The State of AI: Welcome to the Economic Singularity
Generative AI adoption remains highly uneven, with 95% of projects failing to generate returns while coding assistants promise transformative gains. Experts cite a classic productivity paradox, suggesting AI’s economic impact will follow a J‑curve that requires new data infrastructure and workforce retraining. Early signs include a modest rebound in U.S. productivity to over 2% last year, but the magnitude and durability of AI‑driven growth remain uncertain. Forecasts range from McKinsey’s optimistic 3.4% annual boost to more cautious estimates that limit gains to narrow applications.
The Download: Spotting Crimes in Prisoners’ Phone Calls, and Nominate an Innovator Under 35
A U.S. telecom firm, Securus Technologies, has deployed an AI model trained on years of inmates' phone, video, and text communications to flag planned criminal activity. The pilot uses a dataset of seven years of Texas prison calls and is...
An AI Model Trained on Prison Phone Calls Now Looks for Planned Crimes in Those Calls
Securus Technologies has trained a large‑language‑model on years of recorded inmate phone, video, text, and email communications and is now piloting the system to flag conversations that suggest planned criminal activity. The AI tool, initially built on seven years of...
The AI Hype Index: The People Can’t Get Enough of AI Slop
The AI Hype Index was launched to give a quick snapshot of how much hype surrounds artificial‑intelligence products and services. A viral post by fantasy author Joanna Maciejewska highlighted public frustration with AI taking over creative tasks, a sentiment echoed by...
The Download: The Future of AlphaFold, and Chatbot Privacy Concerns
Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2, co‑created by Nobel laureate John Jumper, has achieved atomic‑level protein structure predictions, dramatically accelerating biomedical research and prompting a look at its real‑world impact and future roadmap. Meanwhile, a separate report highlights the rise of AI...
What’s Next for AlphaFold: A Conversation with a Google DeepMind Nobel Laureate
In 2024, DeepMind’s AlphaFold team, led by John Jumper and Demis Hassabis, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold 2, which predicts protein structures with atomic accuracy, dramatically accelerating biological research. Since its 2018 debut, AlphaFold has expanded to AlphaFold Multimer...
Designing Digital Resilience in the Agentic AI Era
Enterprises are confronting a heightened need for digital resilience as agentic AI—autonomous systems that plan, reason, and act with minimal human input—moves from pilot projects to core operations. The technology’s speed, scale, and reliance on real‑time machine data (logs, metrics,...
Three Things to Know About the Future of Electricity
The International Energy Agency’s latest World Energy Outlook projects global electricity demand to surge 40% over the next decade, driven largely by rising air‑conditioning use and temperature increases that will add roughly 500 GW of peak load by 2035. While data‑center...
The Download: De-Censoring DeepSeek, and Gemini 3
Quantum‑physics researchers at Spain’s Multiverse Computing have compressed DeepSeek R1 by 55% into a “Slim” version and stripped the Chinese‑mandated censorship layers, enabling the model to answer politically sensitive queries similarly to Western AI. Meanwhile, Google launched Gemini 3, a multimodal model...
Quantum Physicists Have Shrunk and “De-Censored” DeepSeek R1
Quantum‑inspired AI firm Multiverse Computing announced a 55% smaller version of the Chinese‑censored large language model DeepSeek R1, dubbed DeepSeek R1 Slim, that it claims retains near‑original performance while stripping out state‑mandated censorship. The team used tensor‑network compression, a technique borrowed from quantum...
The Download: AI-Powered Warfare, and How Embryo Care Is Changing
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 State of AI: How war will be changed forever —Helen Warrell & James O’Donnell It is July...
The State of AI: How War Will Be Changed Forever
The piece, a joint FT‑MIT Technology Review dialogue, examines how generative AI is moving from research labs into active military use, from logistics and cyber‑operations to AI‑assisted targeting systems such as Israel’s Lavender database. It highlights a stark scenario of...
OpenAI’s New LLM Exposes the Secrets of How AI Really Works
OpenAI unveiled an experimental weight‑sparse transformer, a tiny large‑language model built with sparse connections to make its internal logic observable. Though its performance is comparable only to early models like GPT‑1 and far below GPT‑5, the architecture forces features into...
Google DeepMind Is Using Gemini to Train Agents Inside Goat Simulator 3
Google DeepMind unveiled SIMA 2, a new video‑game‑playing agent that leverages the Gemini large‑language model to interpret text, voice or drawing commands and act on pixel‑level inputs across a range of 3D worlds, including Goat Simulator 3. Trained on human gameplay from...
The Download: AI to Measure Pain, and How to Deal with Conspiracy Theorists
AI-driven pain assessment tools like PainChek are gaining regulatory clearance across three continents and have recorded over 10 million evaluations, signaling a shift toward objective pain measurement. Social psychologist Sander van der Linden offers strategies for families to counteract the pull of conspiracy‑theory...
Improving VMware Migration Workflows with Agentic AI
VMware-to-cloud migrations, once hampered by manual dependency mapping and legacy code rewrites, are being reshaped by recent licensing changes and the rise of agentic AI tools that automate migration workflows. The shift comes as cloud‑native adoption accelerates—CNCF’s 2024 survey shows...
From Vibe Coding to Context Engineering: 2025 in Software Development
Thoughtworks’ 2025 Technology Radar reports a decisive shift from the loosely‑defined "vibe coding" approach to a disciplined practice called "context engineering," where AI coding assistants such as Claude Code and Augment Code are supplied with curated, high‑quality context to improve reliability and...
The Download: The AGI Myth, and US/China AI Competition
MIT Technology Review’s daily newsletter highlighted two major analyses: a feature by Will Douglas Heaven arguing that artificial general intelligence has become a consequential conspiracy theory, and a joint FT‑MIT piece examining whether China is poised to overtake the United...
