The Download: using AI to access mental health services, and the natural gas debate
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. A chatbot helped more people access mental-health services The news: An AI chatbot helped increase the number of patients referred for mental-health services through England’s National Health Service (NHS), particularly among underrepresented groups who are less likely to seek help, new research has found. What happened: The new study from the AI company Limbic, examined data from 129,400 people visiting websites to refer themselves to 28 mental health services across England, half of which used the chatbot on […]
We are having the wrong debate about Biden’s decision on liquefied natural gas
Late last month, the Biden administration announced it’s suspending permit applications for exporting liquefied natural gas (LNG) as it reevaluates the economic, environmental, and climate impacts of the fuel. LNG is produced by cooling natural gas into a liquid state, making it easier to store and ship to overseas markets. Natural gas itself has been a core but controversial part of the clean-energy debate for decades. When burned, it emits about half as much greenhouse gas as coal. Its use has helped drive down emissions from the power sector in some nations, including the US. But natural gas is mostly […]
What babies can teach AI
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Human babies are fascinating creatures. Despite being completely dependent on their parents for a long time, they can do some amazing stuff. Babies have an innate understanding of the physics of our world and can learn new concepts and languages quickly, even with limited information. Even the most powerful AI systems we have today lack those abilities. Language models that power systems like ChatGPT, for example, are great at predicting the next word in a sentence […]
A chatbot helped more people access mental-health services
An AI chatbot helped increase the number of patients referred for mental-health services through England’s National Health Service (NHS), particularly among underrepresented groups who are less likely to seek help, new research has found. Demand for mental-health services in England is on the rise, particularly since the covid-19 pandemic. Mental-health services received 4.6 million patient referrals in 2022—the highest number on record—and the number of people in contact with such services is growing steadily. But neither the funding nor the number of mental-health professionals is adequate to meet this rising demand, according to the British Medical Association. The chatbot’s creators, […]
The Download: solar geoengineering’s rocky road, and Apple’s driverless ambitions
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. Solar geoengineering could start soon if it starts small —David W. Keith, founding faculty director of the Climate Systems Engineering initiative at the University of Chicago, and Wake Smith, a lecturer at the Yale School of Environment and a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. For half a century, climate researchers have considered the possibility of injecting small particles into the stratosphere to counteract some aspects of climate change. The idea is that by reflecting a small […]
Solar geoengineering could start soon if it starts small
For half a century, climate researchers have considered the possibility of injecting small particles into the stratosphere to counteract some aspects of climate change. The idea is that by reflecting a small fraction of sunlight back to space, these particles could partially offset the energy imbalance caused by accumulating carbon dioxide, thereby reducing warming as well as extreme storms and many other climate risks. Debates about this idea, a form of solar geoengineering called stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), commonly focus either on small-scale outdoor research that seeks to understand the physical processes involved or on deployment at a climate-altering scale. […]
The Download: how babies can teach AI, and new mRNA vaccines
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. This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language Human babies are far better at learning than even the very best large language models. To be able to write in passable English, ChatGPT had to be trained on massive data sets that contain millions upon millions of words. Children, on the other hand, have access to only a tiny fraction of that data, yet by age three they’re communicating in quite sophisticated ways. […]
The next generation of mRNA vaccines is on its way
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. Welcome back to The Checkup! Today I want to talk about … mRNA vaccines. I can hear the collective groan from here, but wait—hear me out! I know you’ve heard a lot about mRNA vaccines, but Japan recently approved a new one for covid. And this one is pretty exciting. Just like the mRNA vaccines you know and love, it delivers the instructions for making the virus’s spike protein. But here’s […]
This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language
Human babies are far better at learning than even the very best large language models. To be able to write in passable English, ChatGPT had to be trained on massive data sets that contain millions or even a trillion words. Children, on the other hand, have access to only a tiny fraction of that data, yet by age three they’re communicating in quite sophisticated ways. A team of researchers at New York University wondered if AI could learn like a baby. What could an AI model do when given a far smaller data set—the sights and sounds experienced by a […]
The Download: recycling’s role, and tidying robots
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. Why recycling alone can’t power climate tech The potential to use old, discarded products to make something new sounds a little bit like magic. This is why, in some cases at least, recycling is going to be a crucial tool for climate technology. But there are massive challenges ahead in material demand for climate technologies, and unfortunately, recycling alone won’t be enough to address them. Our climate reporter Casey Crownhart has taken a look at why recycling isn’t […]