MIT Technology Review — AI
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MIT Technology Review — AI news-outlet 12h ago
AI agents are not your “coworkers”
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Imagine coming in to work to learn that a new underling will report to you. The worker is not a person but an AI tool—one that your company…
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Agent confidence on the technical frontier
Enterprise investment in AI is booming. Gartner is calling 2026 an “inflection year” for organizations to align their AI projects with strategic business objectives. As the pressure to prove ROI mounts, executives and technology leaders are looking to agentic AI to drive the…
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Repositioning retail for the AI era
Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping retail, but not in the ways consumers might immediately notice. The biggest transformation may not be flashy virtual try-ons or chatbot shopping assistants, but in how decisions are made behind the scenes: how products surface in…
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The emergence of the web data infrastructure layer for AI
AI is booming. New use cases are emerging each day. To capitalize on the technology’s potential, enterprises require data at scale. In many cases, though, the relevant information is blocked or unstructured, which limits its use by AI models.  To understand this challenge,…
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The $400 million machine powering the future of chipmaking
Jos Benschop is climbing a ladder to get to the top of his newest machine.  It’s a bit of a schlep. The contraption is the size of a double-decker bus—more than 150 tons of gleaming precision-milled aluminum covered in thousands of snaking tubes, colored cables, and…
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Three things to watch amid Anthropic’s latest feud with the government
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. For those of you enjoying your summer unaware of Anthropic’s latest feud with the US government, here’s a recap: In April the company said it…
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A startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that’s holding back LLMs
Miami-based AI startup Subquadratic came out of stealth mode last month with a huge claim. It announced that it had solved a mathematical bottleneck that had been holding back large language models for almost a decade. The details were thin, and many people were unconvinced. But…
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Want to get a data center online quickly? Give it some flex.
At the end of a tense and scoreless first half of a soccer match between the English men’s team and rival Germany, millions of Brits let out a collective sigh and did what they so often do in moments of stress: They made tea. That wave of electric kettles clicking on, however,…
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Why do South Koreans love AI so much?
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. When I landed in Seoul after a grueling 12-hour flight from San Francisco, I walked through an unmanned immigration checkpoint, where a…
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Google DeepMind is worried about what happens when millions of agents start to interact
Google DeepMind is funding research into the potential dangers of situations where millions of different AI agents interact with each other online. According to Rohin Shah, who directs the company’s AGI safety and alignment research, the mass-market arrival of agents that can…
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Learning to lead in a hybrid human-AI enterprise
As adoption of AI agents looks set to surge by as much as 300% in the next two years, leadership teams are carefully considering the implications of a hybrid human-AI workforce. Unlike existing enterprise-level automation that relies on manual input, AI agents are capable of…
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Five things you need to know about AI
At SXSW London last week I gave a talk called “Five things you need to know about AI,” in which I shared what I think are the biggest themes in AI right now. I pulled a few things from our first AI10 list, an annual guide to the most important trends in this buzzy world,…
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The Meta hack shows there’s more to AI security than Mythos
On June 5, 404 Media reported that attackers had been using Meta’s AI customer support agent to steal Instagram accounts. Their approach was simple: They asked the agent to link the accounts to email addresses that they controlled, and the agent complied. One attacker broke into…
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How courts are coping with a flood of AI-generated lawsuits
Most days in her chambers, Judge Maritza Braswell, a federal magistrate judge in Colorado, sifts through stacks of documents written by people without a lawyer. Many of them can’t afford to hire a lawyer, and others have cases too weak or too small to interest one. She reads…
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Rehumanizing global health care with agentic AI
The global health care sector is under increasing strain.  Decades of chronic underinvestment and constraints in recruitment have coincided with a surge in demand for services for aging populations. Gaps in provision are already taking a toll, with fragmented access to care…
