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MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done. Your thermostat may not look like a power plant. Neither does your electric vehicle, home battery, or HVAC system. But utility and energy companies increasingly want to treat them like one. A virtual power plant, or VPP, is a collection of household devices (such…
I knew I’d officially become a ‘longevity influencer’ this month when a company called Generation Lab reached out to offer me the chance to write about—and even receive—their new rejuvenation treatment, an injectable combination of two existing drugs which they call 1 Generation. This wasn’t just any antiaging treatment, either. A company fact sheet says that…
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 inside story on why OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face The models responsible for last month’s agent hack of Hugging Face had been inadvertently trained to cheat and to communicate with…
EVs account for under 10% of total new-vehicle sales in the US, and the numbers are declining. From a climate perspective, that’s pretty dismal, especially because the transportation sector is the single biggest source of greenhouse-gas emissions in the country. One thing that could help turn that around? Slate Auto’s new truck—a vehicle that seems…
The models responsible for last month’s agent hack of Hugging Face had been inadvertently trained to cheat and to communicate with each other, according to an OpenAI technical report released today. The hack, which a group of agents undertook to find solutions for a cybersecurity test that they were stuck on, has confirmed some experts’…
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 Kids issue If the desire to limit kids’ use of technology was once a subcurrent, it has become a raging flood. Countries around the world are banning children from…
Puzzles and games have been central to AI development since the very beginning. Just as we humans like to test our smarts with crosswords or logic puzzles, developers can test how far models have advanced with a gaming gauntlet. The term “machine learning” was popularized in a 1959 article by the IBM computer scientist Arthur…
When my oldest child was born, I immediately set up Gmail and Twitter accounts in her name. I broadly announced her birth online and proceeded to plaster her photo across all sorts of platforms. In short, I began creating her digital footprint long before she could stand on her own two feet. Fast-forward a couple…
It’s a glorious day in Kirkland, Washington, an affluent Seattle suburb on the eastern shore of Lake Washington. The temperature is in the mid-80s, and the sky is incapable of being any more blue. The view from the Gates Ventures conference room overlooks the Carillon Point Marina, where a flotilla of expensive boats bob in…
When Don Yansen ’63 arrived at the MIT AgeLab for a study on technology in caregiving for older adults, he didn’t plan to launch another company. But when he heard participants talk about how hard modern devices can be to use, he decided to develop an alternative. Yansen, a serial entrepreneur who retired to care for…
