The explosion in text-to-image AI models like OpenAI’s DALL-E 2—programs trained to generate pictures of almost anything you ask for—has sent ripples through the creative industries, from fashion to filmmaking, by providing weird and wonderful images on demand. The same technology behind these programs is also making a splash in biotech labs, which are increasingly…

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. Elon Musk’s Neuralink hopes to test its brain implant in a human next year Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface company Neuralink is planning to test a brain implant in humans in six months, the…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. I’m coming in with a hot take this week: plastics might just be the most useful inventions of the 20th century.  Before you get out the pitchforks, let me take you on a…

Buzz around GPT-4, the anticipated but as-yet-unannounced follow-up to OpenAI’s groundbreaking large language model, GPT-3, is growing by the week. But OpenAI is not yet done tinkering with the previous version. The San Francisco-based company has released a demo of a new model called ChatGPT, a spin-off of GPT-3 that is geared toward answering questions…

UPDATE: I’m claiming victory. Neuralink disclosed it has been testing vision implants in monkeys, although it hasn’t made as much progress as I hoped for. In a presentation lasting more than two hours, Elon Musk said he hoped to win US Food and Drug Administration approval to implant a Neuralink computer inside a human’s skull…

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. Elon Musk has created a toxic mess for the LGBTQ+ community. I would know. By Scott Wiener, a California state senator who represents San Francisco and northern San Mateo County. A mere day…

We tend to lump all plastics into one category, but water bottles, milk jugs, egg cartons, and credit cards are actually made from different materials, as you’ve probably noticed while trying to figure out what can go in your recycling bin. Once they’ve reached a recycling facility, the plastic must be separated, a process that…

China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. The past week has meant many sleepless nights for people in China, and for people like me who are intently watching from afar.  You may have seen that nearly three years after the pandemic started,…

A mere day after Elon Musk reactivated Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter account, she tweeted that I’m a “communist groomer,” presumably because I’m a gay Jewish Democratic elected official from San Francisco.  Greene’s tweet also promoted her proposed federal law to ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth and to make it effectively impossible for adult…

For years, the 150-year-old Colorado State Fair has held its fine art competition under little media glare. But when it announced the 2022 winners in August, this little-known local event immediately sparked controversy around the globe. Judges had picked synthetic media artist Jason Allen’s artificial intelligence-generated work “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” as the winner in 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. The AI myth Western lawmakers get wrong While the US and the EU may differ on how to regulate tech, their lawmakers seem to agree on one thing: the West needs to ban…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. While the US and the EU may differ on how to regulate tech, their lawmakers seem to agree on one thing: the West needs to ban AI-powered social scoring. As they understand it, social…

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. What’s next in cybersecurity In the world of cybersecurity, there is always one certainty: more hacks. That is the unavoidable constant in an industry that will spend an estimated $150 billion worldwide this…

This story is a part of MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series, where we look across industries, trends, and technologies to let you know what to expect in the coming year. In the world of cybersecurity, there is always one certainty: more hacks. That is the unavoidable constant in an industry that will spend an…

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 bot that watched 70,000 hours of Minecraft could unlock AI’s next big thing The news: An AI that binged on 70,000 hours of people playing Minecraft has learned how to play the…

OpenAI has built the best Minecraft-playing bot yet by making it watch 70,000 hours of video of people playing the popular computer game. It showcases a powerful new technique that could be used to train machines to carry out a wide range of tasks by binging on sites like YouTube, a vast and untapped source…

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. Peter Zhu was just 19 years old when he died following a skiing accident in West Point, New York. His donor card made clear he had wanted to donate his organs. But…

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 US and China are pointing fingers at each other over climate change The UN climate conference wrapped up over the weekend after marathon negotiations that ran way over. The most notable outcome was the…

The UN climate conference just wrapped up over the weekend after a marathon negotiating session that stretched talks nearly 48 hours past their scheduled conclusion. (A question for my editor: the UN isn’t hitting deadlines, so do I still have to?) The most notable outcome from the conference was establishment of a fund to help…

Large language models are one of the hottest areas of AI research right now, with companies racing to release programs like GPT-3 that can write impressively coherent articles and even computer code. But there’s a problem looming on the horizon, according to a team of AI forecasters: we might run out of data to train…