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How small businesses can leverage AI
This article is from Making AI Work, MIT Technology Review’s limited-run newsletter examining how to apply LLMs across industries. To receive it in your inbox,sign up here. From accounting to design to market research and product development, there’s a staggering breadth of…
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How the Pope’s Magnifica Humanitas offers a template for individuals to meet the AI moment
Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on artificial intelligence includes a statement that warrants serious attention from technologists and policymakers: “Technology is never neutral.” Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”) is a clarion call to all people to act with courage and…
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The AI Hype Index: AI gets booed in graduation season
It is one thing to say AI will change the world. It is another to expect the class of 2026 to applaud it. In fact, when former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told University of Arizona graduates that their task is to help shape AI, he was met with a resounding chorus of boos. “I…
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Rethinking organizational design in the age of agentic AI
Amid rapidly growing adoption of enterprise-level AI agents, there’s a disconnect emerging between ambition and execution.  Although 85% of organizations say they want to be agentic within the next three years, 76% say their current operations and infrastructure can’t…
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A reality check on the AI jobs hysteria
Haven’t you heard? White-collar jobs are going away, decimated by AI. Waves of layoffs in the tech sector (most recently at Coinbase and Meta and Cisco) are said to presage what will soon come for all of us knowledge workers. But before you quit your job as a software developer…
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It’s time to address the looming crisis in entry-level work.
Artificial intelligence has not so far produced a clean story of mass unemployment. Aggregate employment in developed countries remains broadly stable, and recent assessments have found limited evidence that AI has shifted the headline numbers. But a troubling change may be…
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Google I/O showed how the path for AI-driven science is shifting
During Tuesday’s Google I/O keynote, Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, proclaimed that we are currently “standing in the foothills of the singularity.” It was a striking statement—the singularity is the theoretical future moment when AI rapidly exceeds human…
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Roundtables: Can AI Learn to Understand the World?
Listen to the session or watch below AI companies want to build systems that understand the external world and overcome the limitations of LLMs. Recent developments have brought world models to the forefront of the AI discussion. Watch a conversation with editor in chief Mat…
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Scaling creativity in the age of AI
Storytelling is core to humanity’s DNA, stemming from our impulse to express ideals, warnings, hopes, and experiences. Technology has always been woven through the medium and the distribution: from early humans’ innovation of natural pigments and charcoals for cave…
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Anthropic’s Code with Claude showed off coding’s future—whether you like it or not
The vibes were strong at Code with Claude, Anthropic’s two-day event for software developers in London that kicked off on May 19, the same day as Google’s I/O in Palo Alto. (A coincidence, not a flex, Anthropic staffers assured me.) “Who here has shipped a pull request in the…
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Roundtables: Inside the Musk v. Altman Trial
Listen to the session or watch below Elon Musk lost his suit against OpenAI, in which he alleged CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman had deceived him over the company’s non-profit status. Watch as AI reporter and attorney Michelle Kim, who covered the trial for MIT…
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Here’s why Elon Musk lost his suit against OpenAI
On Monday, the jury in Musk v. Altman dealt Elon Musk a major blow—reaching a unanimous advisory verdict that he had sued OpenAI too late and, as a result, his claims are barred by the applicable statutes of limitations. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers immediately…
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What to expect from Google this week
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. When Google opens its doors tomorrow for its annual developer conference, I/O, it will do so as a clear third place in the foundation model…
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Inside Anduril and Meta’s quest to make smart glasses for warfare
The defense-tech company Anduril has shared new details about the augmented-reality headset for the military it’s prototyping with Meta, including a vision for ordering drone strikes via eye-tracking and voice commands. Quay Barnett, who leads the efforts as a vice president at…
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Musk v. Altman week 3: Musk and Altman traded blows over each other’s credibility. Now the jury will pick a side.
