We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. Understanding AI’s energy use was a huge global conversation in 2025 as hundreds of millions of people began using generative AI tools on a regular basis. Senior reporters James O’Donnell and Casey Crownhart dug into the numbers and published an unprecedented […]

The key to R1’s success was distillation, a technique that makes AI models more efficient. It works by getting a bigger model to tutor a smaller model: You run the teacher model on a lot of examples and record the answers, and reward the student model as it copies those responses as closely as possible, […]

In April 2025, Ronald Deibert left all electronic devices at home in Toronto and boarded a plane. When he landed in Illinois, he took a taxi to a mall and headed directly to the Apple Store to purchase a new laptop and iPhone. He’d wanted to keep the risk of having his personal devices confiscated […]

Back in 2015, the battery storage industry had installed only a fraction of a gigawatt of battery storage capacity across the US. That year, it set a seemingly bold target of adding 35 gigawatts by 2035. The sector passed that goal a decade early this year and then hit 40 gigawatts a couple of months […]

Put your math hats on for a minute, and let’s take a look at what this beef from mid-October was about. It’s a perfect example of what’s wrong with AI right now. Bubeck was excited that GPT-5 seemed to have somehow solved a number of puzzles known as Erdős problems. Paul Erdős, one of the […]

Only none of it is happening inside a body. These images were captured in a Beijing laboratory, inside a microfluidic chip, as scientists watched the scene unfold. A transparent microfluidic chip used to grow an organoid that mimics the lining of a uterus. COURTESY OF THE RESEARCHERS In three papers published this week by Cell […]

@digitalpersons AI video technology is evolving so quickly that even for creative professionals, there is a lot to experiment with. Daryl Anselmo, a creative director turned digital artist, has been experimenting with the technology since its early days, posting an AI-generated video every day since 2021. He tells me that uses a wide range of […]

It’s debatable whether healthy people should be exposed to these risks, says Fernandez Lynch. The technology “still has serious questions about its safety and effectiveness,” even for people with life-threatening diseases, she says. “If you are a healthy person, the risk of harm is more substantial because it’ll be more impactful on your life.” But […]

Cella and Sirona Technologies have a pilot program in the Great Rift Valley called Project Jacaranda. SIRONA TECHNOLOGIES “Climate change is disproportionately impacting this part of the world, but it’s also changing the rules of the game all over the world,” Cella CEO and cofounder Corey Pattison tells me, explaining the draw of Mwangi and […]

One of my favorite stories in that package comes from my colleague David Rotman, who took a hard look at AI for materials research. AI could transform the process of discovering new materials—innovation that could be especially useful in the world of climate tech, which needs new batteries, semiconductors, magnets, and more. But the field […]