After growing up without reliable power at home, Iwnetim Abate is working to develop a steady supply of sustainable energy. "I'm the only one who wears glasses and has eye problems in the family," Iwnetim Abate says with a smile as sun streams in through the windows of his MIT office. "I think it's because of the candles." In the small town in Ethiopia where he grew up, Abate's family had electricity, but it was unreliable. So, for several days each week when they were without power, Abate would finish his homework by candlelight. Today, Abate, 32, is an assistant professor at MIT in the department of materials science and engineering.

OpenAI spent 1.76 million on government lobbying in 2024 and 510,000 in the last three months of the year alone, according to a new disclosure filed on Tuesday--a significant jump from 2023, when the company spent just 260,000 on Capitol Hill. The disclosure is a clear signal of the company's arrival as a political player, as its first year of serious lobbying ends and Republican control of Washington begins. While OpenAI's lobbying spending is still dwarfed by bigger tech players, the uptick comes as it and other AI companies are helping redraw the shape of AI policy. Forget massive steel tanks--some scientists want to make chemicals with the help of rocks deep beneath Earth's surface. New research shows that ammonia, a chemical crucial for fertilizer, can be produced from rocks at temperatures and pressures that are common in the subsurface.

One of the biggest stories in tech this year has been the rise of large language models (LLMs). These are AI models that produce text a human might have written--sometimes so convincingly they have tricked people into thinking they are sentient. These models' power comes from troves of publicly available human-created text that has been hoovered from the internet. If you've posted anything even remotely personal in English on the internet, chances are your data might be part of some of the world's most popular LLMs. My colleague Melissa Heikkilä, our AI reporter, recently started to wonder what data these models might have on her--and how it could be misused. A bruising experience a decade ago left her paranoid about sharing personal details online, so she put OpenAI's GPT-3 to the test to see what it "knows" about her.