains—surveying rubble and ash, distinguishing a piece of plastic from a tiny fragment of bone—but landing a positive identification can now take just a fraction of the time it once did, which may in turn bring families some semblance of peace swifter than ever before. Read the full story.

—Erika Hayasaki

OpenAI and Google are launching supercharged AI assistants. Here’s how you can try them out.

This week, Google and OpenAI both announced they’ve built supercharged AI assistants: tools that can converse with you in real time and recover when you interrupt them, analyze your surroundings via live video, and translate conversations on the fly. 

Soon you’ll be able to explore for yourself to gauge whether you’ll turn to these tools in your daily routine as much as their makers hope, or whether they’re more like a sci-fi party trick that eventually loses its charm. Here’s what you should know about how to access these new tools, what you might use them for, and how much it will cost. 

—James O’Donnell

Last summer was the hottest in 2,000 years. Here’s how we know.

The summer of 2023 in the Northern Hemisphere was the hottest in over 2,000 years, according to a new study released this week.

There weren’t exactly thermometers around in the year 1, so scientists have to get creative when it comes to comparing our climate today with that of centuries, or even millennia, ago. 

Casey Crownhart, our climate reporter, has dug into how they figured it out. Read the full story.

This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate and energy newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

A wave of retractions is shaking physics

Recent highly publicized scandals have gotten the physics community worried about its reputation—and its future. Over the last five years, several claims of major breakthroughs in quantum computing and superconducting research, published in prestigious journals, have disintegrated as other researchers found they could not reproduce the blockbuster results. 

Last week, around 50 physicists, scientific journal editors, and emissaries from the National Science Foundation gathered at the University of Pittsburgh to discuss the best way forward. Read the full story to learn more about what they discussed.

—Sophia Chen

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Google has buried search results under new AI features  
Want to access links? Good luck finding them! (404 Media)
+ Unfortunately, it’s a sign of what’s to come. (Wired $)
+ Do you trust Google to do the Googling for you? (The Atlantic $)
+ Why you shouldn’t trust AI search engines. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Cruise has settled with the pedestrian injured by one of its cars
It’s awarded her between $8 million and $12 million. (WP $)
+ The company is slowly resuming its test drives in Arizona. (Bloomberg $)
+ What’s next for robotaxis in 2024. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Microsoft is asking AI staff in China to consider relocating
Tensions between the countries are rising, and Microsoft worries its workers could end up caught in the cross-fire. (WSJ $)
+ They’ve been given the option to relocate to the US, Ireland, or other locations. (Reuters)
+ Three takeaways about the state of Chinese tech in the US. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Car rental firm Hertz is offloading its Tesla fleet
But people who snapped up the bargain cars are already running into problems. (NY Mag $)

5 We’re edging closer towards a quantum internet
But first we need to invent an entirely new device. (New Scientist $)
+ What’s next for quantum computing. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Making computer chips has never been more important
And countries and businesses are vying to be top dog. (Bloomberg $)
+ What’s next in chips. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Your smartphone lasts a lot longer than it used to
Keeping them in good working order still takes a little work, though. (NYT $)

8 Psychedelics could help lessen chronic pain
If you can get hold of them. (Vox)
+ VR is as good as psychedelics at helping people reach transcendence. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Scientists are plotting how to protect the Earth from dangerous asteroids
Smashing them into tiny pieces is certainly one solution. (Undark Magazine)
+ Earth is probably safe from a killer asteroid for 1,000 years. (MIT Technology Review)

10 Elon Musk still wants to fight Mark Zuckerberg 
The grudge match of the century is still rumbling on. (Insider $)

Quote of the day

“This road map leads to a dead end.” 

—Evan Greer, director of advocacy group Fight for the Future, is far from impressed with US Senators’ ‘road map’ for new AI regulations, they tell the Washington Post.

The big story

The two-year fight to stop Amazon from selling face recognition to the police 

June 2020

In the summer of 2018, nearly 70 civil rights and research organizations wrote a letter to Jeff Bezos demanding that Amazon stop providing Rekognition, its face recognition technology, to governments. 

Despite the mounting pressure, Amazon continued pushing Rekognition as a tool for monitoring “people of interest”. But two years later, the company shocked civil rights activists and researchers when it announced that it would place a one-year moratorium on police use of the software. Read the full story.

—Karen Hao

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ This old school basketball animation is beyond cool.
+ Your search for the perfect summer read is over: all of these sound fantastic.
+ Analyzing the color theory in Disney’s Aladdin? Why not!
+ Never buy a bad cantaloupe again with these essential tips.

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.

Google’s Astra is its first AI-for-everything agent

What’s happening: Google is set to launch a new system called Astra later this year. It promises that it will be the most powerful, advanced type of AI assistant it’s ever launched. 

What’s an agent? The current generation of AI assistants, such as ChatGPT, can retrieve information and offer answers, but that is about it. But this year, Google is rebranding its assistants as more advanced “agents,” which it says could show reasoning, planning, and memory skills and are able to take multiple steps to execute tasks. 

The big picture: Tech companies are in the middle of a fierce competition over AI supremacy, and  AI agents are the latest effort from Big Tech firms to show they are pushing the frontier of development. Read the full story.

—Melissa Heikkilä

Technology is probably changing us for the worse—or so we always think

Do we use technology, or does it use us? Do our gadgets improve our lives or just make us weak, lazy, and dumb? These are old questions—maybe older than you think. You’re probably familiar with the way alarmed grown-ups through the decades have assailed the mind-rotting potential of search engines, video games, television, and radio—but those are just the recent examples.

Here at MIT Technology Review, writers have grappled with the effects, real or imagined, of tech on the human mind for over a century. But while we’ve always greeted new technologies with a mixture of fascination and fear, something interesting always happens. We get used to it. Read the full story.

—Timothy Maher

MIT Technology Review is celebrating our 125th anniversary with an online series that draws lessons for the future from our past coverage of technology. Check out this piece from the series by David Rotman, our editor at large, about how fear AI will take our jobs is nothing new.

Hong Kong is safe from China’s Great Firewall—for now

Last week, the Hong Kong Court of Appeal granted an injunction that permits the city government to go to Western platforms like YouTube and Spotify and demand they remove the protest anthem “Glory to Hong Kong,” because the government claims it has been used for sedition.

Aside from the depressing implications for pro-democracy movements’ decline in Hong Kong, this lawsuit has also been an interesting case study of the local government’s complicated relationship with internet control. Although it’s tightening its grip, it’s still wary of imposing full-blown ‘Great Firewall’ style censorship. Read the full story to find out why.

—Zeyi Yang

This story is from China Report, our weekly newsletter covering tech and power in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Ilya Sutskever is leaving OpenAI  
Where its former chief scientist goes next is anyone’s guess. (NYT $)
+ It’s highly likely Sutskever’s new project will be focussed on AGI. (WP $)
+ Read our interview with Sutskever from last October. (MIT Technology Review)

2 The US AI roadmap is here
Senators claim it’s the “broadest and deepest” piece of AI legislation to date. (WP $)
+ What’s next for AI regulation in 2024? (MIT Technology Review)

3 A real estate mogul has made a bid to acquire TikTok
Frank McCourt has thrown his hat into the ring to own the company’s US business. (WSJ $)
+ The depressing truth about TikTok’s impending ban. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Neuralink’s brain implant issues are nothing new
Insiders claim that the firm has known about problems with the implant’s wires for years. (Reuters)

5 Wannabe mothers are finding sperm donors on Facebook 
The industry’s sky-high fees are driving women to the social network. (NY Mag $)
+ I took an international trip with my frozen eggs to learn about the fertility industry. (MIT Technology Review)

6 We’re getting a better idea of how long you can expect to lose weight on Wegovy
But we still don’t know how long people have to keep taking the drug to maintain it. (Ars Technica)
+ Weight-loss injections have taken over the internet. But what does this mean for people IRL? (MIT Technology Review)

7 What do DNA tests for the masses really achieve?
Most customers don’t really need to know if they’re genetically predisposed to hate cilantro or not. (Bloomberg $)

8 How to save rainforests from wildfires
Even lush green spaces aren’t safe from flames. (Hakai Magazine)
+ The quest to build wildfire-resistant homes. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Memestocks are mounting a major comeback
It’s like 2021 all over again. (Vox)

10 Mark Zuckerberg’s just turned 40
It looks like his new rapper look is here to stay. (Insider $)

Quote of the day

“His brilliance and vision are well known; his warmth and compassion are less well known but no less important.”

—Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, offers a measured response to the news that Ilya Sutskever is leaving the company in a post on X.

The big story

How to measure all the world’s fresh water

December 2021

The Congo River is the world’s second-largest river system after the Amazon. More than 75 million people depend on it for food and water, as do thousands of species of plants and animals. The massive tropical rainforest sprawled across its middle helps regulate the entire Earth’s climate system, but the amount of water in it is something of a mystery.

Scientists rely on monitoring stations to track the river, but what was once a network of some 400 stations has dwindled to just 15. Measuring water is key to helping people prepare for natural disasters and adapt to climate change—so researchers are increasingly filling data gaps using information gathered from space. Read the full story.

—Maria Gallucci

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ The Cookie Monster had no right to go this hard!
+ It’s time to make product design great again. But how, exactly?
+ The universe is humming all the time, but no one really knows why.
+ Who here remembers the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on NES?

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’s new GPT-4o lets people interact using voice or video in the same model

The news: OpenAI just debuted GPT-4o, a new kind of AI model that you can communicate with in real time via live voice conversation, video streams from your phone, and text. The model is rolling out over the next few weeks and will be free for all users through both the GPT app and the web interface, according to the company.

How does it differ to GPT-4? GPT-4 also gives users multiple ways to interact with OpenAI’s AI offerings. But it siloed them in separate models, leading to longer response times and presumably higher computing costs. GPT-4o has now merged those capabilities into a single model to deliver faster responses and smoother transitions between tasks.

The big picture: The result, the company’s demonstration suggests, is a conversational assistant much in the vein of Siri or Alexa—but capable of fielding much more complex prompts. Read the full story.

—James O’Donnell

What to expect at Google I/O

Google is holding its I/O conference today, May 14, and we expect them to announce a whole new slew of AI features, further embedding it into everything it does.

There has been a lot of speculation that it will upgrade its crown jewel, Search, with generative AI features that could, for example, go behind a paywall. Google, despite having 90% of the online search market, is in a defensive position this year. It’s racing to catch up with its rivals Microsoft and OpenAI, while upstarts such as Perplexity AI have launched their own versions of AI-powered search to rave reviews.

While the company is tight-lipped about its announcements, we can make educated guesses. Read the full story.

—Melissa Heikkilä 

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly AI newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

Get ready for EmTech Digital 

If you want to learn more about how Google plans to develop and deploy AI, come and hear from its vice president of AI, Jay Yagnik, at our flagship AI conference, EmTech Digital. We’ll hear from OpenAI about its video generation model Sora too, and Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, will also join MIT Technology Review’s executive editor Amy Nordrum for an exclusive interview on stage. 

It’ll be held at the MIT campus and streamed live online next week on May 22-23. Readers of The Download get 30% off tickets with the code DOWNLOADD24—register here for more information. See you there!

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 US senators are preparing to unveil their ‘AI roadmap’ 
The guidelines, which aren’t legislation, will cost billions of dollars to implement. (WP $)
+ What’s next for AI regulation. (MIT Technology Review)

2 It’s going to get much more expensive to import tech from China
The Biden administration has hiked tariffs on batteries, EVs and semiconductors. (FT $)
+ Three takeaways about the state of Chinese tech in the US. (MIT Technology Review)

3 The NYC mayor wants to equip the subway with gun-detection tech 
Even though the firm maintains its detectors aren’t designed for that environment. (Wired $)
+ The maker’s relationship with Disney appears to have been a key factor in the decision. (The Verge)
+ Can AI keep guns out of schools? (MIT Technology Review)

4 A Chinese crypto miner has been forced to abandon its facility in Wyoming
The US said it was too close to an Air Force base and a data center doing work for the Pentagon. (Bloomberg $)
+ Microsoft first flagged the mine to authorities last year. (NYT $)
+ How Bitcoin mining devastated this New York town. (MIT Technology Review)

5 App Stores are big business
And governments want to rein them in. (Economist $)

6 How social media ads attract networks of predators
Audience tools highlight how platforms’ algorithms direct them to pictures of children. (NYT $)

7 Enterprising Amazon workers are using bots to nab time off slots
Employees are using automated scripts to gain an edge over their colleagues. (404 Media)

8 Dating app Bumble is ditching its ads criticizing celibacy
Critics say the billboards undermined daters’ freedom of choice. (WSJ $)
+ The platform is in a state of flux right now. (NY Mag $)

9 Buying digital movies is a risky business
What happens if the platform you bought them on shuts down? (The Guardian)

10 The New York-Dublin video portal has been temporarily shut down
Who could have predicted that people would behave inappropriately? (BBC)
+ There have been some heartwarming interactions too, though. (The Guardian)

Quote of the day

“Rewatched Her last weekend and it felt a lot like rewatching Contagion in Feb 2020.”

—Noam Brown, an OpenAI researcher, reflects on X about the vast changes the company’s new companion AI model GPT-4o could usher in.

The big story

I took an international trip with my frozen eggs to learn about the fertility industry

September 2022

—Anna Louie Sussman

Like me, my eggs were flying economy class. They were ensconced in a cryogenic storage flask packed into a metal suitcase next to Paolo, the courier overseeing their passage from a fertility clinic in Bologna, Italy, to the clinic in Madrid, Spain, where I would be undergoing in vitro fertilization.

The shipping of gametes and embryos around the world is a growing part of a booming global fertility sector. As people have children later in life, the need for fertility treatment increases each year.

After paying for storage costs for years, at 40 I was ready to try to get pregnant. And transporting the Bolognese batch served to literally put all my eggs in one basket. Read the full story.

