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 handing over total control to AI agents would be a huge mistake —Margaret Mitchell, Avijit Ghosh, Sasha Luccioni, Giada Pistilli all work for Hugging Face, an open source AI company. AI agents…

24 March 2025

AI agents have set the tech industry abuzz. Unlike chatbots, these groundbreaking new systems operate outside of a chat window, navigating multiple applications to execute complex tasks, like scheduling meetings or shopping online, in response to simple user commands. As agents are developed to become more capable, a crucial question emerges: How much control are…

24 March 2025

OpenAI says over 400 million people use ChatGPT every week. But how does interacting with it affect us? Does it make us more or less lonely? These are some of the questions OpenAI set out to investigate, in partnership with the MIT Media Lab, in a pair of new studies.  They found that only a…

21 March 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. Inside a new quest to save the “doomsday glacier” The Thwaites glacier is a fortress larger than Florida, a wall of ice that reaches nearly 4,000 feet above the bedrock of West Antarctica,…

21 March 2025

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been following news of the deaths of actor Gene Hackman and his wife, pianist Betsy Arakawa. It was heartbreaking to hear how Arakawa appeared to have died from a rare infection days before her husband, who had advanced Alzheimer’s disease and may have struggled to understand what had…

21 March 2025

The Thwaites glacier is a fortress larger than Florida, a wall of ice that reaches nearly 4,000 feet above the bedrock of West Antarctica, guarding the low-lying ice sheet behind it. But a strong, warm ocean current is weakening its foundations and accelerating its slide into the Amundsen Sea. Scientists fear that the waters could…

21 March 2025

Europe is on the cusp of a new dawn in commercial space technology. As global political tensions intensify and relationships with the US become increasingly strained, several European companies are now planning to conduct their own launches in an attempt to reduce the continent’s reliance on American rockets. In the coming days, Isar Aerospace, a…

20 March 2025

Recorded on March 20, 2025 AI Chatbots Have Joined the Chat Speakers: Rachel Courtland, commissioning editor, Rhiannon Williams, news reporter, and Eileen Guo, features & investigations reporter. Chatbots are quickly changing how we connect to each other and ourselves. But are these changes for the better? How should they be monitored and regulated? Hear from MIT…

20 March 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. 4 technologies that could power the future of energy Where can you find lasers, electric guitars, and racks full of novel batteries, all in the same giant room? This week, the answer was…

20 March 2025

At a conference dedicated to energy technology that I attended this week, I noticed an outward attitude of optimism and excitement. But it’s hard to miss the current of uncertainty just underneath.  The ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit, held this year just outside Washington, DC, gathers some of the most cutting-edge innovators working on everything from…

20 March 2025