Greater speed and agility are helping organizations address an increasingly competitive marketplace, heightened customer expectations, and the lingering impact of the pandemic. To compete more effectively, companies are gathering and analyzing increasingly large and disparate sets of data. But only with cloud solutions, like Microsoft Azure, can this data provide insight into every corner of the...

When seemingly disparate fields, industries, and ways of thinking merge, a convergence happens, which, has the power to build more intuitive and advanced futures for both organizations and the everyday consumer, says Accenture communications, media and technology industry group chair, Kathleen O’Reilly and Daniela Rus, Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence...

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. Microplastics are messing with the microbiomes of seabirds The news: While we know that tiny pieces of plastic are everywhere, we don’t fully understand what they’re doing to us or other animals. Now,…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Think of a teacher. Close your eyes. What does that person look like? If you ask Stable Diffusion or DALL-E 2, two of the most popular AI image generators, it’s a white man with glasses.  Last week, I published a story about new tools...

Tiny pieces of plastic are everywhere. They’re in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. By one estimate, some people ingest around a credit card’s worth of plastic every week. Microplastics have been found in human blood, placentas, and feces. But we don’t fully understand what all these minuscule bits of plastic are doing to us or other animals. Now, new research...

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. ChatGPT is about to revolutionize the economy. We need to decide what that looks like. Whether it’s based on hallucinatory beliefs or not, a gold rush has started over the last several months…

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. Earlier this week, I was chatting with a policy professor in Washington, DC, who told me that students and colleagues alike are asking about GPT-4 and generative AI: What should they be reading? How...

Whether it’s based on hallucinatory beliefs or not, an artificial-intelligence gold rush has started over the last several months to mine the anticipated business opportunities from generative AI models like ChatGPT. App developers, venture-backed startups, and some of the world’s largest corporations are all scrambling to make sense of the sensational text-generating bot released by…

When Lenovo set out to transition into a services-led company, they began by looking internally, says Art Hu, Lenovo’s senior vice president & chief information, technology and delivery officer of the Solutions & Services Group. To offer products and services that provide valuable business outcomes rather than traditional one-off hardware delivery, the company evolved internal…

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. Newly-revealed coronavirus data has reignited a debate over the virus’s origins This week, we’ve seen the resurgence of a debate that has been swirling since the start of the pandemic—where did the virus…

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. This week, coronavirus has been back in the news in a big way. We’ve seen the resurgence of a debate that has been swirling since the start of the pandemic—where did the…

Connected devices have become an expectation: whether at home, in the office, or moving through the city, people rely on smart, interconnected devices and sensors making their lives easier, more productive, and more efficient. Today, technical advances such as lower power chips, better connectivity, and advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are unlocking new...

Repairing a human liver using lab-grown cells. Using oral antibiotics to treat cystic fibrosis patients. Producing a single-dose treatment for breast cancer that’s proving highly effective. Predicting cancer with AI. All of this innovation came out of the UK life sciences industry. “It’s really the only industry that can both improve the health of your population and, therefore,...

In the United Kingdom, all stars are aligning for the space industry to advance, including an active venture capital community, a government cognizant of space tech’s potential, and close collaboration. Add advancements in emerging technologies, like quantum computing, into the mix, and its potential ignites. Joshua Western, CEO and co-founder of Wales-based space manufacturing startup...

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. Amazon is about to go head to head with SpaceX in a battle for satellite internet dominance  What’s coming: Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are about to lock horns once again. Last month,…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. New Year’s Eve is my favorite holiday. It’s a time to celebrate, reflect, and look forward to what’s next. Setting goals, drinking champagne—what’s not to like?  Before you say anything, I do know…

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are about to lock horns once again. Last month, the US Federal Communications Commission approved the final aspects of Project Kuiper, Amazon’s effort to deliver high-speed internet access from space. In May, the company will launch test versions of the Kuiper communications satellites in an attempt to take on SpaceX’s own venture, Starlink, and tap into a market of...

Popular AI image-generating systems notoriously tend to amplify harmful biases and stereotypes. But just how big a problem is it? You can now see for yourself using interactive new online tools. (Spoiler alert: it’s big.) The tools, built by researchers at AI startup Hugging Face and Leipzig University and detailed in a non-peer-reviewed paper, allow people to examine biases in three popular...

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 just launched Bard, its answer to ChatGPT—and it wants you to make it better Google has launched Bard, the search giant’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat. Unlike Bing Chat,…

China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Did you stay up late last week to watch the release of Ernie Bot, the first Chinese rival to ChatGPT? It felt like the most anticipated event in China’s tech world so far this year, but I couldn’t force myself to stay awake till 3 a.m., so I...

Google has launched Bard, the search giant’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat. Unlike Bing Chat, Bard does not look up search results—all the information it returns is generated by the model itself. But it is still designed to help users brainstorm and answer queries. Google wants Bard to become an integral part of the Google Search experience. In a live demo Google...

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 UN just handed out an urgent climate to-do list. Here’s what it says. Time is running short to limit global warming to 1.5°C (2.7 °F) above preindustrial levels, but there are feasible…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. WOW, last week was intense. Several leading AI companies had major product releases. Google said it was giving developers access to its AI language models, and AI startup Anthropic unveiled its AI assistant Claude.…

Large language models are infamous for spewing toxic biases, thanks to the reams of awful human-produced content they get trained on.  But if the models are large enough, and humans have helped train them, then they may be able to self-correct for some of these biases. Remarkably, all we have to do is ask. That’s the finding of an experiment out of AI lab Anthropic, described in a...

Time is running short to address climate change, but there are feasible and effective solutions on the table, according to a new UN climate report released today.  Despite decades of warnings from scientists, global greenhouse-gas emissions are still climbing, hitting a record high in 2022. If humanity wants to limit the worst effects of climate change, we will have to reverse that trend,...

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. Weight-loss injections have taken over the internet. But what does this mean for people IRL? Over the course of the last year, so-called “miracle” weight-loss drugs have blown up across the internet. Although…

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. There’s been a quiet shift in the abortion fight in the US. Since the reversal of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court last June, laws that make most abortions illegal have passed in 13 states. Efforts...

Michael Edenfield’s doctor calls him the Incredible Shrinking Man.  Between Thanksgiving 2021 and Christmas 2022, the 49-year-old aviation worker shed 129 pounds. Also gone: his sleep apnea machine, his high-blood-pressure medication, and a diuretic pill he had used to alleviate fluid retention in his legs. This is thanks to the only medication Edenfield takes today:…

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company that develops life-transforming medicines, found itself inundated with vast volumes of data during the peak of the covid-19 pandemic. In order to derive actionable information from these disparate data sets, which ranged from clinical trial data to real-time supply chain information, the company needed new ways to join and relate them, regardless...