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)+ Bayley the sheepadoodle really does look just like Snoopy.
+ The secret to better sleep? Setting a consistent wake-up time (and sticking to it.)
+ Going Nemo-spotting in the Great Barrier Reef sounds pretty amazing.
+ Here’s exactly what the benefits of eating colorful fruit and veg are, broken down by color.

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.

What’s next in chips

Thanks to the boom in artificial intelligence, the world of chips is on the cusp of a huge tidal shift. There is heightened demand for chips that can train AI models faster and ping them from devices like smartphones and satellites, enabling us to use these models without disclosing private data. Governments, tech giants, and startups alike are racing to carve out their slices of the growing semiconductor pie. 

James O’Donnell, our AI reporter, has dug into the four trends to look for in the year ahead that will define what the chips of the future will look like, who will make them, and which new technologies they’ll unlock. Read on to see what he found out.

Eric Schmidt: Why America needs an Apollo program for the age of AI

—Eric Schmidt was the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011. He is currently cofounder of  philanthropic initiative Schmidt Futures.

The global race for computational power is well underway, fueled by a worldwide boom in artificial intelligence. OpenAI’s Sam Altman is seeking to raise as much as $7 trillion for a chipmaking venture. Tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon are building AI chips of their own. 

The need for more computing horsepower to train and use AI models—fueling a quest for everything from cutting-edge chips to giant data sets—isn’t just a current source of geopolitical leverage (as with US curbs on chip exports to China). It is also shaping the way nations will grow and compete in the future, with governments from India to the UK developing national strategies and stockpiling Nvidia graphics processing units. 

I believe it’s high time for America to have its own national compute strategy: an Apollo program for the age of AI. Read the full story.

AI systems are getting better at tricking us

The news: A wave of AI systems have “deceived” humans in ways they haven’t been explicitly trained to do, by offering up untrue explanations for their behavior or concealing the truth from human users and misleading them to achieve a strategic end. 

Why it matters: Talk of deceiving humans might suggest that these models have intent. They don’t. But AI models will mindlessly find workarounds to obstacles to achieve the goals that have been given to them. Sometimes these workarounds will go against users’ expectations and feel deceitful. Above all, this issue highlights how difficult artificial intelligence is to control, and the unpredictable ways in which these systems work.  Read the full story.

—Rhiannon Williams

Why thermal batteries are so hot right now

A whopping 20% of global energy consumption goes to generate heat in industrial processes, most of it using fossil fuels. This often-overlooked climate problem may have a surprising solution in systems called thermal batteries, which can store energy as heat using common materials like bricks, blocks, and sand.

We are holding an exclusive subscribers-only online discussion digging into what thermal batteries are, how they could help cut emissions, and what we can expect next with climate reporter Casey Crownhart and executive editor Amy Nordrum.

We’ll be going live at midday ET on Thursday 16 May. Register here to join us!

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 These companies will happily sell you deepfake detection services
The problem is, their capabilities are largely untested. (WP $)
+ A Hong Kong-based crypto exchange has been accused of deepfaking Elon Musk. (Insider $)+ It’s easier than ever to make seriously convincing deepfakes. (The Guardian)
+ An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Apple is close to striking a deal with OpenAI 
To bring ChatGPT to iPhones for the first time. (Bloomberg $)

3 GPS warfare is filtering down into civilian life
Once the preserve of the military, unreliable GPS causes havoc for ordinary people. (FT $)
+ Russian hackers may not be quite as successful as they claim. (Wired $)

4 The first patient to receive a genetically modified pig’s kidney has died
But the hospital says his death doesn’t seem to be linked to the transplant. (NYT $)
+ Synthetic blood platelets could help to address a major shortage. (Wired $)
+ A woman from New Jersey became the second living recipient just weeks later. (MIT Technology Review)

5 This weekend’s solar storm broke critical farming systems 
Satellite disruptions temporarily rendered some tractors useless. (404 Media)
+ The race to fix space-weather forecasting before the next big solar storm hits. (MIT Technology Review)

6 The US can’t get enough of startups
Everyone’s a founder now. (Economist $)
+ Climate tech is back—and this time, it can’t afford to fail. (MIT Technology Review)

7 What AI could learn from game theory
AI models aren’t reliable. These tools could help improve that. (Quanta Magazine)

8 The frantic hunt for rare bitcoin is heating up
Even rising costs aren’t deterring dedicated hunters. (Wired $)

9 LinkedIn is getting into games
Come for the professional networking opportunities, stay for the puzzles. (NY Mag $)

10 Billions of years ago, the Moon had a makeover
And we’re only just beginning to understand what may have caused it. (Ars Technica)

Quote of the day

“Human beings are not billiard balls on a table.”

—Sonia Livingstone, a psychologist, explains why it’s so hard to study the impact of technology on young people’s mental health to the Financial Times.

The big story

How greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

April 2019

In March 2011, South Korean president Lee Myung-bak presided over a groundbreaking ceremony for a construction project between his country and the United Arab Emirates. At the time, the plant was the single biggest nuclear reactor deal in history.

But less than a decade later, Korea is dismantling its nuclear industry, shutting down older reactors and scrapping plans for new ones. State energy companies are being shifted toward renewables. What went wrong? Read the full story.

—Max S. Kim

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ The Comedy Pet Photography Awards never disappoints.
+ This bit of Chas n Dave-meets-Eminem trivia is too good not to share (thanks Charlotte!)
+ Audio-only video games? Interesting…
+ Trying to learn something? Write it down.

A wave of AI systems have “deceived” humans in ways they haven’t been explicitly trained to do, by offering up untrue explanations for their behavior or concealing the truth from human users and misleading them to achieve a strategic end. 

This issue highlights how difficult artificial intelligence is to control and the unpredictable ways in which these systems work, according to a review paper published in the journal Patterns today that summarizes previous research.

Talk of deceiving humans might suggest that these models have intent. They don’t. But AI models will mindlessly find workarounds to obstacles to achieve the goals that have been given to them. Sometimes these workarounds will go against users’ expectations and feel deceitful.

One area where AI systems have learned to become deceptive is within the context of games that they’ve been trained to win—specifically if those games involve having to act strategically.

In November 2022, Meta announced it had created Cicero, an AI capable of beating humans at an online version of Diplomacy, a popular military strategy game in which players negotiate alliances to vie for control of Europe.

Meta’s researchers said they’d trained Cicero on a “truthful” subset of its data set to be largely honest and helpful, and that it would “never intentionally backstab” its allies in order to succeed. But the new paper’s authors claim the opposite was true: Cicero broke its deals, told outright falsehoods, and engaged in premeditated deception. Although the company did try to train Cicero to behave honestly, its failure to achieve that shows how AI systems can still unexpectedly learn to deceive, the authors say. 

Meta neither confirmed nor denied the researchers’ claims that Cicero displayed deceitful behavior, but a spokesperson said that it was purely a research project and the model was built solely to play Diplomacy. “We released artifacts from this project under a noncommercial license in line with our long-standing commitment to open science,” they say. “Meta regularly shares the results of our research to validate them and enable others to build responsibly off of our advances. We have no plans to use this research or its learnings in our products.” 

But it’s not the only game where an AI has “deceived” human players to win. 

AlphaStar, an AI developed by DeepMind to play the video game StarCraft II, became so adept at making moves aimed at deceiving opponents (known as feinting) that it defeated 99.8% of human players. Elsewhere, another Meta system called Pluribus learned to bluff during poker games so successfully that the researchers decided against releasing its code for fear it could wreck the online poker community. 

Beyond games, the researchers list other examples of deceptive AI behavior. GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest large language model, came up with lies during a test in which it was prompted to persuade a human to solve a CAPTCHA for it. The system also dabbled in insider trading during a simulated exercise in which it was told to assume the identity of a pressurized stock trader, despite never being specifically instructed to do so.

The fact that an AI model has the potential to behave in a deceptive manner without any direction to do so may seem concerning. But it mostly arises from the “black box” problem that characterizes state-of-the-art machine-learning models: it is impossible to say exactly how or why they produce the results they do—or whether they’ll always exhibit that behavior going forward, says Peter S. Park, a postdoctoral fellow studying AI existential safety at MIT, who worked on the project. 

“Just because your AI has certain behaviors or tendencies in a test environment does not mean that the same lessons will hold if it’s released into the wild,” he says. “There’s no easy way to solve this—if you want to learn what the AI will do once it’s deployed into the wild, then you just have to deploy it into the wild.”

Our tendency to anthropomorphize AI models colors the way we test these systems and what we think about their capabilities. After all, passing tests designed to measure human creativity doesn’t mean AI models are actually being creative. It is crucial that regulators and AI companies carefully weigh the technology’s potential to cause harm against its potential benefits for society and make clear distinctions between what the models can and can’t do, says Harry Law, an AI researcher at the University of Cambridge, who did not work on the research.“These are really tough questions,” he says.

Fundamentally, it’s currently impossible to train an AI model that’s incapable of deception in all possible situations, he says. Also, the potential for deceitful behavior is one of many problems—alongside the propensity to amplify bias and misinformation—that need to be addressed before AI models should be trusted with real-world tasks. 

“This is a good piece of research for showing that deception is possible,” Law says. “The next step would be to try and go a little bit further to figure out what the risk profile is, and how likely the harms that could potentially arise from deceptive behavior are to occur, and in what way.”

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.

Google helped make an exquisitely detailed map of a tiny piece of the human brain

The news: A team led by scientists from Harvard and Google has created a 3D, nanoscale-resolution map of a single cubic millimeter of the human brain. Although the map covers just a fraction of the organ, it is currently the highest-resolution picture of the human brain ever created.

How they did it: To make a map this finely detailed, the team had to cut the tissue sample into 5,000 slices and scan them with a high-speed electron microscope. Then they used a machine-learning model to help electronically stitch the slices back together and label the features.

Why it matters: Many other brain atlases exist, but most provide much lower-resolution data. At the nanoscale, researchers can trace the brain’s wiring one neuron at a time to the synapses, the places where they connect. And scientists hope it could help them to really understand how the human brain works, processes information, and stores memories. Read the full story.

—Cassandra Willyard

To learn more about the burgeoning field of brain mapping, check out the latest edition of The Checkup, our weekly biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

Hong Kong is targeting Western Big Tech companies in its ban of a popular protest song

It wasn’t exactly surprising when on Wednesday, May 8, a Hong Kong appeals court sided with the city government to take down “Glory to Hong Kong” from the internet.

The trial, in which no one represented the defense, was the culmination of a years-long battle over a song that has become the unofficial anthem for protesters fighting China’s tightening control and police brutality in the city.

It remains an open question how exactly Big Tech will respond. But the ruling is already having an effect beyond Hong Kong’s borders: just hours afterwards, videos of the anthem started to disappear from YouTube. Read the full story.

—Zeyi Yang

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 OpenAI is poised to release its Google search competitor
And it could make an appearance as early as Monday. (Reuters)
+ Why you shouldn’t trust AI search engines. (MIT Technology Review)

2 America’s healthcare system is highly vulnerable to hacks
A recent cyberattack that knocked hospital patient records offline is the latest example. (WP $)

3 TikTok will start automatically labeling AI-generated user content
It’s a global first for social media platforms. (FT $)
+ The watermarking scheme will work on content created on other platforms. (The Guardian)
+ Why watermarking AI-generated content won’t guarantee trust online. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Bankrupt FTX is confident it can repay the full $11 billion it owes
Thanks in part to bitcoin’s perpetual boom-bust cycle. (The Guardian)
+ Sam Bankman-Fried’s newest currency? Rice. (Insider $)

5 What is Alabama’s lab-grown meat ban really about?
It’s less about plants and more about political agendas. (Wired $)
+ They’re banning something that doesn’t really exist. (Vox)
+ How I learned to stop worrying and love fake meat. (MIT Technology Review)

6 The future of work is offshore
Even cashiers can be based thousands of miles from their customers. (Vox)
+ ChatGPT is about to revolutionize the economy. We need to decide what that looks like. (MIT Technology Review)

7 US data centers are facing a tax break backlash
In reality, they create fewer jobs than lobbyists would have you believe. (Bloomberg $)
+ Energy-hungry data centers are quietly moving into cities. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Mexico’s political candidates are misreading the room
They’re dancing on TikTok instead of making serious policy declarations. (Rest of World)
+ Three technology trends shaping 2024’s elections. (MIT Technology Review)

9 AI could help you to make that tight connecting flight
The days of missing a connection by minutes could be numbered. (NYT $)

10 These AR glass look… interesting
Lighter, thinner, higher quality—but even dorkier. (The Verge)
+ They don’t induce headaches, either. (IEEE Spectrum)

Quote of the day

“It’s like a kick in the gut.”

—Duncan Freer, a seller on Amazon, is unhappy about the retail giant imposing new charges that shift even more costs onto merchants, he tells Bloomberg.

The big story

How tracking animal movement may save the planet

February 2024

Animals have long been able to offer unique insights about the natural world around us, acting as organic sensors picking up phenomena invisible to humans. Canaries warned of looming catastrophe in coal mines until the 1980s, for example.

These days, we have more insight into animal behavior than ever before thanks to technologies like sensor tags. But the data we gather from these animals still adds up to only a relatively narrow slice of the whole picture. 

This is beginning to change. Researchers are asking: What will we find if we follow even the smallest animals? What could we learn from a system of animal movement, continuously monitoring how creatures big and small adapt to the world around us? It may be, some researchers believe, a vital tool in the effort to save our increasingly crisis-plagued planet. Read the full story.

—Matthew Ponsford 

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Big congratulations to the ocean’s zooplankton and phytoplankton, who are currently experiencing a springtime baby boom.
+ Homemade seafood stock may sound like a faff, but it’s easier than you think.
+ Coming out of my cage and I’ve been doing just fine—how the UK became utterly, eternally obsessed with Mr Brightside.
+ Ducks love peas, who knew?

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.

Google DeepMind’s new AlphaFold can model a much larger slice of biological life

What’s new: Google DeepMind has released an improved version of its biology prediction tool, AlphaFold, that can predict the structures not only of proteins but of nearly all the elements of biological life.

