There was some good climate news in 2023. Really.
As federal regulations go, preventing emissions of a combustible, planet-warming superpolllutant that isn’t even producing anything of economic value is...
World
These minuscule pixels are poised to take augmented reality by storm
The HMZ-T1 headset performed best with 3D films, which proved to be a fad. But Sony didn’t give up on...
Two-way reflections on MIT Technology Review’s 125th
I composed the following palindromes in honor of the 125th anniversary of MIT Technology Review. They include what I call...
The Download: the AI Edition
The internet changed everything—how we work and play, how we spend time with friends and family, how we learn, how...
Four trends that changed AI in 2023
Existential risk has become one of the biggest memes in AI. The hypothesis is that one day we will build an...
These six questions will dictate the future of generative AI
Still missing: AI’s killer app It’s strange to think that ChatGPT almost didn’t happen. Before its launch in November 2022, Ilya...
Developing climate solutions with green software
There's several standards that we've been focusing on in the Green Software Foundation, one's called the SEI, which is a...
Navigating a shifting customer-engagement landscape with generative AI
A strategic imperative Generative AI’s ability to harness customer data in a highly sophisticated manner means enterprises are accelerating plans...
The Download: a microbiome gold rush, and Eric Schmidt’s election misinformation plan
Over the last couple of decades, scientists have come to realize just how important the microbes that crawl all over...
Get ready to fight misinformation in 2024. Eric Schmidt has advice.
One of the biggest areas to watch, of course, will be generative AI, particularly how it changes social media, political...
The hunter-gatherer groups at the heart of a microbiome gold rush
The first step to finding out is to catalogue what microbes we might have lost. To get as close to...
Eric Schmidt has a 6-point plan for fighting election misinformation
6. Invest in research. For all these approaches to work at scale, we’ll require long-term engagement, starting now. My philanthropic...
The Download: beyond CRISPR, and OpenAI’s superalignment findings
Google DeepMind used a large language model to solve an unsolvable math problem The news: Google DeepMind has used a...
Vertex developed a CRISPR cure. It’s already on the hunt for something better.
Such drawbacks are why a pill to alleviate sickle-cell, if developed, could sweep CRISPR from the playing field. A pill...
Needle-free covid vaccines are (still) in the works
The vaccine outlined in the recent Nature paper is meant to be inhaled. It is a subunit vaccine, meaning it...
Now we know what OpenAI’s superalignment team has been up to
OpenAI's approach to the superalignment problem.OPENAI The researchers point out that the problem is hard to study because superhuman machines...
Google DeepMind used a large language model to solve an unsolvable math problem
FunSearch (so called because it searches for mathematical functions, not because it’s fun) continues a streak of discoveries in fundamental...
The Download: what we learned from COP28, and an advance for household robots
1 Google’s AI search tool could upend the internetPublishers in particular fear it could take a sledgehammer to their traffic....
This new system can teach a robot a simple household task within 20 minutes
While other types of AI, such as large language models, are trained on huge repositories of data scraped from the...
The two words that pushed international climate talks into overtime
If you’ve tuned out news from the summit, I don’t really blame you. The quibbles over wording—“urges” vs. “notes” vs....
