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. “Dr. Google” had its issues. Can ChatGPT Health do better?   For the past two decades, there’s been a clear first step for anyone who starts experiencing new medical symptoms: Look them up online.…

23 January 2026

This week marked a rather unpleasant anniversary: It’s a year since Texas reported a case of measles—the start of a significant outbreak that ended up spreading across multiple states. Since the start of January 2025, there have been over 2,500 confirmed cases of measles in the US. Three people have died. As vaccination rates drop…

23 January 2026

MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. In the final weeks of 2025, the battle over regulating artificial intelligence in the US reached a boiling point. On December 11, after Congress failed twice…

23 January 2026

For the past two decades, there’s been a clear first step for anyone who starts experiencing new medical symptoms: Look them up online. The practice was so common that it gained the pejorative moniker “Dr. Google.” But times are changing, and many medical-information seekers are now using LLMs. According to OpenAI, 230 million people ask…

22 January 2026

This story first appeared in The Debrief, our subscriber-only newsletter about the biggest news in tech by Mat Honan, Editor in Chief. Subscribe to read the next edition as soon as it lands. It’s supposed to be frigid in Davos this time of year. Part of the charm is seeing the world’s elite tromp through the…

22 January 2026

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. Yann LeCun’s new venture is a contrarian bet against large language models     Yann LeCun is a Turing Award recipient and a top AI researcher, but he has long been a contrarian figure in…

22 January 2026

In 2026, I’m going to be closely watching the price of lithium. If you’re not in the habit of obsessively tracking commodity markets, I certainly don’t blame you. (Though the news lately definitely makes the case that minerals can have major implications for global politics and the economy.) But lithium is worthy of a close…

22 January 2026

Yann LeCun is a Turing Award recipient and a top AI researcher, but he has long been a contrarian figure in the tech world. He believes that the industry’s current obsession with large language models is wrong-headed and will ultimately fail to solve many pressing problems.  Instead, he thinks we should be betting on world…

22 January 2026

There are many paths AI evolution could take. On one end of the spectrum, AI is dismissed as a marginal fad, another bubble fueled by notoriety and misallocated capital. On the other end, it’s cast as a dystopian force, destined to eliminate jobs on a large scale and destabilize economies. Markets oscillate between skepticism and…

21 January 2026

Governments plan to pour $1.3 trillion into AI infrastructure by 2030 to invest in “sovereign AI,” with the premise being that countries should be in control of their own AI capabilities. The funds include financing for domestic data centers, locally trained models, independent supply chains, and national talent pipelines. This is a response to real…

21 January 2026