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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. Anthropic can now track the bizarre inner workings of a large language model The news: The AI firm Anthropic has developed a way to peer inside a large language model and watch what…

This week, MIT Technology Review published a piece on bodyoids—living bodies that cannot think or feel pain. In the piece, a trio of scientists argue that advances in biotechnology will soon allow us to create “spare” human bodies that could be used for research, or to provide organs for donation. If you find your skin…

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. With the recent news that the Atlantic’s editor in chief was accidentally added to a group Signal chat for American leaders planning a bombing in Yemen,…

The AI firm Anthropic has developed a way to peer inside a large language model and watch what it does as it comes up with a response, revealing key new insights into how the technology works. The takeaway: LLMs are even stranger than we thought. The Anthropic team was surprised by some of the counterintuitive…

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. Inside a romance scam compound—and how people get tricked into being there Gavesh’s journey had started, seemingly innocently, with a job ad on Facebook promising work he desperately needed. Instead, he found himself…

Glaciers generally move so slowly you can’t see their progress with the naked eye. (Their pace is … glacial.) But these massive bodies of ice do march downhill, with potentially planet-altering consequences.   There’s a lot we don’t understand about how glaciers move and how soon some of the most significant ones could collapse into the…

Heading north in the dark, the only way Gavesh could try to track his progress through the Thai countryside was by watching the road signs zip by. The Jeep’s three occupants—Gavesh, a driver, and a young Chinese woman—had no languages in common, so they drove for hours in nervous silence as they wove their way…

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. China built hundreds of AI data centers to catch the AI boom. Now many stand unused. Just months ago, China’s boom in data center construction was at its height, fueled by both government…

A year or so ago, Xiao Li was seeing floods of Nvidia chip deals on WeChat. A real estate contractor turned data center project manager, he had pivoted to AI infrastructure in 2023, drawn by the promise of China’s AI craze.  At that time, traders in his circle bragged about securing shipments of high-performing Nvidia…

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. While AI models are certainly capable of creating interesting and sometimes entertaining material, their output isn’t necessarily useful. Google DeepMind is hoping that…

OpenAI has released a new image generator that’s designed less for typical surrealist AI art and more for highly controllable and practical creation of visuals—a sign that OpenAI thinks its tools are ready for use in fields like advertising and graphic design.  The image generator, which is now part of the company’s GPT-4o model, was…

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. Ethically sourced “spare” human bodies could revolutionize medicine Many challenges in medicine stem, in large part, from a common root cause: a severe shortage of ethically-sourced human bodies. There might be a way…

This story was originally published in October 2024. In March 2025, 23andMe filed for bankruptcy and announced its plans to “facilitate a sale process to maximize the value of its business.” MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done.  Things aren’t looking good for 23andMe. The consumer DNA testing company recently parted ways with…

A few weeks ago, when I was at the digital rights conference RightsCon in Taiwan, I watched in real time as civil society organizations from around the world, including the US, grappled with the loss of one of the biggest funders of global digital rights work: the United States government. As I wrote in my…

Why do we hear about medical breakthroughs in mice, but rarely see them translate into cures for human disease? Why do so few drugs that enter clinical trials receive regulatory approval? And why is the waiting list for organ transplantation so long? These challenges stem in large part from a common root cause: a severe…

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. Why handing over total control to AI agents would be a huge mistake —Margaret Mitchell, Avijit Ghosh, Sasha Luccioni, Giada Pistilli all work for Hugging Face, an open source AI company. AI agents…

AI agents have set the tech industry abuzz. Unlike chatbots, these groundbreaking new systems operate outside of a chat window, navigating multiple applications to execute complex tasks, like scheduling meetings or shopping online, in response to simple user commands. As agents are developed to become more capable, a crucial question emerges: How much control are…

OpenAI says over 400 million people use ChatGPT every week. But how does interacting with it affect us? Does it make us more or less lonely? These are some of the questions OpenAI set out to investigate, in partnership with the MIT Media Lab, in a pair of new studies.  They found that only 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. Inside a new quest to save the “doomsday glacier” The Thwaites glacier is a fortress larger than Florida, a wall of ice that reaches nearly 4,000 feet above the bedrock of West Antarctica,…

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been following news of the deaths of actor Gene Hackman and his wife, pianist Betsy Arakawa. It was heartbreaking to hear how Arakawa appeared to have died from a rare infection days before her husband, who had advanced Alzheimer’s disease and may have struggled to understand what had…

The Thwaites glacier is a fortress larger than Florida, a wall of ice that reaches nearly 4,000 feet above the bedrock of West Antarctica, guarding the low-lying ice sheet behind it. But a strong, warm ocean current is weakening its foundations and accelerating its slide into the Amundsen Sea. Scientists fear the waters could topple…

Europe is on the cusp of a new dawn in commercial space technology. As global political tensions intensify and relationships with the US become increasingly strained, several European companies are now planning to conduct their own launches in an attempt to reduce the continent’s reliance on American rockets. In the coming days, Isar Aerospace, a…

Recorded on March 20, 2025 AI Chatbots Have Joined the Chat Speakers: Rachel Courtland, commissioning editor, Rhiannon Williams, news reporter, and Eileen Guo, features & investigations reporter. Chatbots are quickly changing how we connect to each other and ourselves. But are these changes for the better? How should they be monitored and regulated? Hear from MIT…

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. 4 technologies that could power the future of energy Where can you find lasers, electric guitars, and racks full of novel batteries, all in the same giant room? This week, the answer was…