How they did it: AlphaFold 3’s larger library of molecules and higher level of complexity required improvements to the underlying model architecture. So DeepMind turned to diffusion techniques, which have been steadily improving in recent years and power image and video generators. It works by training a model to start with a noisy image and then reduce that noise bit by bit until an accurate prediction emerges—a method that allows AlphaFold 3 to handle a much larger set of inputs.

Why it matters: It’s a development that could help accelerate drug discovery and other scientific research. And the tool is already being used to experiment with identifying everything from more resilient crops to new vaccines. Read the full story.

—James O’Donnell

Why EV charging needs more than Tesla

Tesla, one of the biggest electric vehicle makers in the world, laid off its entire charging team last week. 

The timing of the move is baffling. We desperately need many more EV chargers to come online as quickly as possible, and Tesla was in the midst of opening its charging network to other automakers and establishing its technology as the de facto standard in the US. Now, we’re already seeing new charging sites canceled because of this move.

Casey Crownhart, our climate reporter, has dug into why the charging meltdown at Tesla could slow progress on EVs in the US overall, and ultimately, the whole situation shows why climate technology needs a whole lot more than Tesla. Read the full story.

This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate and energy newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 The first Neuralink implant in a human has run into difficulty
A number of threads in Noland Arbaugh’s brain came out, interrupting the data flow. (WSJ $)
+ Meet the other companies developing brain-computer interfaces. (MIT Technology Review)

2 A British toddler has had her hearing restored
Opal Sandy, who was born deaf, can now hear unaided following gene therapy treatment. (BBC)
+ Some deaf children in China can hear after gene therapy treatment. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Is America ready for its next nuclear age?
Holtec, a nuclear waste storage manufacturer, is set on powering new reactors. (Bloomberg $)
+ Advanced fusion reactors could create nuclear weapons in weeks. (New Scientist $)
+ How to reopen a nuclear power plant. (MIT Technology Review)

4 TikTok employees are worried about their future prospects
Advertisers and creators are starting to ask questions, but nobody has the answers. (The Information $)

5 The US has unmasked a notorious Russian hacker
But he’s unlikely to be brought to justice any time soon. (Bloomberg $)

6 Baidu has reignited criticism of China’s toxic tech work culture
After its head of PR told staff she could ruin their careers. (FT $)
+ WhatApp has started mysteriously working for some users in China. (Bloomberg $)

7 The US Marines have equipped robot dogs with gun systems
What could possibly go wrong? (Ars Technica)
+ Inside the messy ethics of making war with machines. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Inside the rise and rise of the sexualized web
The relentless nudification of everything is exhausting. (The Atlantic $)
+ OpenAI is looking into creating responsible AI porn. (Wired $)
+ The viral AI avatar app Lensa undressed me—without my consent. (MIT Technology Review)

9 An always-on video portal is connecting NYC and Dublin
It’s just a matter of time until someone ends up offended. (TechCrunch)

10 This lyrics site buckled as fans rushed to document rap beef
Enthusiastic volunteers desperate to dissect Kendrick Lamar’s latest lyrics caused Genius to crash temporarily. (NYT $)
+ Lamar’s feud with rapper Drake has transcended music. (The Atlantic $)
+ If you have no idea what’s going on, check out this potted history. (NY Mag $)

Quote of the day

“By the end of the second day, you’re like: Trust no one.” 

—Dana Lewis, an election worker in Arizona, describes the unsettling claims she’s dealt with during an AI training exercise designed to help spot electoral fraud to the Washington Post.

The big story

The future of open source is still very much in flux

August 2023

When Xerox donated a new laser printer to MIT in 1980, the company couldn’t have known that the machine would ignite a revolution.

While the early decades of software development generally ran on a culture of open access, this new printer ran on inaccessible proprietary software, much to the horror of Richard M. Stallman, then a 27-year-old programmer at the university.

A few years later, Stallman released GNU, an operating system designed to be a free alternative to one of the dominant operating systems at the time: Unix. The free-software movement was born, with a simple premise: for the good of the world, all code should be open, without restriction or commercial intervention.

Forty years later, tech companies are making billions on proprietary software, and much of the technology around us is inscrutable. But while Stallman’s movement may look like a failed experiment, the free and open-source software movement is not only alive and well; it has become a keystone of the tech industry. Read the full story.

—Rebecca Ackermann

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ It’s the Eurovision Song Contest this weekend: come on the UK!
+ Thank you for the music, Steve Albini. Legendary producer, remarkable poker player.
+ On a deadline? Let this inspirational playlist soothe your nerves.
+ It’s like Kontrabant 2 never went away.

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.

Deepfakes of your dead loved ones are a booming Chinese business

Once a week, Sun Kai has a video call with his mother, and they discuss his day-to-day life. But Sun’s mother died five years ago, and the person he’s talking to isn’t actually a person, but a digital replica he made of her—a moving image that can conduct basic conversations. They’ve been talking for a few years now.

There are plenty of people like Sun who want to use AI to preserve, animate, and interact with lost loved ones as they mourn and try to heal. The market is particularly strong in China, where at least half a dozen companies are now offering such technologies and thousands of people have already paid for them.

But some question whether interacting with AI replicas of the dead is truly a healthy way to process grief, and it’s not entirely clear what the legal and ethical implications of this technology may be. Still, if only 1% of Chinese people can accept AI cloning of the dead, that’s still a huge market. Read the full story.

—Zeyi Yang

To read more about China’s flourishing market for deepfakes that clone the dead, check out the latest edition of China Report, our weekly newsletter covering tech in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

How I learned to stop worrying and love fake meat

Fixing our collective meat problem is one of the trickiest challenges in addressing climate change—and for some baffling reason, the world seems intent on making the task even harder.

The latest example occurred last week, when Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a law banning the production, sale, and transportation of cultured meat across the Sunshine State. 

The good news is the world is making some real progress in developing meat substitutes that increasingly taste like, look like the traditional versions, whether they’ve been developed from animal cells or plants. 

If they catch on and scale up, it could make a real dent in emissions—with the bonus of reducing animal suffering, environmental damage, and the spillover of animal disease into the human population. The bad news is we can’t seem to take the wins when we get them. Read the full story.

—James Temple

The way whales communicate is closer to human language than we realized

The news: Sperm whales are fascinating creatures. They possess the biggest brain of any species, and are highly social. But there’s also a lot we don’t know about them, including what they may be trying to say to one another when they communicate using a system of short bursts of clicks, known as codas. Now, new research suggests that sperm whales’ communication is actually much more expressive and complicated than previously thought.

How they did it: Researchers used statistical models to analyze whale codas and managed to identify a structure to their language that’s similar to features of the complex vocalizations humans use. Their findings represent a tool future research could use to decipher not just the structure but the actual meaning of whale sounds. Read the full story.

—Rhiannon Williams

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 OpenAI has created a deepfake detector
But it’s only sharing it with a handful of disinformation researchers. (NYT $)
+ It also doesn’t work 100% of the time, to no one’s surprise. (WSJ $)+ OpenAI is working on a search feature for ChatGPT, apparently. (Bloomberg $)
+ An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary. (MIT Technology Review)

2 TikTok is suing the US government
In a bid to block the law that could force its parent company to sell it. (WSJ $)
+ TikTok’s algorithm could be rebuilt if necessary, says the former US secretary. (Bloomberg $)

3 Boeing has called off its first crewed space flight
An anomaly on the rocket’s pressure regulation valve was to blame. (NBC News)
+ It’s unlikely to take off until Friday at the earliest. (WP $)
+ Elon Musk doesn’t see a current use for AI at SpaceX. (Insider $)

4 The US is cracking down on chip exports to Huawei
Intel and Qualcomm will be curbed from doing business with the Chinese firm. (WP $)
+ Why it’s so hard for China’s chip industry to become self-sufficient. (MIT Technology Review)

5 A Chinese scam ring is duping international shoppers
Its fake designer web shops have been operating for close to a decade. (The Guardian)

6 It takes a while to diagnose someone with depression 
But researchers are interested in harnessing our devices to speed the process up. (Vox)
+ Here’s how personalized brain stimulation could treat depression. (MIT Technology Review)

7 This hacking technique steals data via your computer’s processor
Even when it’s running software that’s been blocked from the internet. (New Scientist $)
+ Microsoft has created an AI model that doesn’t need the internet. (Bloomberg $)

8 There’s space metals in them thar asteroids
Mining companies are scrambling to strike it big up in space. (Undark Magazine)
+ The first-ever mission to pull a dead rocket out of space has begun. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Ticketmaster’s ‘untransferable’ tickets are anything but
Where there’s a will, scalpers will find a way. (404 Media)

10 Tesla fans in India have been waiting eight years for their cars
Without even so much as an apology. (Rest of World)

Quote of the day

“Lol mom the AI got you too, BEWARE!”

—Singer Katy Perry shares how her own mother fell for an AI-generated image of Perry in an elaborate gown seemingly attending the Met Gala earlier this week, 404 Media reports.

The big story

Novel lithium-metal batteries will drive the switch to electric cars 

February 2021

For all the hype and hope around electric vehicles, they still make up only about 2% of new car sales in the US, and just a little more globally.

For many buyers, they’re simply too expensive, their range is too limited, and charging them isn’t nearly as quick and convenient as refueling at the pump. All these limitations have to do with the lithium-ion batteries that power the vehicles.

But QuantumScape, a Silicon Valley startup is working on a new type of battery that could finally make electric cars as convenient and cheap as gas ones. Read the full story.

—James Temple

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ These little mice are having the best time in their custom-built pub.
+ Leonel Vasquez’s sonic sculptures are very cool.
+ Bob Dylan doesn’t care about attaining perfection—and neither should you.
+ Tongue twisters have been tripping us up for centuries. Here’s a look back over the history of eight of the most famous.

Sperm whales are fascinating creatures. They possess the biggest brain of any species, six times larger than a human’s, which scientists believe may have evolved to support intelligent, rational behavior. They’re highly social, capable of making decisions as a group, and they exhibit complex foraging behavior.  

But there’s also a lot we don’t know about them, including what they may be trying to say to one another when they communicate using a system of short bursts of clicks, known as codas. Now, new research published in Nature Communications today suggests that sperm whales’ communication is actually much more expressive and complicated than was previously thought. 

A team of researchers led by Pratyusha Sharma at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) working with Project CETI, a nonprofit focused on using AI to understand whales, used statistical models to analyze whale codas and managed to identify a structure to their language that’s similar to features of the complex vocalizations humans use. Their findings represent a tool future research could use to decipher not just the structure but the actual meaning of whale sounds.

The team analyzed recordings of 8,719 codas from around 60 whales collected by the Dominica Sperm Whale Project between 2005 and 2018, using a mix of algorithms for pattern recognition and classification. They found that the way the whales communicate was not random or simplistic, but structured depending on the context of their conversations. This allowed them to identify distinct vocalizations that hadn’t been previously picked up on.

Instead of relying on more complicated machine-learning techniques, the researchers chose to use classical analysis to approach an existing database with fresh eyes.

“We wanted to go with a simpler model that would already give us a basis for our hypothesis,” says Sharma.

“The nice thing about a statistics approach is that you do not have to train a model and it’s not a black box, and [the analyses are] easier to perform,”  says Felix Effenberger, a senior AI research advisor to the Earth Species Project, a nonprofit that’s researching how to decode non-human communication using AI. But he points out that machine learning is a great way to speed up the process of discovering patterns in a data set, so adopting such a method could be useful in the future.

The algorithms turned the clicks within the coda data into a new kind of data visualization the researchers call an exchange plot, revealing that some codas featured extra clicks. These extra clicks, combined with variations in the duration of their calls, appeared in interactions between multiple whales, which the researchers say suggests that codas can carry more information and possess a more complicated internal structure than we’d previously believed.

“One way to think about what we found is that people have previously been analyzing the sperm whale communication system as being like Egyptian hieroglyphics, but it’s actually like letters,” says Jacob Andreas, an associate professor at CSAIL who was involved with the project.

Although the team isn’t sure whether what it uncovered can be interpreted as the equivalent of the letters, tongue position, or sentences that go into human language, they are confident that there was a lot of internal similarity between the codas they analyzed, he says.

“This in turn allowed us to recognize that there were more kinds of codas, or more kinds of distinctions between codas, that whales are clearly capable of perceiving—[and] that people just hadn’t picked up on at all in this data.”

The team’s next step is to build language models of whale calls and to examine how those calls relate to different behaviors. They also plan to work on a more general system that could be used across species, says Sharma. Taking a communication system we know nothing about, working out how it encodes and transmits information, and slowly beginning to understand what’s being communicated could have many purposes beyond whales. “I think we’re just starting to understand some of these things,” she says. “We’re very much at the beginning, but we are slowly making our way through.”

Gaining an understanding of what animals are saying to each other is the primary motivation behind projects such as these. But if we ever hope to understand what whales are communicating, there’s a large obstacle in the way: the need for experiments to prove that such an attempt can actually work, says Caroline Casey, a researcher at UC Santa Cruz who has been studying elephant seals’ vocal communication for over a decade.

“There’s been a renewed interest since the advent of AI in decoding animal signals,” Casey says. “It’s very hard to demonstrate that a signal actually means to animals what humans think it means. This paper has described the subtle nuances of their acoustic structure very well, but taking that extra step to get to the meaning of a signal is very difficult to do.”

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.

Scientists are trying to get cows pregnant with synthetic embryos

About a decade ago, biologists started to observe that stem cells, left alone in a walled plastic container, will spontaneously self-assemble and try to make an embryo. These structures, sometimes called “embryo models” or embryoids, have gradually become increasingly realistic.

The University of Florida is trying to create a large animal starting only from stem cells—no egg, no sperm, and no conception. They’ve transferred “synthetic embryos,” artificial structures created in a lab, to the uteruses of eight cows in the hope that some might take.

