Navigating a shifting customer-engagement landscape with generative AI
One can’t step into the same river twice. This simple representation of change as the only constant was taught by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus more than 2000 years ago. Today, it rings truer than ever with the advent of generative AI. The emergence of generative AI is having a profound effect on today’s enterprises—business leaders face a rapidly changing technology that they need to grasp to meet evolving consumer expectations. “Across all industries, customers are at the core, and tapping into their latent needs is one of the most important elements to sustain and grow a business,” says Akhilesh Ayer, […]
Developing climate solutions with green software
After years of committing to sustainable practices in his personal life from recycling to using cloth-based diapers, Asim Hussain, currently the director of green software and ecosystems at Intel, began to ask questions about the practices in his work: software development. Developers often asked if their software was secure enough, fast enough, or cost-effective enough but, Hussain says, they rarely considered the environmental consequences of their applications. Hussain would go on to work at Intel and become the executive director and chairperson of the Green Software Foundation, a non-profit aiming to create an ecosystem of people, tooling, and best practices […]
The Download: a microbiome gold rush, and Eric Schmidt’s election misinformation plan
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 hunter-gatherer groups at the heart of a microbiome gold rush Over the last couple of decades, scientists have come to realize just how important the microbes that crawl all over us are to our health. But some believe our microbiomes are in crisis—casualties of an increasingly sanitized way of life. Disturbances in the collections of microbes we host have been associated with a whole host of diseases, ranging from arthritis to Alzheimer’s. Some might not be completely […]
Get ready to fight misinformation in 2024. Eric Schmidt has advice.
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. We’re already at that time of year when we start looking ahead to what’s coming in 2024. For Technocrat readers (and the rest of the globe!), next year is going to be a doozy, with over 40 national elections worldwide and a landscape of constantly evolving information technologies. One of the biggest areas to watch, of course, will be generative AI, particularly how it changes social media, political campaigning, and the fight […]
The hunter-gatherer groups at the heart of a microbiome gold rush
We’re all teeming with microbes. We’ve got guts full of them, and they’re crawling all over our skin. These tiny, ancient life forms have evolved with us. And over the last couple of decades, scientists have come to realize just how important they are to our health and well-being. They help extract nutrients from our food, influence the way our immune systems work, and can even send signals to our brains that play a role in our mental health. But some researchers believe our microbiomes are in crisis—casualties of an increasingly sanitized, industrialized, and antimicrobial way of life. Disturbances in […]
Eric Schmidt has a 6-point plan for fighting election misinformation
The coming year will be one of seismic political shifts. Over 4 billion people will head to the polls in countries including the United States, Taiwan, India, and Indonesia, making 2024 the biggest election year in history. And election campaigns are using artificial intelligence in novel ways. Earlier this year in the US, the Republican presidential primary campaign of Florida governor Ron DeSantis posted doctored images of Donald Trump; the Republican National Committee released an AI-created ad depicting a dystopian future in response to Joe Biden’s announcing his reelection campaign; and just last month, Argentina’s presidential candidates each created an […]
The Download: beyond CRISPR, and OpenAI’s superalignment findings
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. Vertex developed a CRISPR cure. It’s already on the hunt for something better. The company that just got approval to sell the first gene-editing treatment in history, for sickle-cell disease, is already looking for an ordinary drug that could take its place. Vertex Pharmaceuticals has a 50-person team working to make a pill that doesn’t do gene editing at all—but achieves the same treatment goals. Now that medicine’s CRISPR era has begun, some of the technique’s limitations are […]
Vertex developed a CRISPR cure. It’s already on the hunt for something better.
The company that just got approval to sell the first gene-editing treatment in history, for sickle-cell disease, is already looking for an ordinary drug that could take its place. Vertex Pharmaceuticals has a 50-person team working “to make a pill that doesn’t do gene editing at all,” says David Altshuler, head of research at the Boston drug company. “We’re trying to out-innovate ourselves,” he says. Vertex won approval in the US to sell the world’s first treatment using CRISPR, the gene-editing technique, on December 8. It took eight years to develop, and at huge expense. Regulatory documents filed with the […]
Needle-free covid vaccines are (still) in the works
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. Covid shots do an admirable job of boosting our immune response enough to protect against serious illness, but they don’t boost immunity in the one spot we’d like them to: our airways. That’s why researchers have been working on vaccines you breathe into your lungs or spray into your nose. The idea is that these vaccines will elicit an immune response in the mucous membranes of your respiratory tract that might […]
Now we know what OpenAI’s superalignment team has been up to
OpenAI has announced the first results from its superalignment team, the firm’s in-house initiative dedicated to preventing a superintelligence—a hypothetical future computer that can outsmart humans—from going rogue. Unlike many of the company’s announcements, this heralds no big breakthrough. In a low-key research paper, the team describes a technique that lets a less powerful large language model supervise a more powerful one—and suggests that this might be a small step toward figuring out how humans might supervise superhuman machines. Less than a month after OpenAI was rocked by a crisis when its CEO, Sam Altman, was fired by its oversight […]