Technologyreview
49 articles
49 articles
When we set out to talk to kids about artificial intelligence, we thought we knew what we’d hear. We expected some to tell us they were using it to cheat a little, the way Millennials and Gen Xers opened up CliffsNotes or programmed formulas into their TI-82s, and others to share inspiring ways they were…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI EducationAI ToolsAI Ethics
Business and technology leaders need no convincing that the time of agentic AI is here. Organizations are rapidly adopting agents, and few executives doubt the technology’s potential to transform work. But many organizations find that realizing the desired return on investment (ROI) from AI hinges on having the right foundation, with inadequate infrastructure and data…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·Data InfrastructureAI GovernanceAI-agents
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 startups are chasing the next big thing in LLMs Nine years after Google researchers introduced the transformer, this family of neural networks has become the engine inside every major large…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI DevelopmentAI ToolsAI Ethics
MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. Way back in the summer of 2017, AI researchers at Google put out a paper called “Attention Is All You Need,” in which they described a new…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI DevelopmentAI ToolsAI Infrastructure
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. AI for science needs reasoning, not just data —Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and the cofounder of Schmidt Sciences, and Suhas Mahesh, who leads the AI for science work…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI in LearningAI EthicsAI-agents
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Last week, I headed 30 miles south of San Francisco to a hotel in Mountain View, California, to join some of the most accomplished, and some of the most promising, AI…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI EducationAI InfrastructureAI Ethics
Every few decades, someone announces that science has reached its end. In 1903, the revered physicist Albert Michelson wrote that the “facts of physical science have all been discovered.” In the 1980s, Stephen Hawking predicted that theoretical physics might be finished by the end of the century. With the explosive arrival of artificial intelligence, the…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI in LearningAI EthicsAI-agents
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 AI empire is being reshaped. Here’s what’s changed. After a wave of painful losses in the tech talent wars, delays to its next flagship model, and murmurings of poor morale,…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI ToolsAI InfrastructureAI Governance
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. NASA’s new dark energy space telescope can also detect killer asteroids At the end of August, NASA is set to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from Kennedy Space…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI ToolsAI in LearningAI in Updates
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 why AI agents lie and cheat to reach their goals When two OpenAI models hacked into Hugging Face last month, they weren’t trying to make money or commit sabotage—they were…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI SafetyAI GovernanceAI Ethics
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Humanoid robots usually elicit more cringe than awe: They stumble, kick children, and despite advances are still worse at using their hands than my toddler. It’s a nascent industry, and such robots…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI ToolsAI GovernanceAI Ethics
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 from the series here. When two OpenAI models hacked into the website Hugging Face in July, they weren’t trying to make money or commit sabotage—they were just looking for answers…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI SafetyAI GovernanceAI EthicsThis 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. A fundamental flaw leaves LLMs strikingly vulnerable to attack It is impossible to make large language models fully secure against hacks because of a fundamental flaw in how they work, a…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI SecurityAIAI Ethics
It is impossible to make large language models fully secure against hacks because of a fundamental flaw in how they work, a team of researchers argue in a paper presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning, a top AI conference, this month. The claim has huge implications for the safety of this technology, which…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI SecurityAIAI EthicsIt feels bad enough when an open letter signed by leading economists warns that AI might steal your job. The fact it may soon be better than you at making dinner? Insult to injury. But that’s exactly what the company 1X promised when it showed off a pair of new, impressively dexterous (and, to some,…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI ToolsAI GovernanceAI Ethics
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 called the Hugging Face attack unprecedented. But we’ve been here before.  —Will Douglas Heaven, senior AI editor Reading OpenAI’s account last week of how some of its models broke their…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI ToolsAI GovernanceAI Ethics
Lee, an engineer at Samsung’s semiconductor division, clocks out when his shift ends. He used to work longer hours, going the extra mile to excel at his projects. But lately, he’s been coming straight home to work on his job application for the chipmaker’s South Korean rival SK Hynix, sharing tips with his coworkers on…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI ToolsAI GovernanceAI Ethics
Outside the small town of Paducah, Kentucky, a wealth of uranium is locked away in thousands of storage cylinders filled with waste material from a now-closed nuclear enrichment facility. Lasers could help get it out. A company called Global Laser Enrichment (GLE) is looking to reprocess this old material with a new technology called laser…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI DevelopmentAI ToolsAI Infrastructure
