Large language models are famous for their ability to make things up—in fact, it’s what they’re best at. But their inability to tell fact from fiction has left many businesses wondering if using them is worth the risk. A new tool created by Cleanlab, an AI startup spun out of a quantum computing lab at MIT, is designed to give high-stakes users a clearer sense of how trustworthy these models really are. Called the Trustworthy Language Model, it gives any output generated by a large language model a score between 0 and 1, according to its reliability. This lets people choose which responses to ..read more

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. An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary Until now, AI-generated videos of people have tended to have some stiffness, glitchiness, or other unnatural elements that make them pretty easy to differentiate from reality. For the past several years, AI video startup Synthesia has produced these kinds of AI-generated avatars. But today it launches a new generation, its first to take advantage of the latest advancement ..read more

Political fights over mining and minerals are heating up, and there are growing environmental and sociological concerns about how to source the materials the world needs to build new energy technologies.  But low-emissions energy sources, including wind, solar, and nuclear power, have a smaller mining footprint than coal and natural gas, according to a new report from the Breakthrough Institute released today. The report’s findings add to a growing body of evidence that technologies used to address climate change will likely lead to a future with less mining than a world powered by fossil ..read more

I’m stressed and running late, because what do you wear for the rest of eternity?  This makes it sound like I’m dying, but it’s the opposite. I am, in a way, about to live forever, thanks to the AI video startup Synthesia. For the past several years, the company has produced AI-generated avatars, but today it launches a new generation, its first to take advantage of the latest advancements in generative AI, and they are more realistic and expressive than anything I’ve ever seen. While today’s release means almost anyone will now be able to make a digital double, on this early April aftern ..read more

A month ago, Richard Slayman became the first living person to receive a kidney transplant from a gene-edited pig. Now, a team of researchers from NYU Langone Health reports that Lisa Pisano, a 54-year-old woman from New Jersey, has become the second. Her new kidney has just a single genetic modification—an approach that researchers hope could make scaling up the production of pig organs simpler.  Pisano, who had heart failure and end-stage kidney disease, underwent two operations, one to fit her with a heart pump to improve her circulation and the second to perform the kidney transplant ..read more

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. Introducing: the Build issue Building is a popular tech industry motif—especially in Silicon Valley, where “Time to build” has become something of a call to arms. Yet the future is built brick by brick from the imperfect decisions we make in the present.  We don’t often recognize that the seeming steps forward we are taking today could be seen as steps back in the years to come. Sometimes the things we don’t do, or the steps we skip, have bigg ..read more

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. I’ve wanted to learn more about the world of solar panels ever since I realized just how dominant Chinese companies have become in this field. Although much of the technology involved was invented in the US, today about 80% of the world’s solar manufacturing takes place in China. For some parts of the process, it’s responsible for even more: 97% of wafer manufacturing, for example.  So I jumped at the opportunity to interview ..read more

Today’s climate-change kraken may have been unleashed by human activity—which has discharged greenhouse-gas emissions into Earth’s atmosphere for centuries—but reversing course and taming nature’s growing fury seems beyond human means, a quest only mythical heroes could fulfill. Yet the dream of human-powered flight—of rising over the Mediterranean fueled merely by the strength of mortal limbs—was also the stuff of myths for thousands of years. Until 1988. That year, in October, MIT Technology Review published the aeronautical engineer John Langford’s account of his mission to retrace the lege ..read more

One of the formative memories of my youth took place on a camping trip at an Alabama state park. My dad’s friend brought an at-the-time gee-whiz gadget, a portable television, and we used it to watch the very first space shuttle launch from under the loblolly pines. It was thrilling. And it was hard not to believe, watching that shuttle go up (and, a few days later, land), that we were entering an era when travel into the near reaches of space would become common.  But as it turns out, that’s not the future we built. This is our Build issue, and although it’s certainly about creating the ..read more

Some time before the first dinosaurs, two supercontinents, Laurasia and Gondwana, collided, forcing molten rock out from the depths of the Earth. As eons passed, the liquid rock cooled and geological forces carved this rocky fault line into Pico Sacro, a strange conical peak that sits like a wizard’s hat near the northwestern corner of Spain. Today, Pico Sacro is venerated as a holy site and rumored, in the local mythology, to be a portal to hell. But this magic mountain has also become valued in modern times for a very different reason: the quartz deposits that resulted from these geological ..read more