The Starting Line for Self-Driving Cars
The 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge was a spectacular failure. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had offered a US $1 million prize for the team that could design an autonomous ground vehicle capable of completing an off-road course through sometimes flat, sometimes winding and mountainous desert terrain. As IEEE Spectrum reported at the time, it was “the motleyest assortment of vehicles assembled in one place since the filming of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior.” Not a single entrant made it across the finish line. Some didn’t make it out of the parking lot. Videos of the attempts are comical, although any laughter comes at the expense of the many engineers who spent countless hour..
IEEE Spectrum > RoboticsWhat DeepSeek Means for Open-Source AI
You’ve likely heard of DeepSeek: The Chinese company released a pair of open large language models (LLMs), DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1, in December 2024, making them available to anyone for free use and modification. Then, in January, the company released a free chatbot app, which quickly gained popularity and rose to the top spot in Apple’s app store. The DeepSeek models’ excellent performance, which rivals those of the best closed LLMs from OpenAI and Anthropic, spurred a stock-market route on 27 January that wiped off more than US $600 billion from leading AI stocks.Proponents of open AI models, however, have met DeepSeek’s releases with enthusiasm. Over 700 models based on DeepSe..
IEEE Spectrum > Artificial IntelligenceVideo Friday: Aibo Foster Parents
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.RoboCup German Open: 12–16 March 2025, NUREMBERG, GERMANYGerman Robotics Conference: 13–15 March 2025, NUREMBERG, GERMANYEuropean Robotics Forum: 25–27 March 2025, STUTTGART, GERMANYRoboSoft 2025: 23–26 April 2025, LAUSANNE, SWITZERLANDICUAS 2025: 14–17 May 2025, CHARLOTTE, NCICRA 2025: 19–23 May 2025, ATLANTALondon Humanoids Summit: 29–30 May 2025, LONDONIEEE RCAR 2025: 1–6 June 2025, TOYAMA, JAPAN2025 Energy Drone & Robotics Summit: 1..
IEEE Spectrum > RoboticsDeepSeek might not be such good news for energy after all
In the week since a Chinese AI model called DeepSeek became a household name, a dizzying number of narratives have gained steam, with varying degrees of accuracy: that the model is collecting your personal data (maybe); that it will upend AI as we know it (too soon to tell—but do read my colleague Will’s story…
MIT Technology ReviewOpenAI releases its new o3-mini reasoning model for free
On Thursday, Microsoft announced that it’s rolling OpenAI’s reasoning model o1 out to its Copilot users, and now OpenAI is releasing a new reasoning model, o3-mini, to people who use the free version of ChatGPT. This will mark the first time that the vast majority of people will have access to one of OpenAI’s reasoning…
MIT Technology ReviewHow DeepSeek ripped up the AI playbook—and why everyone’s going to follow its lead
Join us on Monday, February 3 as our editors discuss what DeepSeek’s breakout success means for AI and the broader tech industry.Register for this special subscriber-only session today. When the Chinese firm DeepSeek dropped a large language model called R1 last week, it sent shock waves through the US tech industry. Not only did R1…
MIT Technology ReviewThe Download: measuring vaccine hesitancy, and the rise of DeepSeek
This is today’s edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How measuring vaccine hesitancy could help health professionals tackle it This week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the US’s health agencies, has been facing questions from senators as…
MIT Technology ReviewHow measuring vaccine hesitancy could help health professionals tackle it
This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Review’sweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. This week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the US’s health agencies, has been facing questions from senators as part of his confirmation hearing…
MIT Technology ReviewAIs and Robots Should Sound Robotic
Most people know that robots no longer sound like tinny trash cans. They sound like Siri, Alexa, and Gemini. They sound like the voices in labyrinthine customer support phone trees. And even those robot voices are being made obsolete by new AI-generated voices that can mimic every vocal nuance and tic of human speech, down to specific regional accents. And with just a few seconds of audio, AI can now clone someone’s specific voice. This technology will replace humans in many areas. Automated customer support will save money by cutting staffing at call centers. AI agents will make calls on our behalf, conversing with others in natural language. All of that is happening, and will be commonp..
IEEE Spectrum > Artificial IntelligenceThe Download: climate tech under Trump, and scaling up quantum computing
This is today’s edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Three questions about the future of US climate tech under Trump Donald Trump has officially been in office for just over a week, and the new administration has already issued a blizzard of…
MIT Technology ReviewThree questions about the future of US climate tech under Trump
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Donald Trump has officially been in office for just over a week, and the new administration has hit the ground running with a blizzard of executive orders and memos. Some of the…
MIT Technology ReviewThis quantum computer built on server racks paves the way to bigger machines
A Canadian startup called Xanadu has built a new quantum computer it says can be easily scaled up to achieve the computational power needed to tackle scientific challenges ranging from drug discovery to more energy-efficient machine learning. Aurora is a “photonic” quantum computer, which means it crunches numbers using photonic qubits—information encoded in light. In…
MIT Technology ReviewThe Chancellor’s Speech on Economic Growth - January 2025
Chancellor Rachel Reeves delivered a speech in Oxfordshire outlining the Government’s plans for economic growth, with significant implications for the technology sector.
techUKKey Takeaways from Davos 2025
The jet fumes have now settled on the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual gathering in Davos, which allows us to reflect on what business, political, and civil society leaders had to say about the pressing global issues of 2025.
techUK'Digital doppelgangers' are helping scientists tackle everyday problems—and showing what makes us human
As rising seas lap at its shore, Tuvalu faces an existential threat. In an effort to preserve the tiny island nation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, its government has been building a "digital twin" of the entire country.
Phys.org > Computer Sciences3 Questions: Modeling adversarial intelligence to exploit AI’s security vulnerabilities
MIT CSAIL Principal Research Scientist Una-May O’Reilly discusses how she develops agents that reveal AI models’ security weaknesses before hackers do.
MIT NewsNew training approach could help AI agents perform better in uncertain conditions
Sometimes, it might be better to train a robot in an environment that’s different from the one where it will be deployed.
MIT NewsThe Download: mice with two dads, and Meta’s fact-checking challenges
This is today’s edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Mice with two dads have been created using CRISPR What’s new: Mice with two fathers have been born—and have survived to adulthood—following a complex set of experiments by a team in China. The…
MIT Technology ReviewThree reasons Meta will struggle with community fact-checking
Earlier this month, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta will cut back on its content moderation efforts and eliminate fact-checking in the US in favor of the more “democratic” approach that X (formerly Twitter) calls Community Notes, rolling back protections that he claimed had been developed only in response to media and government pressure. The move…
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