The Download: what’s next for AI, and fighting digital censorship

This is immediately’s version of The Download, our weekday e-newsletter that gives a day by day dose of what is going on on on the planet of know-how.

DeepMind’s cofounder: Generative AI is only a part. What’s next is interactive AI.

DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman needs to construct a chatbot that does an entire lot greater than chat. In a current dialog he had with our senior AI editor Will Douglas Heaven, he defined his view that generative AI is only a part. 

What’s next, he says, is interactive AI: bots that may perform duties you set for them by calling on different software program and folks to get stuff achieved. He additionally calls for strong regulation—and doesn’t suppose that’ll be arduous to realize.

While many will scoff at Suleyman’s model of techno-optimism—even naïveté—he’s not the one one speaking up a future stuffed with ever extra autonomous software program. And, not like most individuals, he has a brand new billion-dollar firm, Inflection, with a roster of top-tier expertise. It may put him ready to alter the world within the methods he’s at all times wished to. Read the complete story.

How new tech helps folks circumvent digital authoritarianism

Questions about who will get to manage the web and who will get entry to on-line data are central to the way forward for our world. They have ramifications for geopolitics, free speech, nationwide safety, political organizing, human rights, fairness, and energy distribution generally.

We’re within the midst of a quiet technological arms race between the censors and these attempting to evade them. And as folks develop extra depending on digital instruments and platforms, the hurt achieved by on-line censorship turns into extra severe. Read the complete story.

—Tate Ryan-Mosley

This story is from The Technocrat, Tate’s weekly e-newsletter providing you with the within monitor on all issues energy and coverage in Silicon Valley. Sign up to obtain it in your inbox each Friday.

This startup plans to energy a tugboat with ammonia later this 12 months

Transportation is without doubt one of the world’s most polluting industries, accounting for roughly 15% of worldwide greenhouse-gas emissions. Electric automobiles will make a dent in these emissions within the coming many years, however batteries can’t maintain sufficient vitality to energy automobiles like long-range vehicles and transoceanic ships.

Young Suk Jo, 34, got here up with a potential answer in an unlikely chemical: ammonia. Amogy, a startup Jo cofounded in 2020, is constructing methods that may use ammonia, usually a part of fertilizer, as a gasoline to energy vehicles and ships. 

While Amogy has efficiently demonstrated its know-how in a small drone and a truck, Jo has now set his tights on a barely extra formidable type of transportation: a tugboat. Read the complete story.

—Casey Crownhart

Young Suk Jo is considered one of MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 for 2023. Read the complete checklist of this 12 months’s honorees, together with these making a distinction in robotics, computing, biotech, local weather and vitality, and AI.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the web to search out you immediately’s most enjoyable/vital/scary/fascinating tales about know-how.

1 Chipmaker Arm isn’t reaping the advantages of the AI increase but
But it has managed to side-step the US-China chip battle. (WSJ $)
+ The US is eager to supply chips from Vietnam. (Rest of World)
+ The chip patterning machines that can form computing’s next act. (MIT Technology Review)

2 A cultivated meat startup hid how its ‘meat’ was actually produced
Upside Foods’ hen filets weren’t brewed in a bioreactor, because it claimed. (Wired $)
+ Two firms can now promote lab-grown hen within the US. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Abortion care suppliers have created a reliable chatbot
The Charley bot is designed to supply up-to-date, dependable data on clinics. (WP $)
+ Texas is attempting out new ways to limit entry to abortion tablets on-line. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Reducing air air pollution may unintentionally velocity up international warming
But in the end, cleaner air makes for a more healthy planet—and human inhabitants. (Vox)
+ A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the ambiance, in an effort to tweak the local weather. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Apple is dealing with powerful occasions in China
While it averted outright bans imposed on different US tech giants, its days could possibly be numbered. (FT $)

6 The days of the digital city sq. are over
Social media feels much more fragmented because of this. (NY Mag $)

7 What it’s wish to attend an web habit assist group
Even although it’s not formally acknowledged as an habit by medical requirements our bodies. (The Guardian)
+ How to log out. (MIT Technology Review)

8 How Spotify reworked music 

9 The excellent time to purchase live performance tickets? It is dependent upon the artist
Resale costs can fluctuate wildly, relying on whenever you’re looking. (Bloomberg $)

10 The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a new child star 🌌  
The spectacular picture depicts highly effective winds emanating from the younger star. (New Scientist $)
+ The US navy is taking pictures satellites into house tremendous shortly. (Ars Technica)
+ How the James Webb Space Telescope broke the universe. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“Time to try a new hobby.”

—A person reacts to AI image-generator Mage Space’s determination to limit its customers from producing sexual photos of celebrities, 404 Media studies.

The large story

Cops constructed a shadowy surveillance machine in Minnesota after George Floyd’s homicide

March 2022

Law enforcement companies in Minnesota have been finishing up a secretive, long-running surveillance program concentrating on civil rights activists and journalists within the aftermath of the homicide of George Floyd in May 2020.

Run underneath a consortium often called Operation Safety Net, this system was arrange in spring 2021, ostensibly to keep up public order as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin went on trial for Floyd’s homicide.

But an investigation by MIT Technology Review reveals that the initiative expanded far past its publicly introduced scope to incorporate expansive use of instruments to scour social media, monitor cell telephones, and amass detailed photos of individuals’s faces. Read the complete story.

—Tate Ryan-Mosley & Sam Richards

We can nonetheless have good issues

A spot for consolation, enjoyable and distraction in these bizarre occasions. (Got any concepts? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ These oceanic footage are actually one thing (thanks Mike!)
+ A plastic Ikea bag is an unorthodox storage methodology for a Van Gogh portray, I’ll provide you with that.
+ An Early Middle English model of Running Up That Hill? Sure, why not.
+ Now we’re nearing fall, this glass squash is the proper harbinger of the brand new season.
+ Gen Z has found nu metallic and is decoding it in their very own distinctive approach.