~mit-technology-revi | Bookmarks (290)

Recorded on March 20, 2025 AI Chatbots Have Joined the Chat Speakers: Rachel Courtland, commissioning editor, Rhiannon Williams, news reporter, and Eileen Guo, features & investigations reporter. Chatbots are quickly changing how we connect to each other and ourselves. But are these changes for the better? How should they be monitored and regulated? Hear from MIT…

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. 4 technologies that could power the future of energy Where can you find lasers, electric guitars, and racks full of novel batteries, all in the same giant room? This week, the answer was…

At a conference dedicated to energy technology that I attended this week, I noticed an outward attitude of optimism and excitement. But it’s hard to miss the current of uncertainty just underneath.  The ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit, held this year just outside Washington, DC, gathers some of the most cutting-edge innovators working on everything from…

Where can you find lasers, electric guitars, and racks full of novel batteries, all in the same giant room? This week, the answer was the 2025 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit just outside Washington, DC. Energy innovation can take many forms, and the variety in energy research was on display at the summit. ARPA-E, part of…

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. HIV could infect 1,400 infants every day because of US aid disruptions Around 1,400 infants are being infected by HIV every day as a result of the new US administration’s cuts to funding…

There has never been a more pressing time for food producers to harness technology to tackle the sector’s tough mission. To produce ever more healthy and appealing food for a growing global population in a way that is resilient and affordable, all while minimizing waste and reducing the sector’s environmental impact. From farm to factory,…

Around 1,400 infants are being infected by HIV every day as a result of the new US administration’s cuts to funding to AIDS organizations, new modeling suggests. In an executive order issued January 20, President Donald Trump paused new foreign aid funding to global health programs, and four days later, US Secretary of State Marco…

In the ever-evolving world of health care, the role of technology is becoming increasingly crucial. From improving patient outcomes to streamlining administrative processes, digital technologies are changing the face of the industry. However, for startups developing health tech solutions, breaking into the market and scaling their products can be a challenging journey, requiring access to…

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. When you might start speaking to robots Last week, Google made a somewhat surprising announcement. It launched a version of its AI model, Gemini, that can do things not just in the digital…

Last Wednesday, Google made a somewhat surprising announcement. It launched a version of its AI model, Gemini, that can do things not just in the digital realm of chatbots and internet search but out here in the physical world, via robots.  Gemini Robotics fuses the power of large language models with spatial reasoning, allowing you…

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. Is Google playing catchup on search with OpenAI? —Mat Honan I’ve been mulling over something that Will Heaven, our senior editor for AI, pointed out not too long ago: all the big players…

This story originally appeared in The Debrief with Mat Honan, a weekly newsletter about the biggest stories in tech from our editor in chief. Sign up here to get the next one in your inbox. I’ve been mulling over something that Will Heaven, our senior editor for AI, pointed out not too long ago: that all the big players…

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 annual shot might protect against HIV infections Every year, my colleagues and I put together a list of what we think are the top 10 breakthrough technologies of that year. When it…

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. Every year, my colleagues and I put together a list of what we think are the top 10 breakthrough technologies of that year. When it came to innovations…

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. Gemini Robotics uses Google’s top language model to make robots more useful The news: Google DeepMind has released a new model, Gemini Robotics, that combines its best large language model with robotics. Plugging…

Google DeepMind has released a new model, Gemini Robotics, that combines its best large language model with robotics. Plugging in the LLM seems to give robots the ability to be more dexterous, work from natural-language commands, and generalize across tasks. All three are things that robots have struggled to do until now. The team hopes…

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. Everyone in AI is talking about Manus. We put it to the test. Since the general AI agent Manus was launched last week, it has spread online like wildfire. And not just in…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Green-steel startup Boston Metal just showed that it has all the ingredients needed to make steel without emitting gobs of greenhouse gases. The company successfully ran its largest reactor yet to make…

For many years, researchers have been working to build devices that can mimic photosynthesis—the process by which plants use sunlight and carbon dioxide to make their fuel. These artificial leaves use sunlight to separate water into oxygen and hydrogen, which could then be used to fuel cars or generate electricity. Now a research team has…

Since the general AI agent Manus was launched last week, it has spread online like wildfire. And not just in China, where it was developed by the Wuhan-based startup Butterfly Effect. It’s made  its way into the global conversation, with influential voices in tech, including Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey and Hugging Face product lead Victor…

The Canadian robotruck startup Waabi says its super-realistic virtual simulation is now accurate enough to prove the safety of its driverless big rigs without having to run them for miles on real roads.  The company uses a digital twin of its real-world robotruck, loaded up with real sensor data, and measures how the twin’s performance…

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. Two new measures show where AI models fail on fairness What’s new: A new pair of AI benchmarks could help developers reduce bias in AI models, potentially making them fairer and less likely…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The concept of artificial general intelligence—an ultra-powerful AI system we don’t have yet—can be thought of as a balloon, repeatedly inflated with hype during peaks of optimism (or fear) about its potential…

A new pair of AI benchmarks could help developers reduce bias in AI models, potentially making them fairer and less likely to cause harm. The research, from a team based at Stanford, was posted to the arXiv preprint server in early February. The researchers were inspired to look into the problem of bias after witnessing…