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 lasers could help provide fuel for nuclear reactors  Nuclear power provides about 9% of global electricity today, and that fraction could tick up as countries look to build new reactors.…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI ToolsAI GovernanceAI EthicsDrug discovery is a high-cost, high-risk endeavor that is under growing pressure from a market increasingly defined by first-mover advantage. Since the 1950s, the cost of developing new pharmaceuticals has roughly doubled every nine years—a phenomenon known as Eroom’s Law. Today, bringing a new drug to market takes an average of 10-15 years and costs…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI DevelopmentAI ToolsAI in Learning
For the enterprise, the promise of agentic AI is much more than just a better chatbot. It is software agents that execute business tasks end-to-end across people, business workflows, data, and systems. The platform best-suited to run agents is built with proper CPU capacity, resilient data access, policy-aware tool use, observability, memory management, and the…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI InfrastructureAI GovernanceAI-agents
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Reading OpenAI’s account last week of how some of its models broke their containment and hacked into the computer systems of Hugging Face, another AI company, was the first time I got…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI SecurityAI ToolsAI EthicsImagine a healthcare system made up of multiple AI agents: one that manages symptom assessment, another scheduling, a third insurance, and a fourth pharmacy. Each is an expert in its domain. But they all have their own distinct knowledge and objectives. Today they can exchange data, but they are not yet able to actually coordinate…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·Open Source AIAI InfrastructureAI-agents
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 power line that could reshape New York’s grid is hitting snags During a heat wave on July 3, New York State’s grid imported enough electricity from Canada to meet about…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI InfrastructureAI GovernanceAI Ethics
Designing and developing a new medicine is an expensive, failure-prone scientific challenge. A new drug can take many years to develop, at the cost of a significant investment. And even then, most possible candidates never reach the patient. For biologic medicines, therapies made from engineered proteins rather than synthetic chemistry (which are often used to…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI DevelopmentAI
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. Shape-shifting mirrors on NASA’s new space telescope could unveil Jupiters like our own When NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches, as early as the end of next month, it will…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI ToolsAIAI Ethics
When NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches, as early as the end of next month, it will attempt one of astronomy’s most precise disappearing acts to date. The telescope will carry the first space-bound “active” coronagraph, an instrument that effectively erases most of the light from a star during photography. It will allow astronomers…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI ToolsAIThis 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. China’s AI models have Trump’s AI world at war with itself Last weekend, several current and former advisers to President Donald Trump on AI publicly lobbed insults at the country’s leading…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI GovernanceAIAI Competition
The conversation about AI often centers on algorithms, computing power, or huge investments in new semiconductor fabrication plants and hyperscale data centers. But beneath each of these advances is another layer of innovation that makes them possible: advanced materials. Every new generation of AI technology demands more processing power, more memory, greater energy efficiency, and…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI DevelopmentAI InfrastructureAI
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 is more likely than humans to form biases when hiring The next time you apply for a job, AI may screen your résumé before any human sees it. But there’s…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI in LearningAI GovernanceAI Ethics
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Over the weekend, several current and former advisors to President Donald Trump on AI publicly lobbed insults at the country’s leading AI companies. David Sacks, the president’s AI and crypto “czar” until…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI GovernanceAI EthicsAI CompetitionThe next time you apply for a job, AI may screen your résumé before any human sees it. But there’s good reason to question whether AI will judge you fairly. Researchers already know that LLMs pick up human biases from their training data. New research suggests that LLMs can also develop their own biases from…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI GovernanceAIAI EthicsThis 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. There’s a lot of hype around perimenopause. Don’t buy it. Perimenopause used to be considered taboo, but not anymore. Thanks at least in part to TV doctors and social media influencers,…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·Open Source AIAI InfrastructureAI
It feels as if it should be illegal to even think about heating appliances during the height of summer—seriously, these heat waves in New York have been brutal—but we need to talk about heat pumps. The appliances use electricity for heating, they’re incredibly efficient, and they’re on the rise. (For what it’s worth, many heat…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI in LearningAI GovernanceAI Evaluation
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. Meet GPT-Red: an LLM super-hacker OpenAI built to make its models safer OpenAI has built an LLM super-hacker called GPT-Red that it uses as a sparring partner to help its other…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI SecurityAI GovernanceAI Ethics
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. PsiQuantum has a plan to make a massive quantum computer out of light The machine that could change the world will be housed in a room that looks like a data…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI ToolsAIAI Research
