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A US push to use ethanol as aviation fuel raises major climate concerns

Corn, like any plant that uses photosynthesis to produce food, sucks up carbon dioxide from the air. But using it for fuel rather than food also creates pressure to clear more land... Read more »

Sam Altman says helpful agents are poised to become AI’s killer function

It’s a leap from OpenAI’s current offerings. Its leading applications, like DALL-E, Sora, and ChatGPT (which Altman referred to as “incredibly dumb” compared with what’s coming next), have wowed us with their ability... Read more »

The Download: mysterious radio energy from outer space, and banning TikTok

When our universe was less than half as old as it is today, a burst of energy that could cook a sun’s worth of popcorn shot out from somewhere amid a compact... Read more »

The depressing truth about TikTok’s impending ban

That 2020 executive order came to nothing in the end—it was blocked in the courts, put aside after the presidency changed hands, and eventually withdrawn by the Biden administration. Yet the idea—that... Read more »

Inside the quest to map the universe with mysterious bursts of radio energy

As a leader in the field and a key player in the advancement of FRB research, Macquart would have been interviewed for this piece. But he died of a heart attack one... Read more »

Roundtables: Inside the Next Era of AI and Hardware

The latest iteration of a legacy Founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1899, MIT Technology Review is a world-renowned, independent media company whose insight, analysis, reviews, interviews and live events... Read more »

The Download: robotics’ data bottleneck, and our AI afterlives

Roboticists believe that, using new AI techniques, they can unlock more capable robots that can move freely through unfamiliar environments and tackle challenges they’ve never seen before. But something is standing in... Read more »

My deepfake shows how valuable our data is in the age of AI

Synthesia has managed to create AI avatars that are remarkably humanlike after only one year of tinkering with the latest generation of generative AI. It’s equally exciting and daunting thinking about where... Read more »

The robot race is fueling a fight for training data

“A lot of people are scrambling to figure out what’s the next big data source,” says Pras Velagapudi, chief technology officer of Agility Robotics, which makes a humanoid robot that operates in... Read more »

The Download: inside the US defense tech aid package, and how AI is improving vegan cheese

After weeks of drawn-out congressional debate over how much the United States should spend on conflicts abroad, President Joe Biden signed a $95 billion aid package into law last week. The bill... Read more »