We’ve reached peak ChatGPT. Released in December as a web app by the San Francisco–based firm OpenAI, the chatbot exploded into the mainstream almost overnight. According to some estimates, it is the fastest-growing internet service ever, reaching 100 million users in January, just two months after launch. Through OpenAI’s $10 billion deal with Microsoft, the tech is now being built into Office software and the Bing search engine. Stung into action by its newly awakened onetime rival in the battle for search, Google is fast-tracking the rollout of its own chatbot, LaMDA. Even my family WhatsApp is filled with ChatGPT […]

For enterprises looking to shift from hardware investments to services and beyond, a change in technology and data infrastructure could be key. One approach is a focus on the “New IT,” a term coined by Lenovo, that features five elements: client, edge and cloud, network, and intelligence to meet business goals. “The mission of the New IT is to enable and empower the intelligent transformation of various industries like manufacturing, transportation, finance, education and so on,” says Dr. Yong Rui, chief technology officer and senior vice president of Lenovo Group. Both the current state and potential of AI promise to […]

From AI-powered platforms that can detect abnormal activities in supermarkets, to edge servers helping preserve biodiversity in remote locations, today’s technologies drive innovation in ways never before imaginable. “Innovation serves the purpose of making our life better, our work more productive, and our planet more sustainable,” says Yang Yuanqing, CEO and chairman of Lenovo. Technology leaders are reimagining an infrastructure where multiple technologies join to spur innovation in a secure, compliant, and user-friendly environment. Long gone are the days of “traditional IT and its client devices, servers, data centers, and on-premises applications,” says Yuanqing. He says traditional IT, shorthand for […]

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. Neuroscientists listened in on people’s brains for a week. They found order and chaos. The news: Our brains exist in a state somewhere between stability and chaos as they help us make sense of the world, according to recordings of brain activity taken from volunteers over the course of a week.  What it means: As we go from reading a book to chatting with a friend, for example, our brains shift from one semi-stable state to another—but only […]

China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. First of all, I’m still processing the whole “Chinese spy balloon” saga, which, from start to finish, took over everyone’s brains for just about 72 hours and has been one of the weirdest recent events in US-China relations. There are still so many mysteries around it that I don’t want to jump to any conclusions, but I will link to some helpful analyses in the next section. For now, I just want to say: RIP The Balloon. On a wholly […]

For over a decade, we’ve heard that small reactors could be a big part of nuclear power’s future. Because of their size, small modular reactors (SMRs) could solve some of the major challenges of traditional nuclear power, making plants quicker and cheaper to build and safer to operate.   That future may have just gotten a little closer. In the past month, Oregon-based NuScale has reached several major milestones for its planned SMRs, most recently receiving a final approval from the US federal government for its reactor design. Other companies, including Kairos Power and GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, are also pursuing […]

Our brains exist in a state somewhere between stability and chaos as they help us make sense of the world, according to recordings of brain activity taken from volunteers over the course of a week. As we go from reading a book to chatting with a friend, for example, our brains shift from one semi-stable state to another—but only after chaotically zipping through multiple other states in a pattern that looks completely random. Understanding how our brains restore some degree of stability after chaos could help us work out how to treat disorders at either end of this spectrum. Too […]

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 original startup behind Stable Diffusion has launched a generative AI for video What’s happened: Runway, the generative AI startup that co-created last year’s breakout text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, has released an AI model that can transform existing videos into new ones by applying styles from a text prompt or reference image. What it does: In a demo reel posted on its website, Runway shows how the model, called Gen-1, can turn people on a street into claymation […]

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Last week, OpenAI unveiled a tool that can detect text produced by its AI system ChatGPT. But if you’re a teacher who fears the coming deluge of ChatGPT-generated essays, don’t get the party poppers out yet.  This tool is OpenAI’s response to the heat it’s gotten from educators, journalists, and others for launching ChatGPT without any ways to detect text it has generated. However, it is still very much a work in progress, and it is woefully unreliable. […]

Runway, the generative AI startup that co-created last year’s breakout text-to-image model, Stable Diffusion, has released an AI model, called Gen-1, that can transform existing videos into new ones by applying any style specified by a text prompt or reference image. In a demo reel posted on its website, Runway shows how its software can turn people on a street into claymation puppets and books stacked on a table into a cityscape at night. Runway hopes that Gen-1 will do to video what Stable Diffusion did for images. “We’ve seen a big explosion in image-generation models,” says Runway CEO and […]