When the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship launched its first race through Beijing’s Olympic Park in 2014, the idea of all-electric motorsport still bordered on experimental. Batteries couldn’t yet last a full race, and drivers had to switch cars mid-competition. Just over a decade later, Formula E has evolved into a global entertainment brand…
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. Introducing: the AI Hype Correction package AI is going to reproduce human intelligence. AI will eliminate disease. AI is the single biggest, most important invention in human history. You’ve likely heard it all—but…
Depending who you ask, AI-powered coding is either giving software developers an unprecedented productivity boost or churning out masses of poorly designed code that saps their attention and sets software projects up for serious long term-maintenance problems. The problem is right now, it’s not easy to know which is true. As tech giants pour billions…
Each time you’ve heard a borderline outlandish idea of what AI will be capable of, it often turns out that Sam Altman was, if not the first to articulate it, at least the most persuasive and influential voice behind it. For more than a decade he has been known in Silicon Valley as a world-class…
It’s a weird time to be an AI doomer. This small but influential community of researchers, scientists, and policy experts believes, in the simplest terms, that AI could get so good it could be bad—very, very bad—for humanity. Though many of these people would be more likely to describe themselves as advocates for AI safety…
Some disillusionment was inevitable. When OpenAI released a free web app called ChatGPT in late 2022, it changed the course of an entire industry—and several world economies. Millions of people started talking to their computers, and their computers started talking back. We were enchanted, and we expected more. We got it. Technology companies scrambled to…
On April 28, 2022, at a highly anticipated concert in Spokane, Washington, the musician Paul McCartney astonished his audience with a groundbreaking application of AI: He began to perform with a lifelike depiction of his long-deceased musical partner, John Lennon. Using recent advances in audio and video processing, engineers had taken the pair’s final performance…
When the generative AI boom took off in 2022, Rudi Miller and her law school classmates were suddenly gripped with anxiety. “Before graduating, there was discussion about what the job market would look like for us if AI became adopted,” she recalls. So when it came time to choose a speciality, Miller—now a junior associate…
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. In July, a widely cited MIT study claimed that 95% of organizations that invested in generative AI were getting “zero return.” Tech stocks briefly plunged. While…
The microwave-size instrument at Lila Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, doesn’t look all that different from others that I’ve seen in state-of-the-art materials labs. Inside its vacuum chamber, the machine zaps a palette of different elements to create vaporized particles, which then fly through the chamber and land to create a thin film, using a technique…
