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 month in the UK. US approval is pending this week.  The treatment, which will be sold in the US by Vertex Pharmaceuticals, employs CRISPR, the Nobel-winning molecular scissors that have…

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 Gemini model looks amazing—but could signal peak AI hype Hype about Gemini, Google DeepMind’s long-rumored response to OpenAI’s GPT-4, has been building for months. Now, the company has finally revealed…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. If you could go back in time, what would you change about your life, or the world? The idea of giving myself some much-needed advice is appealing (don’t cut your own bangs in high school, seriously). But we can think bigger. What about winding the...

Google released the first phase of its next-generation AI model, Gemini, today. Gemini reflects years of efforts from inside Google, overseen and driven by its CEO, Sundar Pichai. (You can read all about Gemini in our report from Melissa Heikkilä and Will Douglas Heaven here.)  Pichai, who previously oversaw Chrome and Android, is famously product…

Hype about Gemini, Google DeepMind’s long-rumored response to OpenAI’s GPT-4, has been building for months. Today the company finally revealed what it has been working on in secret all this time. Was the hype justified? Yes—and no.  Gemini is Google’s biggest AI launch yet—its push to take on competitors OpenAI and Microsoft in the race for AI supremacy. There is no doubt that the...

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. Millions of coders are now using AI assistants. How will that change software? Two weeks into the coding class he was teaching at Duke University in North Carolina this spring, Noah Gift told…

Two weeks into the coding class he was teaching at Duke University in North Carolina this spring, Noah Gift told his students to throw out the course materials he’d given them. Instead of working with Python, one of the most popular entry-level programming languages, the students would now be using Rust, a language that was…

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Have you ordered food delivery lately?  If you have, you probably know that particular feeling of frustration when you have to wait too long for your order or, when you finally receive it, the food isn’t what you asked for. These...

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. Make no mistake—AI is owned by Big Tech —By Amba Kak, Sarah Myers West and Meredith Whittaker, members of the AI Now Institute Until late November, when the epic saga of OpenAI’s board…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. World leaders are currently in Dubai for the UN COP28 climate talks. As 2023 is set to become the hottest year on record, this year’s meeting is a moment of reckoning for oil and gas companies. There is also renewed focus and enthusiasm on boosting...

Until late November, when the epic saga of OpenAI’s board breakdown unfolded, the casual observer could be forgiven for assuming that the industry around generative AI was a vibrant competitive ecosystem.  But this is not the case—nor has it ever been. And understanding why is fundamental to understanding what AI is, and what threats it poses. Put simply, in the context of the current...

Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are on track to reach a record high by the end of 2023. And a new report shows just how insignificant technologies that pull greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere are by comparison.  Worldwide, those emissions are projected to reach 36.8 billion metric tons in 2023, a 1.1% increase from 2022 levels, according to this year’s Global Carbon Budget...

Advances in machine learning (ML) and AI are emerging on a near-daily basis—meaning that industry, academia, government, and society writ large are evolving their understanding of the associated risks and capabilities in real time. As enterprises seek to capitalize on the potential of AI, it’s critical that they develop, maintain, and advance state-of-the-art ML practices and processes that...

On a picturesque fall day a few years ago, I opened the mailbox and took out an envelope as thick as a Bible that would change my life. The package was from Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and it contained a consent form to participate in a clinical trial for a new gene-editing drug to treat sickle cell disease. A week prior, my wife and I had talked on the phone with Haydar Frangoul, an oncologist and...

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. Climate tech is back—and this time, it can’t afford to fail A cleantech bust in 2011 left almost all the renewable-energy startups in the US either dead or struggling to survive. Over a…

This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review’s weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. I want to share a story about an inspirational young woman and her mother, who have stepped into the fray on AI policy issues after…

There are no jury trials in Chinese courts—but if you think the noodles you just got delivered were too hot, a jury of your peers will quickly determine guilt in the app where you ordered it.  Jury trials, in fact, are plentiful on Chinese apps—especially Meituan, the country’s most popular food delivery service, where millions of users have volunteered to arbitrate complaints...

Lost in a stupor of déjà vu, I rang the intercom buzzer a second time. I had the odd sensation of being unstuck in time. The headquarters of this solar startup looked strangely similar to its previous offices, which I had visited more than a decade before. The name of the company had changed from…

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. Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone The news: Generating a single image using a powerful AI model takes as much energy as fully charging your…

On October 20, Francesca Mani was called to the counselor’s office at her New Jersey high school. A 14-year-old sophomore and a competitive fencer, Francesca wasn’t one for getting in trouble. That day, a rumor had been circulating the halls: over the summer, boys in the school had used artificial intelligence to create sexually explicit and even pornographic photos of some of their...

That’s a real nice CRISPR cure you have there. It would be a pity if anything happened to it.  Okay. Drop the tough-guy accent and toss the black fedora aside. But I do believe that similar conversations could be occurring now that a historic gene-editing cure is coming to market, as soon as this year. By the middle of December, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, based in Boston, is expected to...

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. In fact, generating an image using a powerful AI model takes as much energy as fully charging your smartphone, according to a new study by researchers at the AI startup Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University. However, they found that using an AI model to generate text...

When asked why he targeted banks, notorious criminal Willie Sutton reportedly answered, “Because that’s where the money is.” Similarly, when thoughtful organizations target sustainability, they look to their data centers—because that’s where the carbon emissions are. The International Energy Agency (IEA) attributes about 1.5% of total global electricity use to data centers and...

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 University of California has all but dropped carbon offsets—and thinks you should, too In the fall of 2018, the University of California tasked a team of researchers with identifying projects from which…