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The Download: an organ transplant breakthrough, and homegrown Chinese chips

MIT Technology Review

Plus: Space data centers don't exist yet, but people already oppose them. Supercooled kidneys have been transplanted into pigs in a "landmark achievement" When it comes to organ donation, time is everything. As soon as an organ has been removed from a donor's body, it starts to deteriorate. Surgeons have only a matter of hours to get it into a recipient. In most cases, organs will be kept on ice during that time, at around 4 C (39 F). They cannot be frozen--in previous attempts, ice has formed, causing all kinds of damage.


The Download: energy transmission and US threats against Chinese AI

MIT Technology Review

Plus: Why the OpenAI hack is the scariest AI mishap yet. The power line that could reshape New York's grid is hitting snags During a heat wave on July 3, New York State's grid imported enough electricity from Canada to meet about 9% of its total demand that day. Some of that power shuttled in on a 339-mile power line stretching from Quebec to Queens. It opened in May and is officially the longest underground transmission line in North America. It could provide up to 20% of New York City's electricity demand, largely with abundant hydropower from Quebec. One wrinkle: The line has been down for most of this month, and some experts are concerned about how drought will affect the power supply feeding it.


The Download: NASA's new space telescope and OpenAI's autonomous hacker

MIT Technology Review

Plus: France has become the first EU country to ban social media for under-15s. Shape-shifting mirrors on NASA's new space telescope could unveil Jupiters like our own When NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches, as early as the end of next month, it will attempt one of astronomy's most precise disappearing acts to date. It will carry the first space-bound "active" coronagraph, an instrument that effectively erases most of the light from a star during photography. The technology will allow astronomers to take the first pictures of planets orbiting other stars that are similar to those in our solar system. Ultimately, it could pave the way for a future mission that could snap the first photos of Earth-like worlds. "I hope it's remembered for it being that critical stepping stone for finding Earth 2.0," says Brandon Creager, the instrument's lead mechanical engineer.


The Download: Chinese AI divides the White House, and a record copyright payout

MIT Technology Review

China's AI models have Trump's AI world at war with itself David Sacks branded Anthropic's models "lobotomized" and "woke." Emil Michael, a top Pentagon official, called OpenAI's new head of strategic futures a "supreme village idiot." It began because no one can agree on what to do about Kimi, a free, open-source model that Chinese AI company Moonshot launched last week. It appears to rival the intelligence of models from OpenAI and Anthropic, which are very much not free. Every time a new smart, free model from China gets released, US companies see less reason to fork out money for models from Anthropic or OpenAI. Read the full story on why no one can agree what to do about Kimi .


The Download: AI hiring biases, and weather data sabotage

MIT Technology Review

Plus: SpaceX is negotiating to sell the Pentagon AI compute. The next time you apply for a job, AI may screen your rรฉsumรฉ before any human sees it. But there's good reason to question whether AI will judge you fairly. We already know that LLMs pick up human biases from their training data. New research suggests they can also develop their own biases from experience--and stereotype job applicants more than humans do. As AI companies race to build agentic models that remember the tiniest details about users, they may be handing them ammunition for forming those biases.


The Download: Claude's inner workings, and the future of world models

MIT Technology Review

Plus: New York has become the first state to enact a data center moratorium. When Anthropic announced last week that it had found a new window into its models' "internal thoughts" as they reason through answers, there was one colleague I had to talk to: senior editor Will Douglas Heaven. Aside from having a PhD in computer science, Will has spent a lot of time digging into what we can say about how AI models work. I spoke with him about what we should take from Anthropic's new (and typically quirky) research. Here's what he had to say . How will AI understand the real world?


The Download: a donor conception cap and world models for AI

MIT Technology Review

Plus: Apple has sued OpenAI for allegedly stealing trade secrets. Ties van der Meer doesn't know how many siblings he has. The 47-year-old was conceived at a private fertility clinic using sperm from an anonymous donor. He eventually tracked down one sibling, but he may have others he'll never find. Other donor-conceived people have found they have tens or even hundreds of them. "It does make you feel a bit mass-produced," said one who discovered they had 25 half-siblings.


The Download: Claude's inner workings and OpenAI's "super app"

MIT Technology Review

Plus: OpenAI has unveiled its long-awaited super app. The AI firm Anthropic has got the clearest glimpse yet at what's really going on inside large language models as they answer questions or carry out tasks. What they found ranges from the mundane to the unnerving. Researchers at the company built a tool called the Jacobian lens (or J-lens) and used it to uncover a hidden area, which they named the J-space, inside its flagship LLM, Claude. The J-space contains words related to the response a model is working on but may not ultimately produce. If Claude were a person (which it is not), you might say these hidden words reveal what's on its mind before it actually speaks.


The Download: a nuclear landmark, and China eyes Nvidia chips

MIT Technology Review

Plus: NATO is building a network to stop Russian attackers in their tracks. I was really looking forward to July 4, and not just because I love a poolside barbecue. This year the American holiday also marked a big symbolic deadline for US nuclear power. Last year the Trump administration set a goal to see three new microreactors achieve criticality, a technical milestone establishing that a reactor can sustain a chain reaction, by the nation's 250th birthday. And just in time, not just three, but four reactors did so. But achieving criticality doesn't mean a reactor is ready to provide electricity for the grid (or at all, for that matter).


The Download: your stake in OpenAI, and the Treasury's AI warning

MIT Technology Review

Plus: Samsung profits have jumped 1,800% on booming AI chip sales. Sam Altman's proposal that Americans should share in the wealth created by AI is back in the spotlight, with reports that he is discussing giving the US government a 5% stake in OpenAI. At the company's current valuation, that stake would be worth roughly $320 per American household. The idea is meant to address concerns that AI companies are benefiting from human-generated work without compensating creators, while also easing fears that AI will cause a collapse of the labor market by providing a safety net. The details, however, remain unclear. Indeed, the offer may be more powerful as a political narrative than as a policy plan.