The Download: inside the Vitalism movement, and why AI's "memory" is a privacy problem Meet the Vitalists: the hardcore longevity enthusiasts who believe death is "wrong" Last April, an excited crowd gathered at a compound in Berkeley, California, for a three-day event called the Vitalist Bay Summit. It was part of a longer, two-month residency that hosted various events to explore tools--from drug regulation to cryonics--that might be deployed in the fight against death. One of the main goals, though, was to spread the word of Vitalism, a somewhat radical movement established by Nathan Cheng and his colleague Adam Gries a few years ago. Consider it longevity for the most hardcore adherents--a sweeping mission to which nothing short of total devotion will do. Although interest in longevity has certainly taken off in recent years, not everyone in the broader longevity space shares Vitalists' commitment to actually making death obsolete. And the Vitalists feel that momentum is building, not just for the science of aging and the development of lifespan-extending therapies, but for the acceptance of their philosophy that .

The Download: spotting crimes in prisoners' phone calls, and nominate an Innovator Under 35 A US telecom company trained an AI model on years of inmates' phone and video calls and is now piloting that model to scan their calls, texts, and emails in the hope of predicting and preventing crimes. Securus Technologies president Kevin Elder told that the company began building its AI tools in 2023, using its massive database of recorded calls to train AI models to detect criminal activity. It created one model, for example, using seven years of calls made by inmates in the Texas prison system, but it has been working on models for other states and counties. However, prisoner rights advocates say that the new AI system enables a system of invasive surveillance, and courts have specified few limits to this power. We have some exciting news: Nominations are now open for MIT Technology Review's 2026 Innovators Under 35 competition. This annual list recognizes 35 of the world's best young scientists and inventors, and our newsroom has produced it for more than two decades.

I hear it's close: two years, five years--maybe next year! And I hear it's going to solve our biggest problems in ways we cannot yet imagine. I also hear it will bring on the apocalypse and kill us all We're of course talking about artificial general intelligence, or AGI--that hypothetical near-future technology that (I hear) will be able to do pretty much whatever a human brain can do. Every age has its believers, people with an unshakeable faith that something huge is about to happen--a before and an after that they are privileged (or doomed) to live through. For us, that's the promised advent of AGI. And here's what I think: AGI is a lot like a conspiracy theory, and it may be the most consequential one of our time.

Plus: OpenAI's AI-powered web browser is coming We're thrilled to share the latest edition of MIT Technology Review magazine, digging into the future of the human body, and how it could change in the years ahead thanks to scientific and technological tinkering. The below stories are just a taste of what you can expect from this fascinating issue. To read the full thing, subscribe now if you haven't already. But is this the next step in human evolution or something more dangerous? Bonnie Tsui's piece digs into how our bodies learn to remember . MIT Technology Review Narrated: How Antarctica's history of isolation is ending--thanks to Starlink "This is one of the least visited places on planet Earth and I got to open the door," Matty Jordan, a construction specialist at New Zealand's Scott Base in Antarctica, wrote in the caption to the video he posted to Instagram and TikTok in October 2023.

Plus: America's first AI law is here Scientists can see Earth's permafrost thawing from space Something is rotten in the city of Nunapitchuk. In recent years, sewage has leached into the earth. The ground can feel squishy, sodden. This small town in northern Alaska is experiencing a sometimes overlooked consequence of climate change: thawing permafrost. And Nunapitchuk is far from the only Arctic town to find itself in such a predicament. Now scientists think they may be able to use satellite data to delve deep beneath the ground's surface and get a better understanding of how the permafrost thaws, and which areas might be most severely affected.

On Wednesday, Perplexity.ai debuted Comet, its first entry into the browser market that does away with Google and Microsoft's Bing in favor of its own search engine. Comet will be available for both Windows and macOS platforms, the company said. Perplexity has locked Comet behind a, um, perplexing pricing model. Although Comet is technically free, Perplexity has made it accessible for now via a waitlist. If you'd like to download it, you can wait for your turn to arrive or subscribe to Perplexity Max, the company's 200/mo plan that includes access to its latest AI models.

Last week, OpenAI released its new o3 and o4-mini reasoning models, which perform significantly better than their o1 and o3-mini predecessors and have new capabilities like "thinking with images" and agentically combining AI tools for more complex results. This is unusual as newer models tend to hallucinate less as the underlying AI tech improves. In the realm of LLMs and reasoning AIs, a "hallucination" occurs when the model makes up information that sounds convincing but has no bearing in truth. In other words, when you ask questions to ChatGPT, it may respond with an answer that's patently false or incorrect. OpenAI's in-house benchmark PersonQA--which is used to measure the factual accuracy of its AI models when talking about people--found that o3 hallucinated in 33 percent of responses while o4-mini did even worse at 48 percent.

Amazon's new feature could make it easier to get into the latest release in a series, especially if it's been some time since you've read the previous books. The new Recaps feature is part of the latest software update for the Kindle, and the company compares it to "Previously on..." segments you can watch for TV shows. Amazon announced Recaps in a blog post, where it said that you can get access to it once you receive the software update over the air or after you download and install it from Amazon's website. Amazon didn't talk about the technology behind the feature in its post, but a spokesperson has confirmed to TechCrunch that the recaps will be AI generated. Shortly after the feature rolled out, users talked about it on social media, wondering if Amazon is using generative AI to write series summaries.

General Motors is officially ending its support for Crusie's beleaguered fleet of self-driving "robotaxis." In a surprise announcement this week, the US carmaker said it will "realign its autonomous driving strategy" to end robotaxis and instead focus on eventually creating an autonomous personal vehicle. Cruise, which previously operated as a subsidiary, will now be fully absorbed by GM. That's all a major departure for the driverless car company which had its sights set on offering paid robotaxis rides in multiple cities next year. Cruise previously proclaimed it planned to have close to a million of its autonomous vehicles flooding US streets by the end of the decade.

On Saturday, a new image generator called Aurora became available for some Grok users, many of whom shared the tool's results on X touting their photorealism. But as of Sunday afternoon, Aurora appears to be gone. While it briefly showed up as an option in Grok's model selection menu as "Grok 2 Aurora (beta)," it's since been replaced with "Grok 2 Flux (beta)." It looks like Aurora may have gone public before it was meant to. In a tweet replying to one user who shared images of Tesla's Cybertruck created with Aurora, Elon Musk said, "This is our internal image generation system. Still in beta, but it will improve fast."