In the final week of the Musk v. Altman trial, lawyers traded blows over Elon Musk’s and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s credibility. Altman was grilled on his alleged history of lying and self-dealing involving companies that do business with OpenAI. But he fired back, painting Musk as…
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How Chinese short dramas became AI content machines
In a dimly lit bedroom, a frightened young woman is thrown onto a bed by a tall, muscular man. He grabs her hand, and flame-like vines crawl across her body, fusing with her flesh. She levitates, then drops. A dragon-shaped tattoo appears across her chest. “Two months,” the man…
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Data readiness for agentic AI in financial services
Financial services companies have unique needs when it comes to business AI. They operate in one of the most highly regulated sectors while responding to external events that are updated by the second. As a result, the success of agentic AI in financial services depends less on…
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Establishing AI and data sovereignty in the age of autonomous systems
When generative AI first moved from research labs into real-world business applications, enterprises made a tacit bargain: “Capability now, control later.” Feed your proprietary data into third-party AI models, and you will get powerful results. But your data passes through…
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The shock of seeing your body used in deepfake porn
When Jennifer got a job doing research for a nonprofit in 2023, she ran her new professional headshot through a facial recognition program. She wanted to see if the tech would pull up the porn videos she’d made more than 10 years before, when she was in her early 20s. It did in…
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AI chatbots are giving out people’s real phone numbers
People report that their personal contact info was surfaced by Google AI—and there’s apparently no easy way to prevent it.  A Redditor recently wrote that he was “desperate for help”: for about a month, he said, his phone had been inundated by calls from “strangers” who…
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Three things in AI to watch, according to a Nobel-winning economist
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. A few months before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2024, Daron Acemoglu published a paper that earned him few fans in Silicon…
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Fostering breakthrough AI innovation through customer-back engineering
Despite years of digitization, organizations capture less than one-third of the value expected from digital investments, according to McKinsey research. That’s because most big companies begin with technological capabilities and bolt applications onto them, rather than starting…
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Implementing advanced AI technologies in finance
In finance departments that have long been defined by precision and control, AI has arrived less as a neatly managed upgrade than as a quiet insurgency. Employees are already using it while leadership races to impose structure, governance, and strategy after the fact. The result…
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Musk v. Altman week 2: OpenAI fires back, and Shivon Zilis reveals that Musk tried to poach Sam Altman
In the second week of the landmark trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI, Musk’s motivations for bringing the suit were under scrutiny. Last week, Musk took the stand, alleging that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman had deceived him into donating $38 million to the…
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A blueprint for using AI to strengthen democracy
Every few centuries, changes in how information moves reshape how societies govern themselves. The printing press spread vernacular literacy, helping give rise to the Reformation and, eventually, representative government. The telegraph made it possible to administer vast…
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Week one of the Musk v. Altman trial: What it was like in the room
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Two of the most powerful people in AI—Sam Altman and Elon Musk—began their face-off in court in Oakland, California, last week. Musk is…
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Musk v. Altman week 1: Elon Musk says he was duped, warns AI could kill us all, and admits that xAI distills OpenAI’s models
In the first week of the landmark trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI, Musk took the stand in a crisp black suit and tie and argued that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman had deceived him into bankrolling the company. Along the way, he warned that AI could…
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Cyber-Insecurity in the AI Era
Cybersecurity was already under strain before AI entered the stack. Now, as AI expands the attack surface and adds new complexity, the limits of legacy approaches are becoming harder to ignore. This session from MIT Technology Review’s EmTech AI conference explores why…
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Operationalizing AI for Scale and Sovereignty
Companies are taking control of their own data to tailor AI for their needs. The challenge lies in balancing ownership with the safe, trusted flow of high‑quality data needed to power reliable insights. This conversation from MIT Technology Review’s EmTech AI conference…
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A new US phone network for Christians aims to block porn and gender-related content
A new US-wide cell phone network marketed to Christians is set to launch next week. It blocks porn, which experts in network security say marks the first time a US cell plan has used network-level blocking for such content that can’t be turned off even by adult account owners.…
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