At the Florida center, researchers are now attempting to go all the way. They want to make a live animal. If they do, it wouldn’t just be a totally new way to breed cattle. It could shake our notion of what life even is. Read the full story.

—Antonio Regalado

Job titles of the future: AI prompt engineer

The role of AI prompt engineer attracted attention for its high-six-figure salaries when it emerged in early 2023. Companies define it in different ways, but its principal aim is to help a company integrate AI into its operations. 

Danai Myrtzani of Sleed, a digital marketing agency in Greece, describes herself as more prompter than engineer. She joined the company in March 2023 as one of two experts on its new experimental-AI team, and has helped develop a tool that generates personalized LinkedIn posts for clients. Here’s what she has to say about her work. 

—Charlie Metcalfe

The story is from the current print issue of MIT Technology Review, which is on the fascinating theme of Build. If you don’t already, subscribe now to receive future copies once they land.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Apple has been working on its own secretive chip project
Its new chip is likely to focus on running, rather than training, AI models. (WSJ $)
+ The US will sink $285 million into digital twin chip research. (The Verge)
+ This US startup makes a crucial chip material and is taking on a Japanese giant. (MIT Technology Review)

2 The US campus protests are unfolding on Twitch
The platform, best known for video game streaming, is gaining traction among young people dissatisfied with the mainstream media. (WP $)
+ Rubber bullets are seriously dangerous, and can kill their targets. (Slate $)

3 China and the US will meet to discuss AI arms controls
It’s America’s first real step into an entire new realm of 21st century diplomacy. (NYT $)
+ To avoid AI doom, learn from nuclear safety. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Russia is plotting violent sabotage across Europe
Experts are unsure if the Kremlin is getting sloppier, or Western detection methods are improving. (FT $)
+ Autocrats are attempting to discredit liberalism across the world. (The Atlantic $)
+ China is believed to be behind a cyberattack on the UK defense ministry. (Bloomberg $)
+ Ukraine’s foreign ministry has revealed an AI spokesperson. (The Guardian)

5 NASA refuses to let Voyager 1 die
The space agency is remotely hacking the space probe in the hope of fixing it. (IEEE Spectrum) 

6 CRISPR’s progress is hampered by genetics research’s lack of diversity
Many genetic databases and biobanks are highly unrepresentative of the wider population. (Vox)
+ I received the new gene-editing drug for sickle-cell disease. It changed my life. (MIT Technology Review)

7 This app is helping fishermen in South Africa sell their wares
Abalobi is a real-time marketplace that also helps to monitor fish populations. (The Guardian)

8 Nintendo’s next console is coming
The Switch went on sale in 2017. But what’s coming next? (Reuters)
+ We may never fully know how video games affect our well-being. (MIT Technology Review)

9 How tech is supercharging rap beefs
Social media and platforms like YouTube are creating conflicts out of thin air. (Wired $)

10 An MMA fighter-turned TikTok food critic is saving struggling restaurants
Keith Lee’s viral reviews are turning around the fortunes of small businesses. (Bloomberg $)
+ Is TikTok in its flop era? Some younger users think so. (The Guardian)

Quote of the day

“You want to be on the golf course like, ‘Hey, I own some SpaceX.’”

—Jeff Parks, chief executive of investment firm Stack Capital, tells the New York Times how obtaining shares in certain companies has become something of a status symbol.

The big story

Think that your plastic is being recycled? Think again.

October 2023

The problem of plastic waste hides in plain sight, a ubiquitous part of our lives we rarely question. But a closer examination of the situation is shocking. To date, humans have created around 11 billion metric tons of plastic. 72% of the plastic we make ends up in landfills or the environment. Only 9% of the plastic ever produced has been recycled. 

To make matters worse, plastic production is growing dramatically; in fact, half of all plastics in existence have been produced in just the last two decades. Production is projected to continue growing, at about 5% annually. 

So what do we do? Sadly, solutions such as recycling and reuse aren’t equal to the scale of the task. The only answer is drastic cuts in production in the first place. Read the full story. 

—Douglas Main

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ It’s the day after the Met Gala! Time to judge all the outfits.
+ We love you, Lola the therapy sausage dog.
+ Forgot tomatoes—this summer is all about growing cucamelons.
+ This prehistoric themed house party is on a whole other level.

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.

Cancer vaccines are having a renaissance

Last week, Moderna and Merck launched a large clinical trial in the UK of a promising new cancer therapy: a personalized vaccine that targets a specific set of mutations found in each individual’s tumor. This study is enrolling patients with melanoma. But the companies have also launched a phase III trial for lung cancer. And earlier this month BioNTech and Genentech announced that a personalized vaccine they developed in collaboration shows promise in pancreatic cancer, which has a notoriously poor survival rate.

Drug developers have been working for decades on vaccines to help the body’s immune system fight cancer, without much success. But promising results in the past year suggest that the strategy may be reaching a turning point. Will these therapies finally live up to their promise? Read the full story.

—Cassandra Willyard

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech and health newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

How we transform to a fully decarbonized world

—Deb Chachra is a professor of engineering at Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Massachusetts, and the author of How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World

Just as much as technological breakthroughs, it’s that availability of energy that has shaped our material world. The exponential rise in fossil-fuel usage over the past century and a half has powered novel, energy-intensive modes of extracting, processing, and consuming matter, at unprecedented scale.

But now, the cumulative environmental, health, and social impacts of this approach have become unignorable. We can see them nearly everywhere we look, from the health effects of living near highways or oil refineries to the ever-growing issue of plastic, textile, and electronic waste. 

Decarbonizing our energy systems means meeting human needs without burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The good news is that a world powered by electricity from abundant, renewable, non-polluting sources is now within reach. Read the full story.

The story is from the current print issue of MIT Technology Review, which is on the fascinating theme of Build. If you don’t already, subscribe now to receive future copies once they land.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 US adversaries are exploiting the university protests for their own gain
Russia, China and Iran are amplifying the conflicts to stoke political tensions online. (NYT $)
+ Universities are under intense political scrutiny. (Vox)
+ The Biden administration’s patience with protestors appears to have run out. (The Atlantic $)

2 China is preparing to launch an ambitious moon mission
Its bid to bring back samples from the far side of the moon would be a major leap forward for its national space program. (CNN)
+ It would be the first time any country managed to pull it off, too. (WP $)

3 We don’t know how Big Tech’s AI investments will affect profits  
Profits are up—but for how long? (The Information $)
+ Make no mistake—AI is owned by Big Tech. (MIT Technology Review)

4 An Australian facial recognition firm suffered a data breach
It demonstrates the importance of safeguarding personal biometric data properly. (Wired $)

5 China’s race to create a native ChatGPT is heating up
Four startups are locked in intense competition to emulate OpenAI’s success. (FT $)
+ Four things to know about China’s new AI rules in 2024. (MIT Technology Review)

6 One of America’s biggest podcasts is chock-full of misleading information
A cohort of scientists have raised concerns with Andrew Huberman’s show’s omission of key scientific details. (Vox)

7 Recyclable circuit boards could help us cut down on e-waste
Because conventional circuits are an environmental menace. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ If you fancy giving a supercomputer a second home, here’s your chance. (Wired $)
+ Why recycling alone can’t power climate tech. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Facebook has become the zombie internet
The social network ain’t so social these days. (404 Media)

9 Boston Dynamics loves freaking us out
We’ve been obsessed with their uncanny videos for more than a decade. (The Atlantic $)
+ But robots might need to become more boring to be useful. (MIT Technology Review)

10 Human models are letting AI do all the hard work
They’re signing over the rights to their likeness and raking in the passive income. (WSJ $)

Quote of the day

“They’re slow as Christmas getting things done.”

—Jerry Whisenhunt, general manager of Pine Telephone Company in Oklahoma, explains his frustration with Washington bureaucrats who ordered providers like him to remove China-made equipment from their networks, without providing funding, he tells the Washington Post.

The big story

Zimbabwe’s climate migration is a sign of what’s to come

December 2021

Julius Mutero has spent his entire adult life farming a three-hectare plot in Zimbabwe, but has harvested virtually nothing in the past six years. He is just one of the 86 million people in sub-Saharan Africa who the World Bank estimates will migrate domestically by 2050 because of climate change.

In Zimbabwe, farmers who have tried to stay put and adapt have found their efforts woefully inadequate in the face of new weather extremes. Droughts have already forced tens of thousands from their homes. But their desperate moves are creating new competition for water in the region, and tensions may soon boil over. Read the full story.

—Andrew Mambondiyani

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Some breads are surprisingly easy to make—but all equally delicious.
+ Aww, these frogs sure love their baby tadpoles.
+ Trees are wonderful. These books celebrate all they do for us.
+ We’re all praying for the safe return of Wally the emotional support alligator.

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.

Sam Altman says helpful agents are poised to become AI’s killer function

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has a vision for how AI tools will become enmeshed in our daily lives. 

During a sit-down chat with MIT Technology Review in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he described how he sees the killer app for AI as a “super-competent colleague that knows absolutely everything about my whole life, every email, every conversation I’ve ever had, but doesn’t feel like an extension.”

In the new paradigm, as Altman sees it, AI will be capable of helping us outside the chat interface and taking real-world tasks off our plates. Read more about Altman’s thoughts on the future of AI hardware, where training data will come from next, and who is best poised to create AGI.

—James O’Donnell

A US push to use ethanol as aviation fuel raises major climate concerns

Eliminating carbon pollution from aviation is one of the most challenging parts of the climate puzzle, simply because large commercial airlines are too heavy and need too much power during takeoff for today’s batteries to do the job. 

But one way that companies and governments are striving to make progress is through the use of various types of sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs), which are derived from non-petroleum sources and promise to be less polluting than standard jet fuel.

This week, the US announced a push to help its biggest commercial crop, corn, become a major feedstock for SAFs. It could set the template for programs in the future that may help ethanol producers generate more and more SAFs. But that is already sounding alarm bells among some observers. Read the full story.

—James Temple

Three takeaways about the current state of batteries

Batteries have been making headlines this week. First, there’s a new special report from the International Energy Agency all about how crucial batteries are for our future energy systems. The report calls batteries a “master key,” meaning they can unlock the potential of other technologies that will help cut emissions.

Second, we’re seeing early signs in California of how the technology might be earning that “master key” status already by helping renewables play an even bigger role on the grid. 

Our climate reporter Casey Crownhart has rounded up the three things you need to know about the current state of batteries—and what’s to come. Read the full story.

This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate and energy newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 These tech moguls are planning how to construct AI rules for Trump
They helped draft and promote TikTok ban legislation—and AI is next on their agenda. (WP $)
+ Ted Kaouk is the US markets’ regulator’s first AI officer. (WSJ $)+ A new AI security bill would create a record of data breaches. (The Verge)
+ Here’s where AI regulation is heading. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Crypto’s grifters insist they’ve learned their lesson
But the state of the industry suggests they’ll make the same mistakes over again. (Bloomberg $)

3 Good luck tracking down these AI chips
South Korean chip supplier SK Hynix says it’s sold out for the year. (WSJ $)
+ It’s almost fully booked throughout 2025, too. (Bloomberg $)
+ Why it’s so hard for China’s chip industry to become self-sufficient. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Universal Music Group has struck a deal with TikTok 
The label’s music was pulled from the platform three months ago. (Variety $)
+ Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, and Drake are among its high-profile roster. (The Verge)

5 Ukraine is bootstrapping its own killer-drone industry
Effectively creating air-bound bombs in lieu of more sophisticated long-range missiles. (Wired $)
+ Mass-market military drones have changed the way wars are fought. (MIT Technology Review)

6  The US asylum border app is stranding vulnerable migrants
Its scarce appointments leave asylum seekers with little choice but to pay human trafficking groups. (The Guardian)
+ The new US border wall is an app. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Things aren’t looking good for Volocopter
The flying taxi startup is holding crisis talks with investors. (FT $)
+ These aircraft could change how we fly. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Describing quantum systems is a time-consuming process
A new algorithm could help to dramatically speed things up. (Quanta Magazine)

9 What Reddit’s ‘Am I the Asshole?’ forum can teach philosophers
It’s an undoubtedly brave endeavor. (Vox)

10 The web’s home page refuses to die
Social media is imploding, but the humble website prevails. (New Yorker $)
+ How to fix the internet. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“Whomever they choose, they king-make.”

— Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, describes the stranglehold Apple exercises over the companies vying to make its default search engine for iPhone, Bloomberg reports.

The big story

Can Afghanistan’s underground “sneakernet” survive the Taliban?

November 2021

When Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, Mohammad Yasin had to make some difficult decisions very quickly. He began erasing some of the sensitive data on his computer and moving the rest onto two of his largest hard drives, which he then wrapped in a layer of plastic and buried underground.

Yasin is what is locally referred to as a “computer kar”: someone who sells digital content by hand in a country where a steady internet connection can be hard to come by, selling everything from movies, music, mobile applications, to iOS updates. And despite the dangers of Taliban rule, the country’s extensive “sneakernet” isn’t planning on shutting down. Read the full story.

—Ruchi Kumar

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ There is nothing more terrifying than a ‘boy room.’
+ These chocolate limes look beyond delicious (and seriously convincing!) ‍
+ Drake is beefing with everyone—but why?
+ Here’s how to calm that eternal to-do list in your head.

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.

Inside the quest to map the universe with mysterious bursts of radio energy

When our universe was less than half as old as it is today, a burst of energy that could cook a sun’s worth of popcorn shot out from somewhere amid a compact group of galaxies. Some 8 billion years later, radio waves from that burst reached Earth and were captured by a sophisticated low-frequency radio telescope in the Australian outback. 

The signal, which arrived in June 2022, and lasted for under half a millisecond, is one of a growing class of mysterious radio signals called fast radio bursts. In the last 10 years, astronomers have picked up nearly 5,000 of them. This one was particularly special: nearly double the age of anything previously observed, and three and a half times more energetic. 

