Enterprise AI is no longer a future ambition. It is in full operational flight. Model capabilities are advancing faster than most organizations can absorb, while the cost of performance continues to fall. Globally, AI investment is set to reach $2.5 trillion in 2026, up 44% from the previous year...
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. A new contest pits competitors against each other in a race to biological youth —Jessica Hamzelou This week, I officially signed up for an unusual competition....
This week, I officially signed up for an unusual competition. One that rewards competitors for getting younger. I recently turned 40, and I don’t need reminding that both time and my chronological age only tick forward. But this game is focused on competitors’ biological ages—figures that are mea...
On an afternoon in Seoul in March 2016, I watched a program I helped build put a stone on the fifth line of a Go board in what looked like a gift to its human opponent. Move 37 in game two of the five-game match looked so absurd that some commentators thought it was a…
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 “mind-reading” tool can reconstruct what you’re looking at based on a brain scan A new AI tool can guess what you’re looking at just by analyzing your br...
A new AI tool can guess what you’re looking at just by analyzing your brain scans—and recreate that image with remarkable precision. It can go the other way too, and predict a person’s brain activity based on what they’re looking at. In the image above, for example, the left-hand image of each p...
If you want to install a big battery in New York City, you have to cut through a notoriously tough tangle of regulations. That’s made it difficult to get large energy storage projects on the grid. Faced with those obstacles, some startups are getting creative, finding ways to use relatively small...
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. “We’re not going to shoot ourselves in the foot” over hack fallout, says OpenAI’s chief research officer Two months after OpenAI’s agents hacked into the compu...
Two months after the bombshell news that a swarm of its agents had broken their containment and hacked into the computers of the AI company Hugging Face, OpenAI is still putting out fires. A steady drip of disclosures about other hacks in the weeks since has kept OpenAI in the spotlight and raise...
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. Coming soon: our 2026 list of Climate Tech Companies to Watch With the planet nearing 1.5 °C of warming, climate policies being unraveled, and Big Tech backped...
Earlier this month, the UN announced the planet will tip past 1.5 ˚C of warming, “likely within the next few years,” squashing any lingering hope that nations would cut emissions fast enough to achieve the loftiest goal of the Paris climate agreement. In the US, the world’s second-largest-emittin...
When customers talk about AI costs, the conversation usually starts with token prices and ends with access to the latest, most capable model in the cloud. Do they always need that level of capability? Not necessarily. But that is often where the conversation goes. As AI moves from experimentation...
Listen to the session or watch below The US has spent billions building a “virtual wall” of surveillance towers along its southern border over the past 25 years, promising they will help detect and apprehend border crossers and save lives. But a groundbreaking investigation by MIT Technology Revi...
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 Wednesday, Anthropic announced that earlier this year it had launched a molecular biology lab, where Claude agents read and conjecture about hard biology ...
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. Who’s liable when AI agents go rogue? Over the past few months, a cascade of cyberattacks by AI agents has stunned the world. In July, OpenAI disclosed that a ...
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. Over the past few months, a cascade of cyberattacks by AI agents has stunned the world. In July, OpenAI disclosed that...
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 Pentagon wants $30 million to build an AI-powered lie detector The US government wants to spend $30.3 million over the next five years on an improved lie d...
The US government wants to spend $30.3 million over the next five years on an improved form of lie detector, according to a Department of Defense budget request. The program, called “Polygraph+” or “Polygraph Next”, will focus on scoring algorithms that use artificial intelligence and machine lea...
Around this time last year I was attending an aging conference in Manchester, listening to a talk about fly aging, when my phone started pinging. News outlets were reporting that a hot mic had caught Russia’s and China’s leaders discussing the possibility of living forever. “With the developments...
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. A congressional representative just proposed killing America’s border tower program Delia Ramirez, a Democratic US representative from Illinois, has announced ...