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There can be no winners in a US-China AI arms race

The United States and China are entangled in what many have dubbed an “AI arms race.” In the early days of this standoff, US policymakers drove an agenda centered on “winning” the race, mostly from an economic perspective. In recent months, leading AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic got involved in pushing the narrative of “beating China” in…
A new company plans to use Earth as a chemical reactor

Forget massive steel tanks—some scientists want to make chemicals with the help of rocks deep beneath Earth’s surface. New research shows that ammonia, a chemical crucial for fertilizer, can be produced from rocks at temperatures and pressures that are common in the subsurface. The research was published today in Joule, and MIT Technology Review can…
The Download: AI for cancer diagnosis, and HIV prevention

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 it’s so hard to use AI to diagnose cancer Finding and diagnosing cancer is all about spotting patterns. Radiologists use x-rays and magnetic resonance imaging to illuminate tumors, and pathologists examine tissue…
Why it’s so hard to use AI to diagnose cancer

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Peering into the body to find and diagnose cancer is all about spotting patterns. Radiologists use x-rays and magnetic resonance imaging to illuminate tumors, and pathologists examine tissue from kidneys, livers,…
The Download: AI’s coding promises, and OpenAI’s longevity push

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 second wave of AI coding is here Ask people building generative AI what generative AI is good for right now—what they’re really fired up about—and many will tell you: coding. Everyone from…
The second wave of AI coding is here

Ask people building generative AI what generative AI is good for right now—what they’re really fired up about—and many will tell you: coding. “That’s something that’s been very exciting for developers,” Jared Kaplan, chief scientist at Anthropic, told MIT Technology Review this month: “It’s really understanding what’s wrong with code, debugging it.” Copilot, a tool…
OpenAI has created an AI model for longevity science

When you think of AI’s contributions to science, you probably think of AlphaFold, the Google DeepMind protein-folding program that earned its creator a Nobel Prize last year. Now OpenAI says it’s getting into the science game too—with a model for engineering proteins. The company says it has developed a language model that dreams up proteins…
The Download: how to save social media, and “leftover” embryos

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 need to protect the protocol that runs Bluesky —Eli Pariser & Deepti Doshi Last week, when Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta would be ending third-party fact-checking, it was a shocking pivot, but not…
We need to protect the protocol that runs Bluesky

Last week, when Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would be ending third-party fact-checking, it was a shocking pivot, but not exactly surprising. It’s just the latest example of a billionaire flip-flop affecting our social lives on the internet. After January 6, 2021, Zuckerberg bragged to Congress about Facebook’s “industry-leading fact-checking program” and banned Donald Trump…
Deciding the fate of “leftover” embryos

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. Over the past few months, I’ve been working on a piece about IVF embryos. The goal of in vitro fertilization is to create babies via a bit of…