In 1940, a fresh-faced Ronald Reagan starred as US Secret Service agent Brass Bancroft in Murder in the Air, an action film centered on a fictional “superweapon” that could stop enemy aircraft midflight. A mock newspaper in the movie hails it as the “greatest peace argument ever invented.” The experimental weapon is “the exclusive property…

13 August 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. Meet the early-adopter judges using AI The propensity for AI systems to make mistakes that humans miss has been on full display in the US legal system as of late. The follies began…

12 August 2025

Before OpenAI released GPT-5 last Thursday, CEO Sam Altman said its capabilities made him feel “useless relative to the AI.” He said working on it carries a weight he imagines the developers of the atom bomb must have felt. As tech giants converge on models that do more or less the same thing, OpenAI’s new…

12 August 2025

My colleague Grace Huckins has a great story on OpenAI’s release of GPT-5, its long-awaited new flagship model. One of the takeaways, however, is that while GPT-5 may make for a better experience than the previous versions, it isn’t something revolutionary. “GPT-5 is, above all else,” Grace concludes, “a refined product.” This is pretty much…

11 August 2025

The propensity for AI systems to make mistakes and for humans to miss those mistakes has been on full display in the US legal system as of late. The follies began when lawyers—including some at prestigious firms—submitted documents citing cases that didn’t exist. Similar mistakes soon spread to other roles in the courts. In December,…

11 August 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. This quantum radar could image buried objects Physicists have created a new type of radar that could help improve underground imaging, using a cloud of atoms in a glass cell to detect reflected…

11 August 2025

Physicists have created a new type of radar that could help improve underground imaging, using a cloud of atoms in a glass cell to detect reflected radio waves. The radar is a type of quantum sensor, an emerging technology that uses the quantum-mechanical properties of objects as measurement devices. It’s still a prototype, but its…

11 August 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. GPT-5 is here. Now what? At long last, OpenAI has released GPT-5. The new system abandons the distinction between OpenAI’s flagship models and its o series of reasoning models, automatically routing user queries…

8 August 2025

At long last, OpenAI has released GPT-5. The new system abandons the distinction between OpenAI’s flagship models and its o series of reasoning models, automatically routing user queries to a fast nonreasoning model or a slower reasoning version. It is now available to everyone through the ChatGPT web interface—though nonpaying users may need to wait…

7 August 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. Five ways that AI is learning to improve itself Last week, Mark Zuckerberg declared that Meta aims to achieve smarter-than-human AI. He seems to have a recipe for achieving that goal, and the…

7 August 2025