The Download: AI emissions and Google’s big week
AI’s emissions are about to skyrocket even further It’s no secret that the current AI boom is using up immense amounts of energy. Now we have a better idea of how much. A new paper, from a team at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, examined 78% of all data centers in the […]
Google’s big week was a flex for the power of big tech
Last week, this space was all about OpenAI’s 12 days of shipmas. This week, the spotlight is on Google, which has been speeding toward the holiday by shipping or announcing its own flurry of products and updates. The combination of stuff here is pretty monumental, not just for a single company, but I think because […]
AI’s emissions are about to skyrocket even further
It’s no secret that the current AI boom is using up immense amounts of energy. Now we have a better idea of how much. A new paper, from a team at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, examined 2,132 data centers operating in the United States (78% of all facilities in the country). […]
The Download: society’s techlash, and Android XR
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 Silicon Valley is disrupting democracy The internet loves a good neologism, especially if it can capture a purported vibe shift or explain a new trend. In 2013, the columnist Adrian Wooldridge coined […]
How Silicon Valley is disrupting democracy
The internet loves a good neologism, especially if it can capture a purported vibe shift or explain a new trend. In 2013, the columnist Adrian Wooldridge coined a word that eventually did both. Writing for the Economist, he warned of the coming “techlash,” a revolt against Silicon Valley’s rich and powerful fueled by the public’s […]
Why materials science is key to unlocking the next frontier of AI development
The Intel 4004, the first commercial microprocessor, was released in 1971. With 2,300 transistors packed into 12mm2, it heralded a revolution in computing. A little over 50 years later, Apple’s M2 Ultra contains 134 billion transistors. The scale of progress is difficult to comprehend, but the evolution of semiconductors, driven for decades by Moore’s Law, […]
The Download: Google’s Project Astra, and China’s export bans
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. Google’s new Project Astra could be generative AI’s killer app Google DeepMind has announced an impressive grab bag of new products and prototypes that may just let it seize back its lead in […]
China banned exports of a few rare minerals to the US. Things could get messier.
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. I’ve thought more about gallium and germanium over the last week than I ever have before (and probably more than anyone ever should). As you may already know, China banned the export […]
Google’s new Project Astra could be generative AI’s killer app
Google DeepMind has announced an impressive grab bag of new products and prototypes that may just let it seize back its lead in the race to turn generative artificial intelligence into a mass-market concern. Top billing goes to Gemini 2.0—the latest iteration of Google DeepMind’s family of multimodal large language models, now redesigned around the […]
The Download: Bluesky’s impersonators, and shaking up the economy with ChatGPT
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. Bluesky has an impersonator problem —Melissa Heikkilä Like many others, I recently joined Bluesky. On Thanksgiving, I was delighted to see a private message from a fellow AI reporter, Will Knight from Wired. […]