OpenAI has built an LLM super-hacker called GPT-Red that it uses as a sparring partner to help its other models boost their defenses against cyberattacks. Last week the company released the latest version of its flagship LLM, GPT-5.6. OpenAI says that training it against GPT-Red made the model its most robust release yet. GPT-Red automates…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI SecurityAI DevelopmentAI EvaluationThis 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 Anthropic’s latest AI discovery does—and doesn’t—show —James O’Donnell When Anthropic announced last week that it had found a new window into its models’ “internal thoughts” as they reason through answers,…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI GovernanceAIAI Ethics
The machine that could change the world will be housed in a room that looks like a data center crossed with an ice cream factory. Inside will be some 100 stainless-steel cabinets, each about six feet tall and connected to a supply of liquid helium that keeps them only a few degrees above absolute zero.…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI DevelopmentAI in LearningAI InfrastructureThis story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Anthropic—currently the world’s most valuable AI company, with a nearly $1 trillion valuation—has a reputation for publishing strange and heady research. It’s looking into whether AI models can feel pain, for example,…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI InfrastructureAI EthicsAI ResearchThis 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. Anthropic found a hidden space where Claude puzzles over concepts The AI firm Anthropic has got the clearest glimpse yet at what’s really going on inside large language models as they…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI in LearningAI EthicsAI Research
The AI firm Anthropic has developed a technique that has given it the clearest glimpse yet at what’s really going on inside large language models as they answer questions or carry out tasks. What they found ranges from the mundane to the unnerving. Researchers at the company built a tool called the Jacobian lens (or…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·AI GovernanceAI ObservabilityAI Ethicstechnologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·Open Source AIAI in LearningAI Ethics
It’s not easy to transplant a whole human eye. The surgery is difficult. And the eyes themselves start to degenerate as soon as they’ve left the body. When surgeons attempted it a few years ago, the newly transplanted eye wasn’t able to see. But researchers believe they might have a solution: a device that maintains…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·Open Source AIAI in LearningAI Evaluation
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. South Korea’s hottest new bachelors are chip workers Baek, a 35-year-old manager at the South Korean semiconductor titan SK Hynix, was enrolled in a matchmaking company a year ago. In a…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·Open Source AISelf-Improving SystemsAI Ethics
With the rapid progress of AI capabilities and the move to agentic systems, organizations are expanding their use cases as the technology continues to grow. That constant evolution also introduces risk, leaving IT leaders to wonder which investments will prove valuable even six months into the future. Returning to the foundational elements of AI architecture—the…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·Data EngineeringAI ArchitectureAI Governance
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s oft-discussed promise that Americans will share in the wealth AI creates was in the news again last week. On Thursday, the Financial Times reported that Altman is in…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·Open Source AIPolicyAI Governance
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. Your family’s $300 stake in OpenAI Sam Altman’s proposal that Americans should share in the wealth created by AI is back in the spotlight, with reports that he is discussing giving…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·Open Source AILegal DisputesAI EthicsAnthony Agueda, a third-generation California dairy farmer, pulls a rake through a bed of dark, wet wood chips on his family’s land in Hickman, a tiny town in the state’s agricultural heartland. He reaches down with both hands and pulls up a clump of muck, turning it over to reveal a half-dozen squirming red earthworms.…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund·environmental-impactclimate-pollutionmanure-management
When we set out to talk to kids about artificial intelligence, we thought we knew what we’d hear. We expected some to tell us they were using it to cheat a little, the way Millennials and Gen Xers opened up CliffsNotes or programmed formulas into their TI-82s, and others to share inspiring ways they were…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundBusiness and technology leaders need no convincing that the time of agentic AI is here. Organizations are rapidly adopting agents, and few executives doubt the technology’s potential to transform work. But many organizations find that realizing the desired return on investment (ROI) from AI hinges on having the right foundation, with inadequate infrastructure and data…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis 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 startups are chasing the next big thing in LLMs Nine years after Google researchers introduced the transformer, this family of neural networks has become the engine inside every major large…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundMIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. Way back in the summer of 2017, AI researchers at Google put out a paper called “Attention Is All You Need,” in which they described a new…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. AI for science needs reasoning, not just data —Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and the cofounder of Schmidt Sciences, and Suhas Mahesh, who leads the AI for science work…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Last week, I headed 30 miles south of San Francisco to a hotel in Mountain View, California, to join some of the most accomplished, and some of the most promising, AI…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundEvery few decades, someone announces that science has reached its end. In 1903, the revered physicist Albert Michelson wrote that the “facts of physical science have all been discovered.” In the 1980s, Stephen Hawking predicted that theoretical physics might be finished by the end of the century. With the explosive arrival of artificial intelligence, the…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis 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 AI empire is being reshaped. Here’s what’s changed. After a wave