The State of AI: Is China About to Win the Race?
The Financial Times and MIT Technology Review debate the AI rivalry between the United States and China, noting that China now leads in AI citations (22.6% of global citations) and patents (69.7% of filings) and has overtaken the U.S. in...
Leveraging the Clinician’s Expertise with Agentic AI
Physicians in the U.S. spend roughly eight hours of a 59‑hour work week on electronic health‑record tasks, contributing to near‑50% burnout rates. Ambient AI assistants such as Nabla’s 2023‑launched platform now record, structure and summarize patient encounters in real time,...
Four Thoughts From Bill Gates on Climate Tech
Bill Gates, the largest private funder of climate‑tech through Breakthrough Energy, warned that global efforts are overly fixated on short‑term emissions targets and national reporting, urging a broader focus on cheap, scalable solutions for energy, steel, cement and fertilizer. He...
Chatbots Are Surprisingly Effective at Debunking Conspiracy Theories
Researchers deployed DebunkBot, a GPT‑4 Turbo‑based chatbot, in three‑round, eight‑minute conversations with over 2,000 self‑identified conspiracy believers. The interaction cut participants' confidence in the targeted conspiracy by 20% and led roughly one‑quarter to abandon the belief entirely, with effects lasting...
How AGI Became the Most Consequential Conspiracy Theory of Our Time
The MIT Technology Review article frames artificial general intelligence (AGI) as the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time, noting how its promise of near‑human intelligence fuels both utopian hype and apocalyptic fear among Silicon Valley leaders. It traces the...
The AI Hype Index: Data Centers’ Neighbors Are Pivoting to Power Blackouts
The AI Hype Index warns that many firms are chasing AI without clear returns, while NGOs exploit generative models to fabricate suffering for social media clicks and AI translators churn out low‑quality Wikipedia entries in endangered languages. At the same...
DeepSeek May Have Found a New Way to Improve AI’s Ability to Remember
DeepSeek, a Chinese AI firm, unveiled an OCR model that uses visual tokens instead of traditional text tokens to store and retrieve information, effectively compressing memory like a snapshot of a book page. The approach reduces token count, mitigating the...
The Download: Microsoft’s Stance on Erotic AI, and an AI Hype Mystery
Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman said the company will never build a sex robot and warned that chatbots that appear human risk misleading users, even as Microsoft unveiled new expressive and helpful features for its Copilot assistant. At the same time,...
“We Will Never Build a Sex Robot,” Says Mustafa Suleyman
Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman warned against building "seemingly conscious" AI while unveiling new Copilot features aimed at keeping users grounded in reality. The updates include a group‑chat mode, a "Real Talk" setting that reduces sycophancy, expanded memory for personal...
An AI Adoption Riddle
The author investigated whether companies are scaling back AI spending after recent setbacks, such as the underwhelming GPT‑5 launch and a report that 95% of generative AI pilots are failing. Despite widespread media narratives of an AI bubble, no firm...
An AI App to Measure Pain Is Here
A smartphone app called PainChek, now deployed in some hospitals and care settings, uses AI analysis of small facial movements plus clinician checklists to score patient pain and aims to help assess individuals who cannot self‑report, such as dementia patients....
Redefining Data Engineering in the Age of AI
A survey of 400 senior data and technology executives by MIT Technology Review Insights finds data engineers are becoming central to corporate AI efforts, with 72% of respondents—and 86% at the largest, most AI‑mature firms—saying data engineers are integral to...
Dispatch: Partying at One of Africa’s Largest AI Gatherings
The Deep Learning Indaba in Kigali, one of Africa’s largest AI gatherings, drew a vibrant community of researchers and practitioners showcasing generative AI work and networking at scale. Founded in 2017 from 300 attendees and now with local chapters in...
Walking Faster, Hanging Out Less
An MIT‑coauthored study finds urban life has become brisker and less social: average walking speeds in Boston, New York and Philadelphia rose 15% from 1980 to 2010 while the share of people lingering in public spaces fell 14%. Researchers applied...
A I-Designed Compounds Can Kill Drug-Resistant Bacteria
MIT researchers used generative artificial intelligence to design and computationally screen more than 36 million novel compounds, identifying two structurally distinct antibiotic candidates that kill multi‑drug‑resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae and MRSA. The top molecules appear to act via a previously unseen...
AI Could Predict Who Will Have a Heart Attack
Startups including Bunkerhill Health, Nanox.AI and HeartLung Technologies are applying AI to routine chest CT scans to automatically detect and quantify coronary artery calcium (CAC), potentially flagging millions of patients at elevated risk of heart attack who are currently missed....
This Startup Thinks Slime Mold Can Help Us Design Better Cities
Cambridge startup Mireta has built an algorithm inspired by slime mold’s natural network-building to optimize urban infrastructure—claiming it can improve transit times, reduce congestion and factor in constraints like flood zones, traffic patterns and budgets. The team translated observable slime...
From Slop to Sotheby’s? AI Art Enters a New Phase
Generative AI is moving from novelty to institutional recognition as artists using tools like Midjourney and Runway gain large followings, museum placements and auction sales—most notably an AI-generated bitcoin NFT by Henry Daubrez that sold for $24,000 at Sotheby’s and...
AI Is Changing How We Quantify Pain
Care homes and clinical researchers are turning to AI-driven tools to quantify pain in nonverbal patients, replacing or augmenting subjective observational scales like the Abbey Pain Scale. These systems use computer vision, sensor data and pattern recognition to detect facial...
Can We Repair the Internet?
From addictive algorithms to exploitative apps, data mining to misinformation, the internet today can be a hazardous place. Books by three influential figures—the intellect behind “net neutrality,” a former Meta executive, and the web’s own inventor—propose radical approaches to fixing...
