Isabella's AI-Powered News Aggregator

SpaceX cuts a deal to maybe buy Cursor for $60 billion

With an IPO looming for Elon Musk's SpaceX / xAI / X combo platter of companies, SpaceX has announced an odd arrangement to either acquire the automated programming platform Cursor for $60 billion or pay a fee of $10 billion. Buying this startup that's focused on AI coding could help xAI's tools com...

Roundtables: Unveiling The 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now

Listen to the session or watch below Subscribers saw a special edition of Roundtables simulcast live from EmTech AI, MIT Technology Review’s signature conference for AI leadership. Subscribers got an exclusive first look at a new list capturing 10 key technologies, emerging trends, bold ideas, and p...

Home theater fans will be happy the LG G6 OLED TV fixes this overlooked picture issue its predecessors had — but there's a catch

The LG G6 fixes a long-running issue most prominent on LG's G-series OLEDs… for the most part.

Pentagon wants $54B for drones, more than most nations’ military budgets

The proposed Pentagon drone investment rivals Ukraine’s entire military budget.

'Not just generating images. It’s thinking' — ChatGPT Images 2.0 could fundamentally change how you make AI images

ChatGPT Images 2.0 upgrades image generation with better reasoning, clearer text, and more reliable outputs, bringing it closer to true multimodal AI

Mozilla: Anthropic's Mythos found 271 security vulnerabilities in Firefox 150

CTO says new AI model is "every bit as capable" as world's best security researchers.

'Pushpaganda is, at the highest level, a case of social engineering': Experts warn scammers are flooding Google Discover with AI-generated content spreading malicious notifications

Pushpaganda uses AI-generated content and deceptive tactics to trick users into enabling notifications that deliver scams and evade traditional security defenses.

Supreme Court arguments make it clear that FCC fines are "nonbinding"

FCC tells Supreme Court its fines are nonbinding unless a jury upholds penalty.

Tim Cook is stepping down as CEO of Apple: Here’s a look at his 15-year legacy, from new products and services to China expansion

Cook, who joined Apple in 1998, succeeded Steve Jobs as CEO in 2011 and went on to transform Apple into a $4 trillion powerhouse. 

We translated the Palantir manifesto for actual human beings

Palantir CEO Alex Karp is a man in charge of one of the most important and frightening companies in the world. Karp's new book, cowritten with Nicholas Zamiska, is called The Technological Republic. After claiming "because we get asked a lot," Palantir posted a 22-point summary of the book that read...

The new word in home construction could be “plastics”

Single-use plastics are a persistent source of environmental pollution, and the need to house a growing global population puts increasing pressure on resources such as timber. MIT engineers have an idea that could make a dent in both problems at once. In a recent study, a team led by mechanical engi...

A natural protein may protect the GI tract from infection

Embedded in the body’s mucosal surfaces, proteins called lectins bind to sugars found on cell surfaces. A team led by MIT chemistry professor Laura Kiessling has found that one such protein, intelectin-2, both helps fortify the mucosal barrier and offers broad-spectrum protection against harmful bac...

This tool could show how consciousness works

How does the physical matter in our brains translate into thoughts, sensations, and emotions? It’s hard to explore that question without neurosurgery. But in a recent paper, MIT philosopher Matthias Michel, Lincoln Lab researcher Daniel Freeman, and colleagues outline a strategy for doing so with an...

Early life may have breathed oxygen earlier than believed

Around 2.3 billion years ago, a pivotal period known as the Great Oxidation Event set the evolutionary course for oxygen-breathing life on Earth. But MIT geobiologists and colleagues have found evidence that some early forms of life evolved the ability to use oxygen hundreds of millions of years bef...

Analog computing from waste heat

Heat generated by electronic devices is usually a problem, but a team led by Giuseppe Romano, a research scientist at MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, has found a way to use it for data processing that doesn’t rely on electricity. In this analog computing method, input data is encoded n...

Recent books from the MIT community

Priority Technologies: Ensuring US Security and Shared ProsperityEdited by Elisabeth B. Reynolds, professor of the practice of urban studies and planning and former executive director of the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future MIT PRESS, 2026, $24.95 The Shape of Wonder: How Scientists Think, W...

Get ready for hotter, muggier, stormier summers

A long stretch of humid heat followed by a powerful thunderstorm is a familiar weather pattern in the tropics, but it’s also becoming more common in midlatitude regions such as the US Midwest. A recent study by two MIT scientists identifies a key atmospheric condition that determines how hot, humid,...

Inventor recalls eye imaging breakthrough

If you’ve been to an eye doctor and had an image taken of the inside of your eye, chances are good it was done with optical coherence tomography (OCT)—a technology invented by clinician-scientist David Huang ’85, SM ’89, PhD ’93, and now used in 40 million procedures per year.  OCT is a noninvasive...

AI at MIT

At MIT, AI has become so pervasive that you can almost find your way into it without meaning to. Take Sili Deng, an associate professor of mechanical engineering. Deng says she still doesn’t know whether she’d have gone all in on artificial intelligence had it not been for the covid pandemic. She ha...

Caring for service dogs

Brenda Schafer Kennedy, SM ’93, knows that sometimes the best medicine comes with four legs and fur. Kennedy is the chief veterinary and research officer for Canine Companions, a California-based, nationwide organization that provides assistance dogs at no cost to children, veterans, and adults with...

Silo S3 teaser hints at the wasteland's origins

"Before we can know how it will all end, we need to understand how it all began."

10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now

LLMs+

When ChatGPT launched as an experimental prototype in late 2022, OpenAI’s chatbot became an everyday everything app for hundreds of millions of people. LLMs like ChatGPT were the new future: The entire tech industry was consumed by the inferno, with companies racing to spin up rival products. The as...

Supercharged scams

When ChatGPT was released to the public in late 2022, it opened people’s eyes to how easily generative AI could churn out vast amounts of human-seeming text from simple prompts. This quickly caught the attention of criminals, who soon began using large language models to produce malicious emails—bot...

World models

AI systems have already gained impressive mastery over the digital world, but the physical world is still humanity’s domain. As it turns out, building an AI system that can compose a novel or code an app is far easier than developing one that can fold laundry or navigate a city street. To get there,...

Weaponized deepfakes

For years, experts have warned that deepfakes—AI-generated videos, images, or audio recordings of people doing or saying things they haven’t actually done in real life—could be deployed in malicious ways.  These dangers are now here. Improvements in deepfake technology, and the widespread availabili...

Humanoid data

I was recently invited to join an app that would pay me cryptocurrency to film myself doing tasks like putting food into a bowl, microwaving it, and then taking it out. Another website suggested I try a new game in which I’d remotely control a robotic arm in Shenzhen, China, as it completed puzzles...

Agent orchestration

When people say AI will speed up drug development or fear that it will bring about mass layoffs, what they have in mind—whether they know it or not—are AI agents. ChatGPT made large language models a mass consumer product. But to change the world, AI needs to do more than just talk back: It needs…

Artificial scientists

AI companies frequently invoke the possibility of AI-enabled scientific discovery as a justification for their existence: If the technology eventually cures cancer and solves climate change, then all the carbon emissions and slop videos will have been well worth it.  Already, LLMs can assist scienti...

China’s open-source bet

Silicon Valley AI companies follow a familiar playbook: Keep the secret sauce behind an API, and charge for every drop. China’s leading AI labs are playing a different game: They ship models as downloadable “open-weight” packages. This lets developers adapt the models and run them on their own hardw...