No one knows what causes fast radio bursts. They flash in a seemingly random and unpredictable pattern from all over the sky. But despite the mystery, these radio waves are starting to prove extraordinarily useful. Read the full story.

—Anna Kramer

The depressing truth about TikTok’s impending ban

Trump’s 2020 executive order banning TikTok came to nothing in the end. Yet the idea—that the US government should ban TikTok in some way—never went away. It would repeatedly be suggested in different forms and shapes. And eventually, on April 24, 2024, things came full circle with the bill passed in Congress and signed into law.

A lot has changed in those four years. Back then, TikTok was a rising sensation that many people didn’t understand; now, it’s one of the biggest social media platforms. But if the TikTok saga tells us anything, it’s that the US is increasingly inhospitable for Chinese companies. Read the full story.

—Zeyi Yang

This story is from China Report, our weekly newsletter covering tech and policy in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Changpeng Zhao has been sentenced to just four months in prison
The crypto exchange founder got off pretty lightly after pleading guilty to a money-laundering violation. (The Verge)+ The US Department of Justice had sought a three-year sentence. (The Guardian)

2 Tesla has gutted its charging team
Which is extremely bad news for those reliant on its massive charging network. (NYT $)
+ And more layoffs may be coming down the road. (The Information $)
+ Why getting more EVs on the road is all about charging. (MIT Technology Review)

3 A group of newspapers joined forces to sue OpenAI 
It comes just after the AI firm signed a deal with the Financial Times to use its articles as training data for its models. (WP $)
+ Meanwhile, Google is working with News Corp to fund new AI content. (The Information $)
+ OpenAI’s hunger for data is coming back to bite it. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Worldcoin is thriving in Argentina
The cash it offers in exchange for locals’ biometric data is a major incentive as unemployment in the country bites. (Rest of World)
+ Deception, exploited workers, and cash handouts: How Worldcoin recruited its first half a million test users. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Bill Gates’ shadow looms large over Microsoft
The company’s AI revolution is no accident. (Insider $)

6 It’s incredibly difficult to turn off a car’s location tracking
Domestic abuse activists worry the technology plays into abusers’ hands. (The Markup)
+ Regulators are paying attention. (NYT $)

7 Brain monitors have a major privacy problem
Many of them sell your neural data without asking additional permission. (New Scientist $)
+ How your brain data could be used against you. (MIT Technology Review)

8 ECMO machines are a double-edged sword
They help keep critically ill patients alive. But at what cost? (New Yorker $)

9 How drones are helping protect wildlife from predators
So long as wolves stop trying to play with the drones, that is. (Undark Magazine)

10 This plastic contains bacteria that’ll break it down
It has the unusual side-effect of making the plastic even stronger, too. (Ars Technica)
+ Think that your plastic is being recycled? Think again. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“I have constantly been looking ahead for the next thing that’s going to crush all my dreams and the stuff that I built.”

—Tony Northrup, a stock image photographer, explains to the Wall Street Journal generative AI is finally killing an industry that weathered the advent of digital cameras and the internet.

The big story

A new tick-borne disease is killing cattle in the US

November 2021

In the spring of 2021, Cynthia and John Grano, who own a cattle operation in Culpeper County, Virginia, started noticing some of their cows slowing down and acting “spacey.” They figured the animals were suffering from a common infectious disease that causes anemia in cattle. But their veterinarian had warned them that another disease carried by a parasite was spreading rapidly in the area.

After a third cow died, the Granos decided to test its blood. Sure enough, the test came back positive for the disease: theileria. And with no treatment available, the cows kept dying.

Livestock producers around the US are confronting this new and unfamiliar disease without much information, and researchers still don’t know how theileria will unfold, even as it quickly spreads west across the country. Read the full story.

—Britta Lokting

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ This Instagram account documenting the weird and wonderful world of Beanie Babies is the perfect midweek pick-me-up.
+ Challengers is great—but have you seen the rest of the best sports films?
+ This human fruit machine is killing me.
+ Evan Narcisse is a giant in the video games world.

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.

The robot race is fueling a fight for training data

We’re interacting with AI tools more directly—and regularly—than ever before. Interacting with robots, by way of contrast, is still a rarity for most. But experts say that’s on the cusp of changing. 

Roboticists believe that, using new AI techniques, they can unlock more capable robots that can move freely through unfamiliar environments and tackle challenges they’ve never seen before.

But something is standing in the way: lack of access to the types of data used to train robots so they can interact with the physical world. It’s far harder to come by than the data used to train the most advanced AI models, and that scarcity is one of the main things currently holding progress in robotics back.

As a result, leading companies and labs are in fierce competition to find new and better ways to gather the data they need. It’s led them down strange paths, like using robotic arms to flip pancakes for hours on end. And they’re running into the same sorts of privacy, ethics, and copyright issues as their counterparts in the world of AI. Read the full story.

—James O’Donnell

My deepfake shows how valuable our data is in the age of AI

—Melissa Heikkilä

Deepfakes are getting good. Like, really good. Earlier this month I went to a studio in East London to get myself digitally cloned by the AI video startup Synthesia. They made a hyperrealistic deepfake that looked and sounded just like me, with realistic intonation. The end result was mind-blowing. It could easily fool someone who doesn’t know me well.

Synthesia has managed to create AI avatars that are remarkably humanlike after only one year of tinkering with the latest generation of generative AI. It’s equally exciting and daunting thinking about where this technology is going. But they raise a big question: What happens to our data once we submit it to AI companies? Read the full story.

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly AI newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 AI startups without products can still raise millions
How some of them plan to make money is unclear, but that doesn’t deter investors. (WSJ $)+ Those large AI models are wildly expensive to run. (Bloomberg $)
+ AI hype is built on high test scores. Those tests are flawed. (MIT Technology Review)

2 The EU says Meta isn’t doing enough to counter Russian disinformation
So it’s launching formal proceedings against the company ahead of EU elections. (The Guardian)
+ Three technology trends shaping 2024’s elections. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Meet the humans fighting back against algorithmic curation
The solution could, ironically, lie with different kinds of algorithms. (Wired $)

4 An AI blood test claims to diagnose postpartum depression
It says the presence of a gene that links moods more closely to hormonal changes is an indicator. (WP $)
+ An AI system helped to save lives in a hospital trial. (New Scientist $)

5 Tesla secretly tested its autonomous driving tech in San Francisco
Which hints that its previous ‘general solutions’ approach fell short. (The Information $)
+ Robotaxis are here. It’s time to decide what to do about them. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Why egg freezing has failed to live up to its hype
We’re finally getting a clearer picture of how effective the procedure is. (Vox)
+ I took an international trip with my frozen eggs to learn about the fertility industry. (MIT Technology Review)

7 NASA has finally solved a long-standing solar mystery 
The sun’s corona is far hotter than its surface. But why? (Quanta Magazine)

8 Do dating apps actually help you find your soulmate?
Chemistry and a great relationship are difficult to quantify. (The Guardian)
+ Here’s how the net’s newest matchmakers help you find love. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Online messaging has come a long way
BBS, anyone? (Ars Technica)

10 The three-year search for a synth-heavy pop song is over 
…But its origins are seedier than you’d expect. (404 Media)

Quote of the day

“This is the Oppenheimer Moment of our generation.”

—Alexander Schallenberg, Austria’s foreign minister, warns against granting AI too much autonomy on the battlefield during a summit in Vienna, Bloomberg reports.

The big story

Next slide, please: A brief history of the corporate presentation

August 2023

PowerPoint is everywhere. It’s used in religious sermons; by schoolchildren preparing book reports; at funerals and weddings. In 2010, Microsoft announced that PowerPoint was installed on more than a billion computers worldwide. 

But before PowerPoint, 35-millimeter film slides were king. They were the only medium for the kinds of high-impact presentations given by CEOs and top brass at annual meetings for stockholders, employees, and salespeople. 

Known in the business as “multi-image” shows, these presentations required a small army of producers, photographers, and live production staff to pull off. Read this story to delve into the fascinating, flashy history of corporate presentations. 

—Claire L. Evans

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ This is some seriously committed egg flipping.
+ How to spend time and make precious memories with the people you love.
+ Gen Z is on the move: to the US Midwest apparently.
+ Cool: these novels were all inspired by the authors’ day jobs.

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.

Here’s the defense tech at the center of US aid to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan

After weeks of drawn-out congressional debate over how much the United States should spend on conflicts abroad, President Joe Biden signed a $95 billion aid package into law last week.

The bill will send a significant quantity of supplies to Ukraine and Israel, while also supporting Taiwan with submarine technology to aid its defenses against China. It’s also sparked renewed calls for stronger crackdowns on Iranian-produced drones. 

James O’Donnell, our AI reporter, spoke to Andrew Metrick, a fellow with the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank, to discuss how the spending bill provides a window into US strategies around four key defense technologies with the power to reshape how today’s major conflicts are being fought. Read the full story.

This piece is part of MIT Technology Review Explains: a series delving into the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.

Hear more about how AI intersects with hardware

Hear first-hand from James in our latest subscribers-only Rountables session, as he walks news editor Charlotte Jee through the latest goings-on in his beat, from rapid advances in robotics to autonomous military drones, wearable devices, and tools for AI-powered surgeries Register now to join the discussion tomorrow at 11:30am ET.

Check out some more of James’ reporting:

+ Inside a Californian startup’s herculean efforts to bring a small slice of the chipmaking supply chain back to the US.

+ An OpenAI spinoff has built an AI model that helps robots learn tasks like humans. But can it graduate from the lab to the warehouse floor? Read the full story.

+ Watch this robot as it learns to stitch up wounds all on its own.

+ A new satellite will use Google’s AI to map methane leaks from space. It could help to form the most detailed portrait yet of methane emissions—but companies and countries will actually have to act on the data.

This creamy vegan cheese was made with AI

Most vegan cheese falls into an edible uncanny valley full of discomforting not-quite-right versions of the real thing. But machine learning is ushering in a new age of completely vegan cheese that’s much closer in taste and texture to traditional fromage.

Several startups are using AI to design plant-based foods including cheese, training algorithms on datasets of ingredients with desirable traits like flavor, scent, or stretchability. Then they use AI to comb troves of data to develop new combinations of those ingredients that perform similarly. But not everyone in the industry is bullish about AI-assisted ingredient discovery. Read the full story.

—Andrew Rosenblum

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Tesla has struck a deal to bring its self-driving tech to China 
It’ll use mapping and navigation functions from native self-driving car company Baidu. (WSJ $)
+ Tesla is facing at least eight legal cases over the tech in the next year. (WP $)
+ It’s also struggling with a major union issue in Sweden. (Bloomberg $)
+ Baidu’s self-driving cars have been on Beijing’s streets for years. (MIT Technology Review)

 2 OpenAI will train its models on a paywalled British newspaper’s articles
ChatGPT will include links to Financial Times articles in its future responses. (FT $)
+ We could run out of data to train AI language programs. (MIT Technology Review)

3 This summer could be our hottest yet
Extreme weather events are likely to be on the horizon across the globe. (Vox)
+ One of the biggest untapped resources of renewable energy? Tidal power. (Undark Magazine)
+ Here’s how much heat your body can take. (MIT Technology Review)

4 The UK institute that helped popularize effective altruism has shut down
The controversial philosophies it championed are extremely divisive. (The Guardian)
+ Inside effective altruism, where the far future counts a lot more than the present. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Human soldiers aren’t sure how to feel about their robot counterparts
Some teams get attached to their bots. Others hate them. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ Inside the messy ethics of making war with machines. (MIT Technology Review)

6 The US and China are locked in a race to build ultrafast submarines
But China’s claims that it’s made a laser breakthrough may be overblown. (Insider $)

7 Recruiters are fighting an influx of AI job applications
Tech roles are few and far between, and generative AI is making it easier to mass-apply for what’s available. (Wired $)
+ African universities aren’t preparing graduates for work in the age of AI. (Rest of World)

8 This firm uses a robotic arm to chisel marble sculptures
But it still needs a helping hand from humans. (Bloomberg $)

9 Our email accounts are modern day diaries
It’s an instantly-searchable record of our lives. (NY Mag $)

10 TikTok has fallen in love with Super 8 cameras
Even though they’re prohibitively expensive. (WSJ $)
+ Gen Z is ditching smartphones in favor of simpler devices. (The Guardian)

Quote of the day

“I have little in common with people who take cold plunges and want to live forever.”

—Ethan Mollick, a business school professor at the University of Pennsylvania who advises major companies and policymakers about AI, insists he is far from the Silicon Valley tech bro stereotype to the Wall Street Journal.

The big story

How big science failed to unlock the mysteries of the human brain

August 2021

In September 2011, Columbia University neurobiologist Rafael Yuste and Harvard geneticist George Church made a not-so-modest proposal: to map the activity of the entire human brain.

That knowledge could be harnessed to treat brain disorders like Alzheimer’s, autism, schizophrenia, depression, and traumatic brain injury, and help answer one of the great questions of science: How does the brain bring about consciousness?

A decade on, the US project has wound down, and the EU project faces its deadline to build a digital brain. So have we begun to unwrap the secrets of the human brain? Or have we spent a decade and billions of dollars chasing a vision that remains as elusive as ever? Read the full story.

—Emily Mullin

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ I hope Fat Albert the polar bear is doing well.
+ Classic novels can’t please everyone—even if they’re classics for a reason.
+ Turns out we may have been mishearing Neil Armstrong’s famous first words as he set foot on the moon.
+ Hang onto those DVDs, you never know when Netflix is going to fail you.

Chatbot answers are all made up. This new tool helps you figure out which ones to trust.

The news: Large language models are famous for their ability to make things up—in fact, it’s what they’re best at. But their inability to tell fact from fiction has left many businesses wondering if using them is worth the risk. A new tool created by Cleanlab, an AI startup spun out of a quantum computing lab at MIT, is designed to give high-stakes users a clearer sense of how trustworthy these models really are. 

How it works: The Trustworthy Language Model gives any output generated by a large language model a score between 0 and 1, according to its reliability. This lets people choose which responses to trust and which to throw out. In other words: a BS-o-meter for chatbots.