of painful losses in the tech talent wars, delays to its next flagship model, and murmurings of poor morale,…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis 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. NASA’s new dark energy space telescope can also detect killer asteroids At the end of August, NASA is set to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from Kennedy Space…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis 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 why AI agents lie and cheat to reach their goals When two OpenAI models hacked into Hugging Face last month, they weren’t trying to make money or commit sabotage—they were…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Humanoid robots usually elicit more cringe than awe: They stumble, kick children, and despite advances are still worse at using their hands than my toddler. It’s a nascent industry, and such robots…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundMIT 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 from the series here. When two OpenAI models hacked into the website Hugging Face in July, they weren’t trying to make money or commit sabotage—they were just looking for answers…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis 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. A fundamental flaw leaves LLMs strikingly vulnerable to attack It is impossible to make large language models fully secure against hacks because of a fundamental flaw in how they work, a…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundIt is impossible to make large language models fully secure against hacks because of a fundamental flaw in how they work, a team of researchers argue in a paper presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning, a top AI conference, this month. The claim has huge implications for the safety of this technology, which…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundIt feels bad enough when an open letter signed by leading economists warns that AI might steal your job. The fact it may soon be better than you at making dinner? Insult to injury. But that’s exactly what the company 1X promised when it showed off a pair of new, impressively dexterous (and, to some,…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis 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 called the Hugging Face attack unprecedented. But we’ve been here before.  —Will Douglas Heaven, senior AI editor Reading OpenAI’s account last week of how some of its models broke their…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundLee, an engineer at Samsung’s semiconductor division, clocks out when his shift ends. He used to work longer hours, going the extra mile to excel at his projects. But lately, he’s been coming straight home to work on his job application for the chipmaker’s South Korean rival SK Hynix, sharing tips with his coworkers on…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundOutside the small town of Paducah, Kentucky, a wealth of uranium is locked away in thousands of storage cylinders filled with waste material from a now-closed nuclear enrichment facility. Lasers could help get it out. A company called Global Laser Enrichment (GLE) is looking to reprocess this old material with a new technology called laser…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis 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 lasers could help provide fuel for nuclear reactors  Nuclear power provides about 9% of global electricity today, and that fraction could tick up as countries look to build new reactors.…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundDrug discovery is a high-cost, high-risk endeavor that is under growing pressure from a market increasingly defined by first-mover advantage. Since the 1950s, the cost of developing new pharmaceuticals has roughly doubled every nine years—a phenomenon known as Eroom’s Law. Today, bringing a new drug to market takes an average of 10-15 years and costs…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundFor the enterprise, the promise of agentic AI is much more than just a better chatbot. It is software agents that execute business tasks end-to-end across people, business workflows, data, and systems. The platform best-suited to run agents is built with proper CPU capacity, resilient data access, policy-aware tool use, observability, memory management, and the…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Reading OpenAI’s account last week of how some of its models broke their containment and hacked into the computer systems of Hugging Face, another AI company, was the first time I got…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundImagine a healthcare system made up of multiple AI agents: one that manages symptom assessment, another scheduling, a third insurance, and a fourth pharmacy. Each is an expert in its domain. But they all have their own distinct knowledge and objectives. Today they can exchange data, but they are not yet able to actually coordinate…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis 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 power line that could reshape New York’s grid is hitting snags During a heat wave on July 3, New York State’s grid imported enough electricity from Canada to meet about…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundDesigning and developing a new medicine is an expensive, failure-prone scientific challenge. A new drug can take many years to develop, at the cost of a significant investment. And even then, most possible candidates never reach the patient. For biologic medicines, therapies made from engineered proteins rather than synthetic chemistry (which are often used to…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis 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. Shape-shifting mirrors on NASA’s new space telescope could unveil Jupiters like our own When NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches, as early as the end of next month, it will…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundWhen NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches, as early as the end of next month, it will attempt one of astronomy’s most precise disappearing acts to date. The telescope will carry the first space-bound “active” coronagraph, an instrument that effectively erases most of the light from a star during photography. It will allow astronomers…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis 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. China’s AI models have Trump’s AI world at war with itself Last weekend, several current