MIT Technology Review

MIT Technology Review is a magazine created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It originally started in 1899 as The Technology Review but was rebranded on April 23, 1998, dropping "The" from its title, under the leadership of publisher R. Bruce Journey. In September 2005, it was revamped again by the current editor-in-chief and publisher, Jason Pontin, bringing it back to a style similar to its earlier days.

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A new AI translation system for headphones clones multiple voices simultaneously

5 days ago | technologyreview.com | Rhiannon Williams

Spatial Speech Translation consists of two AI models, the first of which divides the space surrounding the person wearing the headphones into small regions and uses a neural network to search for potential speakers and pinpoint their direction. The second model then translates the speakers’ words from French, German, or Spanish into English text using publicly available data sets.
The US has approved CRISPR pigs for food

1 week ago | technologyreview.com | Antonio Regalado

What’s certain is that the pig project was technically impressive and scientifically clever. Genus edited pig embryos to remove the receptor that the PRRS virus uses to enter cells. No receptor means no infection. According to Matt Culbertson, chief operating office of the Pig Improvement Company, a Genus subsidiary, the pigs appear entirely immune to more than 99% of the known versions of the PRRS virus, although there is one rare subtype that may break through the protection.
A long-abandoned US nuclear technology is making a comeback in China

1 week ago | technologyreview.com | Casey Crownhart

You can basically copy and paste that line into countless stories about today’s advanced reactor technology. Molten-salt cooling systems? Invented in the mid-20th century but never commercialized. Same for several alternative fuels, like TRISO. And, of course, there’s thorium. This one research reactor in China running with an alternative fuel says a lot about this moment for nuclear energy technology: Many groups are looking into the past for technologies, with a new appetite for building them.
This data set helps researchers spot harmful stereotypes in LLMs

2 weeks ago | technologyreview.com | Rhiannon Williams

AI models are riddled with culturally specific biases. A new data set, called SHADES, is designed to help developers combat the problem by spotting harmful stereotypes and other kinds of discrimination that emerge in AI chatbot responses across a wide range of languages.
The Download: The AI Hype Index, and "normal" AI

2 weeks ago | technologyreview.com | Rhiannon Williams

One more thing The terrible complexity of technological problemsThe philosopher Karl Popper once argued that there are two kinds of problems in the world: clock problems and cloud problems. As the metaphor suggests, clock problems obey a certain logic. The fix may not be easy, but it’s achievable. Cloud problems offer no such assurances. They are inherently complex and unpredictable, and they usually have social, psychological, or political dimensions.
Sweeping tariffs could threaten the US manufacturing rebound

2 weeks ago | technologyreview.com | David Rotman

The move to bolster US manufacturing was fueled by a sense during the beginning of the pandemic that the country must regain the ability to make critical products and technologies. Thedecline of US manufacturing had become obvious. Federal support torebuild the industrial base came in a series of bills passed during the Biden administration, including the CHIPS and Science Act and the climate bill.
Seeing AI as a collaborator, not a creator

3 weeks ago | technologyreview.com | Mat Honan

But none of that would have been possible if I hadn’t been bored and curious. And more to the point: curious about tech. The university computer lab may seem at first like an unlikely center for creativity. We tend to think of creativity as happening more in the artist’s studio or writers’ workshop. But throughout history, very often our greatest creative leaps—and I would argue that the web and its descendants represent one such leap—have been due to advances in technology.
AI is pushing the limits of the physical world

3 weeks ago | technologyreview.com | Allison Arieff

Technology has long enabled architecture to push the limits of form and function. As early as 1963, Sketchpad, one of the first architectural software programs, allowed architects and designers to move and change objects on screen.
This spa’s water is heated by bitcoin mining

3 weeks ago | technologyreview.com | Carrie Klein

“I thought, ‘That’s interesting—we need heat,’” Goodman says of Bathhouse. Mining facilities typically use fans or water to cool their computers. And pools of water, of course, are a prominent feature of the spa. It takes six miners, each roughly the size of an Xbox One console, to maintain a hot tub at 104 °F. At Bathhouse’s Williamsburg location, miners hum away quietly inside two large tanks, tucked in a storage closet among liquor bottles and teas.
The world’s biggest space-based radar will measure Earth’s forests from orbit

3 weeks ago | technologyreview.com | Jacek Krywko

“To measure biomass, you need to cut the tree down and weigh it, which is why we use indirect measuring systems,” says Klaus Scipal, manager of the Biomass mission. These indirect systems rely on a combination of field sampling—foresters roaming among the trees to measure their height and diameter—and remote sensing technologies like lidar scanners, which can be flown over the forests on airplanes or drones and used to measure treetop height along lines of flight.