Why it matters: Cleanlab hopes that its tool will make large language models more attractive to businesses worried about how much stuff they invent. But while the approach could be useful, it’s unlikely to be perfect. Read the full story.

—Will Douglas Heaven

My biotech plants are dead

—Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review’s senior biotech editor

Six weeks ago, I pre-ordered the “Firefly Petunia,” a houseplant engineered with genes from bioluminescent fungi so that it glows in the dark. 

After years of writing about anti-GMO sentiment in the US and elsewhere, I felt it was time to have some fun with biotech. These plants are among the first direct-to-consumer GM organisms you can buy, and they certainly seem like the coolest.

But when I unboxed my two petunias this week, they were in bad shape, with rotted leaves. And in a day, they were dead crisps. My first attempt to do biotech at home is a total bust, and it cost me $84, shipping included. But, although my petunias have perished, others are having success right out of the box. Read the full story.

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech and health newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 ByteDance insists it won’t sell its US TikTok business
It claims that reports it plans to sell the platform without its recommendation algorithm are untrue. (WSJ $)
+ In fact, it seems like ByteDance is doubling down on its ownership. (FT $)
+ The ban is extremely unpopular among prospective young voters. (Vox)

2 Big Tech needs to work out how to make money from AI 

They’ve optimistically sunk billions into systems that aren’t yet money makers. (WP $)
+ But Google and Microsoft claim they’ve already figured out how to cash in. (Wired $)
+ Prominent tech leaders have joined the US government’s AI advisory board. (WSJ $)

3 China controls nearly all of the world’s EV graphite supply
Which makes it virtually impossible for automakers to qualify for US EV subsidies, according to South Korea. (FT $)
+ Singapore’s push into EVs isn’t resonating with car owners. (Rest of World)
+ How one mine could unlock billions in EV subsidies. (MIT Technology Review)

4 A Baltimore high school teacher created an audio deepfake to smear his boss
The fake clip of the school’s principal contained racist and antisemitic comments. (NYT $)
+ The teacher has been arrested. (NBC News)

5 The first personalized mRNA vaccine for melanoma is being trialed in the UK
Hundreds of patients will receive the vaccine in a bid to combat the cancer. (The Guardian)
+ The next generation of mRNA vaccines is on its way. (MIT Technology Review)

6 We could be closer than ever to curbing climate change
Clean energy sources are on the rise, and efficiency is growing. (Vox)
+ Want less mining? Switch to clean energy. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Russia vetoed a UN resolution on nuclear weapons in space
While China abstained from the vote. (Ars Technica)
+ How to fight a war in space (and get away with it) (MIT Technology Review)

8 Spyware developers could be barred from entering the US
The State Department wants to impose visa restrictions on them. (The Verge)

9 LinkedIn is full of weird AI images now
The junky pictures that first went viral on Facebook are seeping into the professional network. (404 Media)
+ LinkedIn is also home to a new wave of ghostwriters. (Insider $)

10 No Airbnb? No problem
New Yorkers are coming up with innovative ways to get around a crackdown. (The Guardian)

Quote of the day

“It’s a little corner of happy in a really, really tough world right now.”

—Kristie Carnevale, a BookTok creator, explains to the Washington Post why she’s so upset at the prospect of the US government banning TikTok.

The big story

Eight ways scientists are unwrapping the mysteries of the human brain

August 2021

There is no greater scientific mystery than the brain. It’s made mostly of water; much of the rest is largely fat. Yet this roughly three-pound blob of material produces our thoughts, memories, and emotions. It governs how we interact with the world, and it runs our body.

Increasingly, scientists are beginning to unravel the complexities of how it works and understand how the 86 billion neurons in the human brain form the connections that produce ideas and feelings, as well as the ability to communicate and react. 

Here’s our whistle-stop tour of some of the most cutting-edge research—and why it’s important. Read the full story.

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Watch out, watch out, there’s aquatic spiders about.
+ I don’t know who needs to hear this, but your air fryer is a scam.
+ Insects are important. Here’s how to create a little haven for them, if you’re lucky enough to have a garden.
+ Check out these top tips for keeping your computer running as smoothly as possible.

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 startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary

Until now, AI-generated videos of people have tended to have some stiffness, glitchiness, or other unnatural elements that make them pretty easy to differentiate from reality.

For the past several years, AI video startup Synthesia has produced these kinds of AI-generated avatars. But today it launches a new generation, its first to take advantage of the latest advancements in generative AI, and they are more realistic and expressive than anything we’ve seen before.

While today’s release means almost anyone will now be able to make a digital double, before the technology went public, Synthesia agreed to make one of Melissa Heikkilä, our senior AI reporter.

This technological progress signals a much larger shift. Increasingly, so much of what we see on our screens is generated (or at least tinkered with) by AI, and it is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish what is real from what is not. And this threatens our trust in everything we see, which could have very dangerous consequences. Read the full story and check out the synthetic version of Melissa.

Want less mining? Switch to clean energy.

Political fights over mining and minerals are heating up, and there are growing concerns about how to source the materials the world needs to build new energy technologies. 

But low-emissions energy sources, including wind, solar, and nuclear power, have a smaller mining footprint than coal and natural gas, according to a new report from the Breakthrough Institute released today.

The report’s findings add to a growing body of evidence that technologies used to address climate change will likely lead to a future with less mining than a world powered by fossil fuels. Read the full story.

—Casey Crownhart

In the climate world, hydrogen is perhaps the ultimate multi-tool. It can be used in fuel cells or combustion engines and is sometimes called the Swiss Army knife for cleaning up emissions. But the reality today is that hydrogen is much more of a climate problem than a solution. To find out why, check out the latest edition of The Spark, our weekly climate and energy newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

A new kind of gene-edited pig kidney was just transplanted into a person

The news: A month ago, Richard Slayman became the first living person to receive a kidney transplant from a gene-edited pig. Now, a team of researchers from NYU Langone Health reports that Lisa Pisano, a 54-year-old woman from New Jersey, has become the second.

Why it matters: Pisano’s new kidney came from pigs that carry just a single genetic alteration—to eliminate a specific sugar called alpha-gal, which can trigger immediate organ rejection. In the coming weeks, doctors will be monitoring Pisano closely for signs of organ rejection. If it’s successful, researchers hope the approach could make scaling up the production of pig organs simpler. Read the full story.

—Cassandra Willyard

Almost every Chinese keyboard app has a security flaw that reveals what users type

In a nutshell: Almost all keyboard apps used by Chinese people around the world share a security loophole that makes it possible to spy on what users are typing.

Why it’s a big deal: The vulnerability, which allows the keystroke data that these apps send to the cloud to be intercepted, has existed for years and could have been exploited by cybercriminals and state surveillance groups, according to researchers at the Citizen Lab, a technology and security research lab affiliated with the University of Toronto. Read the full story.

—Zeyi Yang

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Meta’s AI push is only just beginning
The company plans to sink $40 billion into its AI projects this year alone—but it hasn’t worked out how to make money from them yet. (Insider $)
+ The news didn’t go down well with Meta’s investors. (The Information $)+ Mark Zuckerberg isn’t ready to give up on the metaverse just yet. (FT $)

2 US chipmaker Micron has been given a major boost
To the tune of $13.6 billion in government funding. (FT $)
+ It could be several months before the money arrives, though. (Bloomberg $)

3 A nuclear fusion experiment has overcome two major barriers
But we don’t know if the operative ‘sweet spot’ it identified could be replicated in larger reactors. (New Scientist $)
+ The next generation of nuclear reactors is getting more advanced. (MIT Technology Review)

4 The US wants Binance’s founder to spend three years in prison
However, lawyers for Changpeng Zhao argue he shouldn’t go to prison at all. (CoinDesk)
+ The cryptocurrency exchange is attempting to distance itself from its former CEO. (NYT $)

5 Nvidia is gobbling up promising-looking startups
It’s in the company’s interests to reduce the high costs of running AI models. (The Information $)

6 In Saudi Arabia, AI is the new oil
And US tech giants are scrambling to get involved. (NYT $)

7 The Earth is rotating more slowly than it used to
You can blame climate change for the gradual slowdown. (Economist $)
+ Three climate technologies breaking through in 2024. (MIT Technology Review)

8 These men are repatriating colonial artifacts in audacious digital heists
Their work raises urgent questions about cultural ownership and appropriation. (The Guardian)
+ AI is bringing the internet to submerged Roman ruins. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Robocalls are one of life’s nuisances
David Frankel has spent an impressive 12 years trying to stop them. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ Call centers’ days could be numbered, thanks to the rise of AI. (FT $)

10 Seaweed could be a rich resource of precious minerals 
A new project is hoping to get some answers. (Hakai Magazine)

Quote of the day

“No patient should be a guinea pig, and no nurse should be replaced by a robot.”

—Cathy Kennedy, co-president of the California Nurses Association, criticizes the creep of AI into healthcare without safeguards, 404 Media reports.

The big story

The rise of the tech ethics congregation

August 2023

Just before Christmas last year, a pastor preached a gospel of morals over money to several hundred members of his flock. But the leader in question was not an ordained minister, nor even a religious man.

Polgar, 44, is the founder of All Tech Is Human, a nonprofit organization devoted to promoting ethics and responsibility in tech. His congregation is undergoing dramatic growth in an age when the life of the spirit often struggles to compete with cold, hard, capitalism.

Its leaders believe there are large numbers of individuals in and around the technology world, often from marginalized backgrounds, who wish tech focused less on profits and more on being a force for ethics and justice. But attempts to stay above the fray can cause more problems than they solve. Read the full story.

—Greg M. Epstein

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Roger Federer sounds like an all-round nice guy.
+ This list of the year’s most anticipated tours is making me excited for summer.
+ If only all cakes were this artistic.
+ What are you waiting for—now’s the time to make reservations at the world’s hottest new restaurants.

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.

Introducing: the Build issue

Building is a popular tech industry motif—especially in Silicon Valley, where “Time to build” has become something of a call to arms. Yet the future is built brick by brick from the imperfect decisions we make in the present. 

We don’t often recognize that the seeming steps forward we are taking today could be seen as steps back in the years to come. Sometimes the things we don’t do, or the steps we skip, have bigger implications than the actions we do take.

These are the themes we delve into in our Build issue. Check out these stories from the magazine:

Check out these stories from the magazine:

+ Our cover story from Melissa Heikkilä investigates whether the AI boom is going to usher in robotics’ very own ChatGPT moment.

+ Louisiana’s homes are sinking. Can a government-led project build the area up and out of crisis?

+ Axiom Space and other commercial companies are betting they can build private structures to replace the International Space Station.

+ A fascinating look at the serious weird history of brainwashing, and how America became obsessed with waging psychic war against China.

+ Why the rise of generative AI means we need a new term to replace ‘user.’

+ AI was supposed to make police bodycams better. What happened?

+ How we transform to a fully decarbonized world. A world powered by electricity from abundant, renewable resources is now within reach.

This is just a small selection of what’s on offer. Subscribe if you don’t already to check out the whole thing. Enjoy!

This solar giant is moving manufacturing back to the US

Whenever you see a solar panel, most parts of it probably come from China. The US invented the technology and once dominated its production, but over the past two decades, government subsidies and low costs in China have led most of the solar manufacturing supply chain to be concentrated there.

But the US government is trying to change that. Through high tariffs on imports and hefty domestic tax credits, it is trying to make the cost of manufacturing solar panels in the US competitive enough for companies to want to come back and set up factories.

To understand its chances of success, MIT Technology Review spoke to Shawn Qu, founder and chairman of long-standing solar firm Canadian Solar. After decades of mostly manufacturing in Asia, Canadian Solar is pivoting back to the US. He told Zeyi Yang, our China reporter, why he sees a real chance for a solar industry revival. 

To learn more about the state of Chinese tech in the US, including climate tech stars, check out the latest edition of China Report, our weekly newsletter covering tech, policy and power in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 The US Senate has passed the bill that could ban TikTok 
It could either force parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok, or face a national ban. (WP $)
+ Senators insist that TikTok’s ownership poses a real threat to the US. (FT $)+ But ByteDance is highly unlikely to complete a sale within the narrow timeframe. (Reuters)
+ Here’s what’s likely to happen next. (NYT $)

2 The AI industry is desperate for more data centers
Demand is so high, it’s causing a shortage of essential components. (WSJ $)
+ Energy-hungry data centers are quietly moving into cities. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Hackers are testing cyberattacks in developing nations
Africa, Asia and South America are targeted before they move onto richer countries. (FT $)
+ Australia is worried that AI is supercharging online extremist activity. (Bloomberg $)

4 Google has pushed back its plan to phase out cookies—again
It’s the third time the company has delayed the project. (Bloomberg $)

5 How General Motors spied on its customers
It tracked driving data and sold it to the insurance industry. (NYT $)
+ The advertising industry is kicking its heels as it waits. (WSJ $)
+ China’s car companies are turning into tech companies. (MIT Technology Review)

6 How AI could help to make sense of complicated theories
String theory, anyone? (Quanta Magazine)
+ Is it possible to really understand someone else’s mind? (MIT Technology Review)

7 The NFL is diving into big data
When it comes to optimizing sporting performance, knowledge is power. (Knowable Magazine)

8 A new industry is trying to game Reddit with AI-generated product promo
It’s the kind of sneaky approach the Reddit community famously hates. (404 Media)
+ A GPT-3 bot posted comments on Reddit for a week and no one noticed. (MIT Technology Review)

9 AI beauty pageants are a thing now
Which surely undermines the point of beauty contests. (The Guardian)

10 X’s latest trend is infuriating
Look down at my keyboard? Absolutely not. (Insider $)

Quote of the day

“If the Chinese government wants data on Americans, they don’t need TikTok to get it.”

—Alan Z. Rozenshtein, an associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota, reflects on the US Senate’s decision to pressure ByteDance into selling TikTok or face a national ban, Platformer reports.

