OpenAI spent $1.76 million on government lobbying in 2024 and $510,000 in the last three months of the year alone, according to a new disclosure filed on Tuesday—a significant jump from 2023, when the company spent just $260,000 on Capitol Hill. The company also disclosed a new in-house lobbyist, Meghan Dorn, who worked for five…

22 January 2025

The United States and China are entangled in what many have dubbed an “AI arms race.”  In the early days of this standoff, US policymakers drove an agenda centered on “winning” the race, mostly from an economic perspective. In recent months, leading AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic got involved in pushing the narrative of “beating China” in…

21 January 2025

Forget massive steel tanks—some scientists want to make chemicals with the help of rocks deep beneath Earth’s surface. New research shows that ammonia, a chemical crucial for fertilizer, can be produced from rocks at temperatures and pressures that are common in the subsurface. The research was published today in Joule, and MIT Technology Review can…

21 January 2025

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 it’s so hard to use AI to diagnose cancer Finding and diagnosing cancer is all about spotting patterns. Radiologists use x-rays and magnetic resonance imaging to illuminate tumors, and pathologists examine tissue…

21 January 2025

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Peering into the body to find and diagnose cancer is all about spotting patterns. Radiologists use x-rays and magnetic resonance imaging to illuminate tumors, and pathologists examine tissue from kidneys, livers,…

21 January 2025

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 second wave of AI coding is here Ask people building generative AI what generative AI is good for right now—what they’re really fired up about—and many will tell you: coding. Everyone from…

20 January 2025

Ask people building generative AI what generative AI is good for right now—what they’re really fired up about—and many will tell you: coding.  “That’s something that’s been very exciting for developers,” Jared Kaplan, chief scientist at Anthropic, told MIT Technology Review this month: “It’s really understanding what’s wrong with code, debugging it.” Copilot, a tool…

20 January 2025

When you think of AI’s contributions to science, you probably think of AlphaFold, the Google DeepMind protein-folding program that earned its creator a Nobel Prize last year. Now OpenAI says it’s getting into the science game too—with a model for engineering proteins. The company says it has developed a language model that dreams up proteins…

17 January 2025

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. We need to protect the protocol that runs Bluesky —Eli Pariser & Deepti Doshi Last week, when Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta would be ending third-party fact-checking, it was a shocking pivot, but not…

17 January 2025

Last week, when Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would be ending third-party fact-checking, it was a shocking pivot, but not exactly surprising. It’s just the latest example of a billionaire flip-flop affecting our social lives on the internet.  After January 6, 2021, Zuckerberg bragged to Congress about Facebook’s “industry-leading fact-checking program” and banned Donald Trump…

17 January 2025