The Download, MIT Technology Review’s weekday briefing, leads with a feature by Will Douglas Heaven arguing that artificial general intelligence has taken on the character of a conspiracy theory. The piece captures the polar extremes of expectation around the technology – optimistic timelines and promises of transformative solutions on one side, existential apocalyptic fears on the other – and frames the debate as part of MIT Technology Review’s “The New Conspiracy Age” series on how conspiracy thinking is reshaping science and technology.
The newsletter also carries the first edition of a collaboration between the Financial Times and MIT Technology Review called The State of AI, with a dispatch by John Thornhill and Caiwei Chen asking whether China is about to win the artificial intelligence race. The column contrasts the United States’ advantages in semiconductor expertise, cutting-edge research, and data center investment with China’s capacity to mobilize whole-of-society resources to develop and deploy artificial intelligence at scale. The series will publish weekly for six weeks and aims to map how generative artificial intelligence is reshaping global power.
A curated must-reads list highlights industry and policy developments, including reports that China may offer incentives for data centers that use native chips, Norway’s oil fund opposing Elon Musk’s large pay package, OpenAI’s significant compute deal with Amazon, and allegations that cybersecurity workers moonlighted as criminal hackers. Other items touch on labor used to train humanoid robots, limits to large language models’ introspective descriptions, renewed corporate bets on artificial intelligence advertising, and Facebook Dating’s growing use despite scam risks. The issue closes with a quote about the human limits of algorithmic matchmaking, an in-depth piece on an asteroid that briefly carried a 3.1% chance of impacting Earth in 2032 before being ruled safe, and a light section of cultural links and distractions to round out the briefing.