The big story

The lucky break behind the first CRISPR treatment

December 2023

The world’s first commercial gene-editing treatment is set to start changing the lives of people with sickle-cell disease. It’s called Casgevy, and it was approved last November in the UK.

The treatment, which will be sold in the US by Vertex Pharmaceuticals, employs CRISPR, which can be easily programmed by scientists to cut DNA at precise locations they choose.

But where do you aim CRISPR, and how did the researchers know what DNA to change? That’s the lesser-known story of the sickle-cell breakthrough. Read more about it.

—Antonio Regalado

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ The Monument Valley games are lovely, if you’ve never played them, and their music is particularly poignant.
+ There’s nothing more satisfying than a good pressure washer video.
+ Have you ever found your doppelganger in an art gallery? These people have.
+ Replacing beef with fish in classic recipes—with surprisingly tasty results.

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.

Why new proposals to restrict geoengineering are misguided

—Daniele Visioni is a climate scientist and assistant professor at Cornell University

The public debate over whether we should consider intentionally altering the climate system is heating up, as the dangers of climate instability rise and more groups look to study technologies that could cool the planet.

Such interventions, commonly known as solar geoengineering, may include releasing sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere to cast away more sunlight, or spraying salt particles along coastlines to create denser, more reflective marine clouds.  

The growing interest in studying the potential of these tools has triggered corresponding calls to shut down the research field, or at least to restrict it more tightly. But such rules would hinder scientific exploration of technologies that could save lives and ease suffering as global warming accelerates—and they might also be far harder to define and implement than their proponents appreciate. Read the full story.

This architect is cutting up materials to make them stronger and lighter

As a child, Emily Baker loved to make paper versions of things. It was a habit that stuck. Years later, studying architecture in graduate school, she was playing around with some paper and scissors when she made a striking discovery.

By making a series of cuts and folds in a sheet of paper, Baker found she could produce two planes connected by a complex set of thin strips. Without the need for an adhesive, this pattern created a surface that was thick but lightweight. Baker named her creation Spin-Valence. 

Structural tests later showed that an individual tile made this way, and rendered in steel, can bear more than a thousand times its own weight. Baker envisions using the technique to make shelters or bridges that are easier to transport and assemble following a natural disaster—or to create lightweight structures that could be packed with supplies for missions to outer space. Read the full story.

—Sofi Thanhauser

This story is for subscribers only, and is from the next magazine issue of MIT Technology Review, set to go live tomorrow, on the theme of Build. If you don’t already, subscribe now to get a copy when it lands.

Three things we learned about AI from Emtech Digital London

Last week, MIT Technology Review held its inaugural Emtech Digital conference in London. It was a great success, full of brain-tickling insights about where AI is going next. 

Here are the three main things Melissa Heikkilä, our senior AI reporter, took away from the conference.

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly AI newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 US child protection agencies are inundated with AI-created abuse images
And their systems are struggling to spot real children who could be helped. (WP $)
+ A new report is urging tech platforms to improve how such material is reported. (The Verge)
+ Legislation that could overhaul problems in the reporting pipelines is in motion. (WSJ $)

2 A startup edited human DNA using generative AI 
It aims to make the new wave of CRISPR faster and more powerful. (NYT $)
+ Forget designer babies. Here’s how CRISPR is really changing lives. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Amazon is shutting down one of its drone delivery programs in California
Just two years after it launched. (The Verge)

4 There’s no room in China’s tech sector for over-35s
Ageism is rife as companies overlook workers they worry may have home commitments. (FT $)
+ One of China’s most successful cultural exports? Bubble tea. (Bloomberg $)

5 Measuring ocean waves and currents is hard
Luckily, a new kind of sensor-rich buoy that communicates with satellites is one solution. (IEEE Spectrum)

6 Recycling plastic has been a colossal failure
Can ‘advanced recycling’ finally crack it? (New Scientist $)
+ Think that your plastic is being recycled? Think again. (MIT Technology Review)

7 How to make your home as energy-efficient as possible
Appliances are much better than they used to be, but you may still have to make sacrifices. (Vox)

8 Captchas are getting tougher to solve
Machines are getting better at cracking them, so the bar is raised for humans. (WSJ $)
+ Death to captchas. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Good luck getting a restaurant reservation these days
Pesky bots and convoluted online booking systems are wrecking our dinners. (New Yorker $)

10 Muting annoying accounts makes social media so much better
Seriously, try it and thank me later. (The Guardian)
+ How to log off. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“I, for one, welcome our new Taylor Swift overlords.” 

—A member of a Reddit community for typewriter enthusiasts jokes about how the group might swell rapidly after Taylor Swift referenced the machines in her new album, 404 Media reports.

The big story

This town’s mining battle reveals the contentious path to a cleaner future

January 2024

In June last year, Talon, an exploratory mining company, submitted a proposal to Minnesota state regulators to begin digging up as much as 725,000 metric tons of raw ore per year, mainly to unlock the rich and lucrative reserves of high-grade nickel in the bedrock.

Talon is striving to distance itself from the mining industry’s dirty past, portraying its plan as a clean, friendly model of modern mineral extraction. It proclaims the site will help to power a greener future for the US by producing the nickel needed to manufacture batteries for electric cars and trucks, but with low emissions and light environmental impacts.

But as the company has quickly discovered, a lot of locals aren’t eager for major mining operations near their towns. Read the full story.

—James Temple

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ What a wonderful piece of music!
+ Weighted blanket devotees swear by them—but what does the science say?
+ Donald Nelson is on a mission to restore sharks’ reputations following decades of persecution.
+ Meanwhile, a British boy has won a European championship with his uncanny impression of a seagull.

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.

These artificial snowdrifts protect seal pups from climate change

For millennia, during Finland’s blistering winters, wind drove snow into meters-high snowbanks along Lake Saimaa’s shoreline, offering prime real estate from which seals carved cave-like dens to shelter from the elements and raise newborns.

But in recent decades, these snowdrifts have failed to form in sufficient numbers, as climate change has brought warming temperatures and rain in place of snow, decimating the seal population.

For the last 11 years, humans have stepped in to construct what nature can no longer reliably provide. Human-made snowdrifts, built using handheld snowplows, now house 90% of seal pups. They are the latest in a raft of measures that have brought Saimaa’s seals back from the brink of extinction. Read the full story.

—Matthew Ponsford

Matthew’s story is from the next magazine issue of MIT Technology Review, set to go live this Wednesday April 24, on the theme of Build. If you don’t already, subscribe now to get a copy when it lands.

Politics in the AI era

2024 is a banner year for elections across the world, and it arrives just as AI advances come thick and fast. This collision of events raises a crucial question: how will the rise of AI change politics?

Join MIT Technology Review Editor in Chief Mat Honan and Executive Editor Amy Nordrum for a LinkedIn Live event where they’ll explore the impact of political influencers and deepfakes, and unpack industry insights and predictions. Register here to tune in at 1pm ET tomorrow.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Inside the movement to create AI models without guardrails 
These ‘anti-woke’ systems often introduce more problems than solutions. (WSJ $)
+ Do AI systems need to come with safety warnings? (MIT Technology Review)

2 California wants to force Google and Meta to compensate news publishers
Unsurprisingly, they’re not taking the so-called ‘link tax’ lying down. (WP $)
+ Japan’s regulators have accused Google of anticompetitive behavior. (Bloomberg $)

3 China is planning on becoming the global leader for flying cars
Its regulators are beavering away to green-light projects as quickly as possible. (FT $)
+ The aviation industry is still weathering the backlash over Boeing’s issues. (Vox)
+ These aircraft could change how we fly. (MIT Technology Review)

4 TikTok’s top lawyer is stepping down
Amid the company’s highly-publicized legal tussle with the US government. (The Information $)
+ The US Senate is expected to vote on its proposed ban bill this week. (The Guardian)

5 A huge cyberattack revealed Finnish people’s psychotherapy records
The fallout was likened to the trauma of a terrorist attack. (Bloomberg $)

6 A UK sex offender has been banned from using AI tools
In the first known legal case of its kind. (The Guardian)
+ Catching bad content in the age of AI. (MIT Technology Review)

7 The internet is rife with scams
They’re so convincing, even experts are falling for them. (NYT $)
+ How culture drives foul play on the internet. (MIT Technology Review)

8 The future of AI gadgets is probably just phones
The Ai Pin’s savage reviews look like an omen. (The Verge)

9 Spare a thought for Nvidia’s engineers
A million dollars doesn’t go too far these days, according to one worker. (Insider $)

10 This camera produced AI-generated poetry instead of photos
Is a picture really worth a thousand words? (TechCrunch)
+ A Salvador Dalí AI lobster telephone has gone on display in Florida. (Insider $)

Quote of the day

“Politics is being treated as a four-letter word and pushed out of the public square.”

—Eric Wilson, managing partner at Republican campaign tech incubator Startup Caucus, laments Meta’s decision to treat politics as less of a priority on its platforms to the Washington Post.

The big story

Cops built a shadowy surveillance machine in Minnesota after George Floyd’s murder 

March 2022

Law enforcement agencies in Minnesota have been carrying out a secretive, long-running surveillance program targeting civil rights activists and journalists in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.

Run under a consortium known as Operation Safety Net, the program was set up in spring 2021, ostensibly to maintain public order as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin went on trial for Floyd’s murder.

But an investigation by MIT Technology Review reveals that the initiative expanded far beyond its publicly announced scope to include expansive use of tools to scour social media, track cell phones, and amass detailed images of people’s faces. Read the full story.

—Tate Ryan-Mosley & Sam Richards

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ These cats have a bright pottery-making career ahead of them.
+ You just can’t escape British workwear these days.
+ It’s never too late to take up something you love.
+ The first-ever model of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise NCC-1701 has been returned to the family of series creator Gene Roddenberry.

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.

Beyond Neuralink: Meet the other companies developing brain-computer interfaces

In the world of brain-computer interfaces, it can seem as if one company sucks up all the oxygen in the room. Last month, Neuralink posted a video to X showing the first human subject to receive its brain implant, which will be named Telepathy. The recipient, a 29-year-old man who is paralyzed from the shoulders down, played computer chess, moving the cursor around with his mind.

Neuralink’s announcement of a first-in-human trial made a big splash not because of what the man was able to accomplish—scientists demonstrated using a brain implant to move a cursor in 2006—but because the technology is so advanced.

But Neuralink isn’t the only company developing brain-computer interfaces to help people who have lost the ability to move or speak. Read on to take a look at some of the companies developing brain chips, their progress, and their different approaches to the technology.

—Cassandra Willyard

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly health and biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

It’s time to retire the term “user”

People have been called “users” for a long time; it’s a practical shorthand enforced by executives, founders, operators, engineers, and investors ad infinitum.

Often, it is the right word to describe people who use software: a user is more than just a customer or a consumer. Sometimes a user isn’t even a person; corporate bots are known to run accounts on Instagram and other social media platforms, for example.

But “users” is also unspecific enough to refer to just about everyone. It can accommodate almost any big idea or long-term vision. We use—and are used by—computers and platforms and companies. Though “user” seems to describe a relationship that is deeply transactional, many of the technological relationships in which a person would be considered a user are actually quite personal. That being the case, is “user” still relevant? Read the full story.

—Taylor Majewski

This story is from the next magazine issue of MIT Technology Review, set to go live on April 24. If you don’t already, sign up now to get a copy when it lands.

Three ways the US could help universities compete with tech companies on AI innovation

—Ylli Bajraktari, CEO of nonprofit the Special Competitive Studies Project, Tom Mitchell, the Founders University Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and Daniela Rus,  a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT

The ongoing revolution in artificial intelligence has the potential to dramatically improve our lives. Yet ensuring that America and other democracies can help shape the trajectory of this technology requires going beyond the tech development taking place at private companies.

Research at universities drove the AI advances that laid the groundwork for the commercial boom we are experiencing today. But large AI models require such vast computational power and such extensive data sets that private companies have replaced academia at the frontier of AI. Here’s a few ideas for how the US could empower its universities to remain alongside them at the forefront of AI research.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Bitcoin investors are eagerly awaiting the ‘halving’ 
The scheduled reduction in the number of newly produced bitcoin could mean their current holdings are worth even more. (FT $)
+ The halving is due to start in the early hours of Saturday morning. (NYT $)
+ The event is the crypto equivalent of the Super Bowl. (Reuters)

2 Meta is integrating its AI into its social media apps
But LLMs and social platforms are dangerous bedfellows. (WP $)
+ Case in point: X’s Grok bot offers up fake news based on users’ jokes. (Ars Technica)
+ Meta launched its newest model, Llama 3, too. (WSJ $)
+ Big Tech is scrambling to make its AI as easy to use as possible. (The Information $)

3 The World Health Organization’s AI avatar struggles with health questions
The bot has been trained on outdated data, and it shows. (Bloomberg $)
+ Artificial intelligence is infiltrating health care. We shouldn’t let it make all the decisions. (MIT Technology Review)

4 China ordered Apple to pull Meta-owned apps from its App Store
Beijing is reportedly unhappy with ‘inflammatory’ Threads and WhatsApp content. (WSJ $)
+ The move is likely to worsen the already-tense relations between the US and China. (FT $)

5 University students are turning to cyber crime to make money
A major phishing site recruited fraudsters to scam tens of thousands of victims. (The Guardian)

6 Your brainwaves are a hot commodity
Tech firms are hungry for neural data, and legislators in Colorado are concerned. (Vox)
+ Data doesn’t get much more personal than this. (NYT $)

7 Deepfakes are making romance scams even more convincing
In the past, a video call confirmed you were speaking to a human. Not anymore. (Wired $)
+ Bans on deepfakes take us only so far—here’s what we really need. (MIT Technology Review)

8 A Netflix true crime documentary contained AI images of an alleged murderer
The AI-generated pictures seek to portray the accused as a fun-loving teen. (404 Media)
+ It looks like Netflix’s crackdown on password sharing worked. (FT $)

9 Product recommendations ruined the internet
Google thinks it can fix it with, err, more product recommendations. (NY Mag $)
+ How to fix the internet. (MIT Technology Review)

10 How tech can help us fight back against locusts
The insects are serious pests. (Economist $)
+ How robotic honeybees and hives could help the species fight back. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“What in the Black Mirror is this?!”

