China Report: How a Chinese battery company powers Turkey’s home-grown EVsZeyi Yang
China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. First, a quick housekeeping note: China Report will be off for a few weeks. I’ll be away from work for the rest of the month, so the newsletter will take a brief pause. It will return on May 9 with more news and analysis of China’s tech world. So stay tuned! In the meantime, I hope you’ll reach out and tell me what you’ve enjoyed about the newsletter so far—and what you’d like to read more about in […]
Digital simulations open up real-world possibilitiesMIT Technology Review Insights
Building a better train doesn’t end with delivering the railcars. When Siemens was asked to improve train reliability, the company added sensors and built digital models that could predict the need for door maintenance 10 days before a door actually got stuck—allowing mechanics to prevent delays before they happened. Peter Koerte, chief technology and strategy officer at Siemens, says the potential of the industrial metaverse doesn’t end there. “The minute you start to connect real-world operations with a digital simulation thereof,” he says, “you can enable a lot of new services you even hadn’t thought about in the beginning.” When […]
The Download: Russia’s crumbling tech industry, and an AI security disasterRhiannon Williams
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. How Russia killed its tech industry In the months after Vladimir Putin announced the invasion of Ukraine, Russia saw a mass exodus of IT workers. According to government figures, about 100,000 IT specialists left Russia in 2022, or some 10% of the tech workforce—a number that is likely an underestimate. It has now been over a year since the invasion began. The tech workers who left everything behind to flee Russia warn that the country is well on […]
The complex math of counterfactuals could help Spotify pick your next favorite songWill Douglas Heaven
A new kind of machine-learning model built by a team of researchers at the music-streaming firm Spotify captures for the first time the complex math behind counterfactual analysis, a precise technique that can be used to identify the causes of past events and predict the effects of future ones. The model, described earlier this year in the scientific journal Nature Machine Intelligence, could improve the accuracy of automated decision making, especially personalized recommendations, in a range of applications from finance to health care. The basic idea behind counterfactuals is to ask what would have happened in a situation had certain […]
How Russia killed its tech industryMasha Borak
Seven days after the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Belugin packed up his and his family’s belongings, canceled the lease on his apartment in Moscow, withdrew his kids from kindergarten, and started a new life outside of Russia. Not long after that, he resigned from his position as chief commercial officer for search at Yandex, Russia’s equivalent to Google and the country’s largest technology company. The war meant that everything would change in Russia, both for him and for his company, Belugin said from his new home in Cyprus: “You have to accept the new rules of having no rules at […]
We are hurtling toward a glitchy, spammy, scammy, AI-powered internetMelissa Heikkilä
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, AI insiders were hotly debating an open letter signed by Elon Musk and various industry heavyweights arguing that AI poses an “existential risk” to humanity. They called for labs to introduce a six-month moratorium on developing any technology more powerful than GPT-4. I agree with critics of the letter who say that worrying about future risks distracts us from the very real harms AI is already causing today. Biased systems are used to make decisions about people’s […]
Three ways AI chatbots are a security disaster Melissa Heikkilä
AI language models are the shiniest, most exciting thing in tech right now. But they’re poised to create a major new problem: they are ridiculously easy to misuse and to deploy as powerful phishing or scamming tools. No programming skills are needed. What’s worse is that there is no known fix. Tech companies are racing to embed these models into tons of products to help people do everything from book trips to organize their calendars to take notes in meetings. But the way these products work—receiving instructions from users and then scouring the internet for answers—creates a ton of new […]
The Download: a bitter campus privacy row, and AI-powered lawyersRhiannon Williams
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. Inside the bitter campus privacy battle over smart building sensors When computer science students and faculty at Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for Software Research returned to campus in the summer of 2020, there was a lot to adjust to. The department had moved into a brand-new building, complete with experimental super-sensing devices called Mites. Embedded in more than 300 locations throughout the building, these light-switch-size devices measure 12 types of data—including motion and sound. The Mites had been […]
AI might not steal your job, but it could change itTate Ryan-Mosley
(This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review’s weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here.) Advances in artificial intelligence tend to be followed by anxieties around jobs. This latest wave of AI models, like ChatGPT and OpenAI’s new GPT-4, is no different. First we had the launch of the systems. Now we’re seeing the predictions of automation. In a report released this week, Goldman Sachs predicted that AI advances could cause 300 million jobs, representing roughly 18% of the global workforce, to be automated in […]
Inside the bitter campus privacy battle over smart building sensorsEileen Guo, Tate Ryan-Mosley
When computer science students and faculty at Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for Software Research returned to campus in the summer of 2020, there was a lot to adjust to. Beyond the inevitable strangeness of being around colleagues again after months of social distancing, the department was also moving into a brand-new building: the 90,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art TCS Hall. The hall’s futuristic features included carbon dioxide sensors that automatically pipe in fresh air, a rain garden, a yard for robots and drones, and experimental super-sensing devices called Mites. Mounted in more than 300 locations throughout the building, these light-switch-size devices can measure […]