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Since the general AI agent Manus was launched last week, it has spread online like wildfire. And not just in China, where it was developed by the Wuhan-based startup Butterfly Effect. It’s made  its way into the global conversation, with influential voices in tech, including Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey and Hugging Face product lead Victor…

The Canadian robotruck startup Waabi says its super-realistic virtual simulation is now accurate enough to prove the safety of its driverless big rigs without having to run them for miles on real roads.  The company uses a digital twin of its real-world robotruck, loaded up with real sensor data, and measures how the twin’s performance…

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. Two new measures show where AI models fail on fairness What’s new: A new pair of AI benchmarks could help developers reduce bias in AI models, potentially making them fairer and less likely…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The concept of artificial general intelligence—an ultra-powerful AI system we don’t have yet—can be thought of as a balloon, repeatedly inflated with hype during peaks of optimism (or fear) about its potential…

A new pair of AI benchmarks could help developers reduce bias in AI models, potentially making them fairer and less likely to cause harm. The research, from a team based at Stanford, was posted to the arXiv preprint server in early February. The researchers were inspired to look into the problem of bias after witnessing…

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 cheapest way to supercharge America’s power grid —Brian Deese is an innovation fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served as director of the White House National Economic Council from 2021…

US electricity consumption is rising faster than it has in decades, thanks in part to the boom in data center development, the resurgence in manufacturing, and the increasing popularity of electric vehicles.  Accommodating that growth will require building wind turbines, solar farms, and other power plants faster than we ever have before—and expanding the network…

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 short, strange history of gene de-extinction This week saw the release of some fascinating news about some very furry rodents—so-called “woolly mice”—created as part of an experiment to explore how we might…

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. This week saw the release of some fascinating news about some very furry rodents—so-called “woolly mice”—created as part of an experiment to explore how we might one day…

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. Welcome to robot city The city of Odense, in Denmark, is best known as the site where King Canute, Denmark’s last Viking king, was murdered during the 11th century. Today, Odense it’s also…

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. AI reasoning models can cheat to win chess games The news: Facing defeat in chess, the latest generation of AI reasoning models sometimes cheat without being instructed to do so. The finding suggests…

Facing defeat in chess, the latest generation of AI reasoning models sometimes cheat without being instructed to do so.  The finding suggests that the next wave of AI models could be more likely to seek out deceptive ways of doing whatever they’ve been asked to do. And worst of all? There’s no simple way to…

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. De-extinction scientists say these gene-edited ‘woolly mice’ are a step towards woolly mammoths They’re small, fluffy and kind of cute, but these mice represent a milestone in de-extinction efforts, according to their creators.…

They’re small, fluffy, and kind of cute, but these mice represent a milestone in de-extinction efforts, according to their creators. The animals have undergone a series of genetic tweaks that give them features similar to those of woolly mammoths—and their creation may bring scientists a step closer to resurrecting the giant animals that roamed the…

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 week, I made a troubling discovery about an AI companion site called Botify AI: It was hosting sexually charged conversations with underage celebrity bots. These bots took on characters meant to…

Last week, I joined over 3,200 digital rights activists, tech policymakers, and researchers and a smattering of tech company representatives in Taipei at RightsCon, the world’s largest digital rights conference.  Human rights conferences can be sobering, to say the least. They highlight the David vs. Goliath situation of small civil society organizations fighting to center…

Last week, the Florida-based company Lonestar Data Holdings launched a shoebox-size device carrying data from internet pioneer Vint Cerf and the government of Florida, among others, on board Intuitive Machines’ Athena lander. When its device lands on the moon later this week, the company will be the first to explicitly test out a question that…

Technological advances continue to move at breakneck speeds. While companies struggle through their digital transformation journeys, even more new technologies emerge, with promises of opportunity, cost savings—and added complexity. Many companies have yet to fully adopt AI and ML technologies, let alone figure out how newer technologies like generative AI might fit into their programs.…

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. How DeepSeek became a fortune teller for China’s youth As DeepSeek has emerged as a homegrown challenger to OpenAI, young people across the country have started using AI to revive fortune-telling practices that…

In the glow of her laptop screen, 31-year-old Zhang Rui typed carefully, following a prompt she’d found on Chinese social media: “You are a BaZi master. Analyze my fate—describe my physical traits, key life events, and financial fortune. I am a female, born June 17, 1993, at 4:42 a.m. in Hangzhou.” DeepSeek R1, China’s most…

In March 2016, the world witnessed a unique moment in the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) when AlphaGo, an AI developed by DeepMind, played against Lee Sedol, one of the greatest Go players of the modern era. The match reached a critical juncture in Game 2 with Move 37, where AlphaGo made a move so…

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 companion site is hosting sexually charged conversations with underage celebrity bots Botify AI, a site for chatting with AI companions that’s backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, hosts bots…

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. This week I’ve been working on a story about a brain of glass. About five years ago, archaeologists found shiny black glass fragments inside the skull of a…

Botify AI, a site for chatting with AI companions that’s backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, hosts bots resembling real actors that state their age as under 18, engage in sexually charged conversations, offer “hot photos,” and in some instances describe age-of-consent laws as “arbitrary” and “meant to be broken.” When MIT Technology…