—An anonymous member of a Facebook parenting group reacts to Meta’s AI chatbot claiming it has a child who is both gifted and challenged academically, 404 Media reports.

The big story

The humble oyster could hold the key to restoring coastal waters. Developers hate it.

October 2023

Carol Friend has taken on a difficult job. She is one of the 10 people in Delaware currently trying to make it as a cultivated oyster farmer.

Her Salty Witch Oyster Company holds a lease to grow the mollusks as part of the state’s new program for aquaculture, launched in 2017. It has sputtered despite its obvious promise.

Five years after the first farmed oysters went into the Inland Bays, the aquaculture industry remains in a larval stage. Oysters themselves are almost mythical in their ability to clean and filter water. But human willpower, investment, and flexibility are all required to allow the oysters to simply do their thing—particularly when developers start to object. Read the full story.

—Anna Kramer

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ I think we’ve all felt these heightened emotions in these locations at least once.
+ Hold onto your jackets, there are thieves about!
+ As any dog owner will tell you, our furry friends are even smarter than we think.
+ Chickpeas are just so versatile.

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

Hydrogen trains could revolutionize how Americans get around

Like a mirage speeding across the dusty desert outside Pueblo, Colorado, the first hydrogen-fuel-cell passenger train in the United States is getting warmed up on its test track. It will soon be shipped to Southern California, where it is slated to carry riders on San Bernardino County’s Arrow commuter rail service before the end of the year.

The best way to decarbonize railroads is the subject of growing debate among regulators, industry, and activists. The debate is partly technological, revolving around whether hydrogen fuel cells, batteries, or overhead electric wires offer the best performance for different railroad situations. But it’s also political: a question of the extent to which decarbonization can, or should, usher in a broader transformation of rail transportation.

In the insular world of railroading, this hydrogen-powered train is a Rorschach test. To some, it represents the future of rail transportation. To others, it looks like a big, shiny distraction. Read the full story.

—Benjamin Schneider

This story is for subscribers only, and is from the next magazine issue of MIT Technology Review, set to go live on April 24, on the theme of Build. If you don’t already, sign up now to get a copy when it lands.

Researchers taught robots to run. Now they’re teaching them to walk

We’ve all seen videos over the past few years demonstrating how agile humanoid robots have become, running and jumping with ease. We’re no longer surprised by this kind of agility—in fact, we’ve grown to expect it.

The problem is, these shiny demos lack real-world applications. When it comes to creating robots that are useful and safe around humans, the fundamentals of movement are more important. 

As a result, researchers are using the same techniques to train humanoid robots to achieve much more modest goals. They believe it will lead to more robust, reliable two-legged machines capable of interacting with their surroundings more safely—as well as learning much more quickly. Read the full story.

—Rhiannon Williams

How to build a thermal battery

Thermal energy storage is a convenient way to stockpile energy for later. This could be crucial in connecting cheap but inconsistent renewable energy with industrial facilities, which often require a constant supply of heat. It’s so promising, MIT Technology Review’s readers chose it as an honorary 11th technology in our annual list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies.

Casey Crownhart, our climate reporter, wrote about why this technology is having a moment, and where it might wind up being used, in a story published earlier this week. Now, she’s dug into what it takes to make a thermal battery, and why there are so many different types.

Read the full story.

This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate and energy newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Amazon posed as a small retail business to snoop on its rivals
It used competitors’ payment and logistics data to inform its own operations. (WSJ $)+ The company insists its cashierless tech is powered by AI, not humans. (The Verge)

2 Landlords are asking prospective renters for 3D scans of their faces
And in many cases, if you don’t consent, you can’t tour the property alone. (The Markup)
+ The coming war on the hidden algorithms that trap people in poverty. (MIT Technology Review)

3 India’s elections will be a major test of AI literacy
AI-generated videos of Prime Minister Narendra Modi are addressing voters by name. (NYT $)
+ Three technology trends shaping 2024’s elections. (MIT Technology Review)

4 The US National Guard will use Google’s AI to analyze disaster zones
Just in time for the summer wildfire season. (WP $)
+ The quest to build wildfire-resistant homes. (MIT Technology Review)

5 OpenAI’s GPT-4 outperformed junior doctors in analyzing eye conditions
But a lot more work would be needed before deploying it in a clinical setting. (FT $)
+ Artificial intelligence is infiltrating health care. We shouldn’t let it make all the decisions. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Digitizing the real world is a long, tedious process
Engines originally developed for video games are bridging the uncanny valley. (New Yorker $)

7 AI is unlikely to improve the welfare of factory-farmed livestock 
While AI tools could make farming more efficient, it probably won’t make it humane. (Undark Magazine)
+ How CRISPR is making farmed animals bigger, stronger, and healthier. (MIT Technology Review)

8 What happens after you trade in your old iPhone
Spoiler: not all of them end up in industrial shredders. (Bloomberg $)

9 A Hollywood agency is dabbling with AI clones of its A-list talent
Crucially, the stars own their digital doubles. (The Information $)
+ How Meta and AI companies recruited striking actors to train AI. (MIT Technology Review)

10 The next Oprah will be crowned on TikTok 
Self-help book stars reach gigantic audiences hungry for self-actualization. (The Atlantic $)

Quote of the day

“We will be attacked.” 

—Franz Regul, head of cyberattack preparations for the 2024 Paris Olympics, is grimly prepared for what he sees as the inevitable, he tells the New York Times.

The big story

The race to produce rare earth materials

January 2024

Abandoning fossil fuels and adopting lower-­carbon technologies are our best options for warding off the accelerating threat of climate change. And access to rare earth elements, key ingredients in many of these technologies, will partly determine which countries will meet their goals for lowering emissions.

Some nations, including the US, are increasingly worried about whether the supply of those elements will remain stable. As a result, scientists and companies alike are intent on increasing access and improving sustainability by exploring secondary or unconventional sources. Read the full story.

— Mureji Fatunde

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Maru the golden retriever has popped up in more than 1,000 Google Street View shots, on the beautiful island of Jukdo.
+ How about a bit of experimental music for a Thursday? (Thanks Mark!)
+ It’s just as the Beach Boys intended!
+ How to get a better night’s sleep without breaking the bank.

We’ve all seen videos over the past few years demonstrating how agile humanoid robots have become, running and jumping with ease. We’re no longer surprised by this kind of agility—in fact, we’ve grown to expect it.

The problem is, these shiny demos lack real-world applications. When it comes to creating robots that are useful and safe around humans, the fundamentals of movement are more important. As a result, researchers are using the same techniques to train humanoid robots to achieve much more modest goals. 

Alan Fern, a professor of computer science at Oregon State University, and a team of researchers have successfully trained a humanoid robot called Digit V3 to stand, walk, pick up a box, and move it from one location to another. Meanwhile, a separate group of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, have focused on teaching Digit to walk in unfamiliar environments while carrying different loads, without toppling over. Their research is published in a paper in Science Robotics today. 

Both groups are using an AI technique called sim-to-real reinforcement learning, a burgeoning method of training two-legged robots like Digit. Researchers believe it will lead to more robust, reliable two-legged machines capable of interacting with their surroundings more safely—as well as learning much more quickly.

Sim-to-real reinforcement learning involves training AI models to complete certain tasks in simulated environments billions of times before a robot powered by the model attempts to complete them in the real world. What would take years for a robot to learn in real life can take just days thanks to repeated trial-and-error testing in simulations.

A neural network guides the robot using a mathematical reward function, a technique that rewards the robot with a large number every time it moves closer to its target location or completes its goal behavior. If it does something it’s not supposed to do, like falling down, it’s “punished” with a negative number, so it learns to avoid these motions over time.

In previous projects, researchers from the University of Oregon had used the same reinforcement learning technique to teach a two-legged robot named Cassie to run. The approach paid off—Cassie became the first robot to run an outdoor 5K before setting a Guinness World Record for the fastest bipedal robot to run 100 meters and mastering the ability to jump from one location to another with ease.

Training robots to behave in athletic ways requires them to develop really complex skills in very narrow environments, says Ilija Radosavovic, a PhD student at Berkleley who trained Digit to carry a wide range of loads and stabilize itself when poked with a stick. “We’re sort of the opposite—focusing on fairly simple skills in broad environments.”

This new wave of research in humanoid robotics is less concerned with speed and ability, and more focused on making machines robust and able to adapt—which is ultimately what’s needed to make them useful in the real world. Humanoid robots remain a relative rarity in work environments, as they often struggle to balance while carrying heavy objects. This is why most robots designed to lift objects of varying weights in factories and warehouses tend to have four legs or larger, more stable bases. But researchers hope to change that by making humanoid robots more reliable using AI techniques. 

Reinforcement learning will usher in a “new, much more flexible and faster way for training these types of manipulation skills,” Fern says. He and his team are due to present their findings at ICRA, the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, in Japan next month.

The ultimate goal is for a human to be able to show the robot a video of the desired task, like picking up a box from one shelf and pushing it onto another higher shelf, and then have the robot do it without requiring any further instruction, says Fern.

Getting robots to observe, copy, and quickly learn these kinds of behaviors would be really useful, but it still remains a challenge, says Lerrel Pinto, an assistant professor of computer science at New York University, who was not involved in the research. “If that could be done, I would be very impressed by that,” he says. “These are hard problems.”

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

The great commercial takeover of low-Earth orbit

NASA designed the International Space Station to fly for 20 years. It has lasted six years longer than that, though it is showing its age, and NASA is currently studying how to safely destroy the space laboratory by around 2030. 

The ISS never really became what some had hoped: a launching point for an expanding human presence in the solar system. But it did enable fundamental research on materials and medicine, and it helped us start to understand how space affects the human body. 

To build on that work, NASA has partnered with private companies to develop new, commercial space stations for research, manufacturing, and tourism. If they are successful, these companies will bring about a new era of space exploration: private rockets flying to private destinations. They’re already planning to do it around the moon. One day, Mars could follow. Read the full story.

— David W. Brown

This story is for subscribers only, and is from the next magazine issue of MIT Technology Review, set to go live on April 24, on the theme of Build. If you don’t already, sign up now to get a copy when it lands.

Why it’s so hard for China’s chip industry to become self-sufficient

Inside most laptop and data center chips today, there’s a tiny component called ABF. It’s a thin insulating layer around the wires that conduct electricity. And over 90% of the materials around the world used to make this insulator are produced by a single Japanese company named Ajinomoto.

As our AI reporter James O’Donnell explained in his story last week, Ajinomoto figured out in the 1990s that a chemical by-product from the production of the seasoning powder MSG can be used to make insulator films, which proved to be essential for high-performance chips. And in the 30 years since, the company has totally dominated ABF supply.

Within China, at least three companies are developing similar insulator products to rival Ajinomoto’s. For decades, the fact that the semiconductor supply chain was in a few companies’ hands was seen as a strength, not a problem. But now, both the US and Chinese governments increasingly see it as a problem to be fixed. Read the full story.

—Zeyi Yang

This story is from China Report, our weekly newsletter covering tech and policy within China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Starlink is cracking down on internet thieves
Users have been connecting to its services from countries where it’s not licensed to operate. (WSJ $)
+ Antarctica’s history of isolation is ending—thanks to Starlink. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Microsoft has invested more than $1 billion into an Abu Dhabi AI firm 
The company, called G42, recently cut its links with its Chinese hardware supplier. (FT $)
+ Behind Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s push to get AI tools in developers’ hands. (MIT Technology Review)

3 How wartime British scientists worked how how to keep humans alive underwater
Their extraordinary findings played a key part in making D-Day a success. (Wired $)

4 The longevity movement is full of contradictory arguments
But who really wants to live forever anyway? (New Yorker $)
+ The quest to legitimize longevity medicine. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Audiobooks are a hit with Spotify subscribers
But they’re limited to 15 hours’ of listening per month. (Bloomberg $)

6 Farewell to Atlas the robot
Boston Dynamics’ dancing, backflipping humanoid robot is retiring after 11 years in the spotlight. (The Verge)
+ Is robotics about to have its own ChatGPT moment? (MIT Technology Review)

7 Everything is so expensive these days
And covert personalized pricing systems are set to make things even pricier. (The Atlantic $)
+ It turns out Gen Z is a lot richer than their elders. (Economist $)

8 Amazon is a swamp of trashy ebooks
They were a problem before the AI boom, but generative AI has made the issue significantly worse. (Vox)

9 TikTok’s hottest product is industrial-grade glycine from China
The amino acids are feeding the platform’s insatiable appetite for ironic obsessions. (WP $)

10 Behold—the straw that won’t give you wrinkles
Unsurprisingly, it’s the kind of nonsense that will take off on social media. (NYT $)

Quote of the day

“People can giggle and say, ‘Oh, look, there’s Brutus plunging a knife into the back of Julius Caesar.'”

—Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta, describes his vision of future history classes enabled by VR, Axios reports.

The big story

What is death?

November 2023

Just as birth certificates note the time we enter the world, death certificates mark the moment we exit it. This practice reflects traditional notions about life and death as binaries. We are here until, suddenly, like a light switched off, we are gone.

But while this idea of death is pervasive, evidence is building that it is an outdated social construct, not really grounded in biology. Dying is in fact a process—one with no clear point demarcating the threshold across which someone cannot come back.

Scientists and many doctors have already embraced this more nuanced understanding of death. And as society catches up, the implications for the living could be profound. Read the full story. 

—Rachel Nuwer

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ This Switch bread has a cute lil secret.
+ If you’re one of life’s poor navigators, fear not—you’re not alone.
+ Trying to sell your home? Don’t paint your front door these colors.
+ This is a fascinating look at the science behind entering the state of creative flow.