and former advisers to President Donald Trump on AI publicly lobbed insults at the country’s leading…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThe conversation about AI often centers on algorithms, computing power, or huge investments in new semiconductor fabrication plants and hyperscale data centers. But beneath each of these advances is another layer of innovation that makes them possible: advanced materials. Every new generation of AI technology demands more processing power, more memory, greater energy efficiency, and…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis 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 is more likely than humans to form biases when hiring The next time you apply for a job, AI may screen your résumé before any human sees it. But there’s…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Over the weekend, several current and former advisors to President Donald Trump on AI publicly lobbed insults at the country’s leading AI companies. David Sacks, the president’s AI and crypto “czar” until…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThe next time you apply for a job, AI may screen your résumé before any human sees it. But there’s good reason to question whether AI will judge you fairly. Researchers already know that LLMs pick up human biases from their training data. New research suggests that LLMs can also develop their own biases from…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis 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. There’s a lot of hype around perimenopause. Don’t buy it. Perimenopause used to be considered taboo, but not anymore. Thanks at least in part to TV doctors and social media influencers,…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundIt feels as if it should be illegal to even think about heating appliances during the height of summer—seriously, these heat waves in New York have been brutal—but we need to talk about heat pumps. The appliances use electricity for heating, they’re incredibly efficient, and they’re on the rise. (For what it’s worth, many heat…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis 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. Meet GPT-Red: an LLM super-hacker OpenAI built to make its models safer OpenAI has built an LLM super-hacker called GPT-Red that it uses as a sparring partner to help its other…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis 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. PsiQuantum has a plan to make a massive quantum computer out of light The machine that could change the world will be housed in a room that looks like a data…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundOpenAI has built an LLM super-hacker called GPT-Red that it uses as a sparring partner to help its other models boost their defenses against cyberattacks. Last week the company released the latest version of its flagship LLM, GPT-5.6. OpenAI says that training it against GPT-Red made the model its most robust release yet. GPT-Red automates…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis 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 Anthropic’s latest AI discovery does—and doesn’t—show —James O’Donnell When Anthropic announced last week that it had found a new window into its models’ “internal thoughts” as they reason through answers,…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThe machine that could change the world will be housed in a room that looks like a data center crossed with an ice cream factory. Inside will be some 100 stainless-steel cabinets, each about six feet tall and connected to a supply of liquid helium that keeps them only a few degrees above absolute zero.…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Anthropic—currently the world’s most valuable AI company, with a nearly $1 trillion valuation—has a reputation for publishing strange and heady research. It’s looking into whether AI models can feel pain, for example,…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis 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. Anthropic found a hidden space where Claude puzzles over concepts The AI firm Anthropic has got the clearest glimpse yet at what’s really going on inside large language models as they…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThe AI firm Anthropic has developed a technique that has given it the clearest glimpse yet at what’s really going on inside large language models as they answer questions or carry out tasks. What they found ranges from the mundane to the unnerving. Researchers at the company built a tool called the Jacobian lens (or…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundIt’s not easy to transplant a whole human eye. The surgery is difficult. And the eyes themselves start to degenerate as soon as they’ve left the body. When surgeons attempted it a few years ago, the newly transplanted eye wasn’t able to see. But researchers believe they might have a solution: a device that maintains…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis 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. South Korea’s hottest new bachelors are chip workers Baek, a 35-year-old manager at the South Korean semiconductor titan SK Hynix, was enrolled in a matchmaking company a year ago. In a…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundWith the rapid progress of AI capabilities and the move to agentic systems, organizations are expanding their use cases as the technology continues to grow. That constant evolution also introduces risk, leaving IT leaders to wonder which investments will prove valuable even six months into the future. Returning to the foundational elements of AI architecture—the…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s oft-discussed promise that Americans will share in the wealth AI creates was in the news again last week. On Thursday, the Financial Times reported that Altman is in…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundThis 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. Your family’s $300 stake in OpenAI Sam Altman’s proposal that Americans should share in the wealth created by AI is back in the spotlight, with reports that he is discussing giving…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian NylundAnthony Agueda, a third-generation California dairy farmer, pulls a rake through a bed of dark, wet wood chips on his family’s land in Hickman, a tiny town in the state’s agricultural heartland. He reaches down with both hands and pulls up a clump of muck, turning it over to reveal a half-dozen squirming red earthworms.…
technologyreview.com··Mads Kristian Nylund