Tech and consulting giant IBM was not immune to the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) cuts. IBM had 15 of its federal contracts canceled due to DOGE-related cuts during the first quarter of 2025, according to reporting from Reuters and Bloomberg. These cuts amount to $100 million in future payments, per Bloomberg. Federal contracts represent […]
Read more AI coding assistant startup Windsurf cut its prices “across the board” it announced on Monday, touting “massive savings” for its users as competition with its rival Cursor intensifies. Windsurf said it’s getting rid of its complex system of “flow action credits,” which charged developers for actions its AI did in the background. It’s also cutting […]
Read more Tesla has started testing its autonomous ride-hail service with employees in Austin and the Bay Area ahead of the company’s planned robotaxi launch this summer. “FSD Supervised ride-hailing service is live for an early set of employees in Austin & San Francisco Bay Area,” the company posted Wednesday on X. FSD stands for “Full Self-Driving,” […]
Read more Government censorship has found its way to Bluesky, but there’s currently a loophole thanks to how the social network is structured. Earlier this month, Bluesky restricted access to 72 accounts in Turkey at the request of Turkish governmental authorities, according to a recent report by the Freedom of Expression Association. As a result, people in Turkey can […]
Read more Recorded on April 23, 2025
Brain-Computer Interfaces: From Promise to Product
Speakers: David Rotman, editor at large, and Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine.
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have been crowned the 11th Breakthrough Technology of 2025 by MIT Technology Review‘s readers. BCIs are electrodes implanted into the brain to send neural commands to computers, primarily to assist paralyzed people. Hear from MIT Technology Review editor at large David Rotman and senior editor for biomedicine Antonio Regalado as they explore the past, present, and future of BCIs.
Related Coverage
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Introducing: the Creativity issue
The university computer lab may seem like an unlikely center for creativity. We tend to think of creativity as happening more in the artist’s studio or writers’ workshop. But throughout history, very often our greatest creative leaps—and I would argue that the web and its descendants represent one such leap—have been due to advances in technology.
But the key to artistic achievement has never been the technology itself. It has been the way artists have applied it to express our humanity.
This latest issue of our magazine, which was entirely produced by human beings using computers, explores creativity and the tension between the artist and technology. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed putting it together.
—Mat Honan, editor in chief
Here’s just a taste of what you can expect:
+ AI is warping our expectations of music. New diffusion AI models that make songs from scratch are complicating our definitions of authorship and human creativity. Read the full story.
+ Meet the researchers testing the “Armageddon” approach to asteroid defense. Read the full story.
+ How the federal government is tracking changes in the supply of street drugs. A new harm reduction initiative is helping prevent needless deaths. Read the full story.
+ How AI is ushering in a new era of co-creativity, laying the groundwork for a future in which humans and machines create things together. Read the full story.
+ South Korea’s graphic artists are divided over whether AI will immortalize their work or threaten their creativity.
+ A new biosensor can detect bird flu in just five minutes. Read the full story.
MIT Technology Review Narrated: Quantum computing is taking on its biggest challenge—noise
For a while researchers thought they’d have to make do with noisy, error-prone systems, at least in the near term. That’s starting to change.
This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we’re publishing each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.
Join us today to chat about brain-computer interfaces
Brain-computer interfaces are electrodes implanted into the brain to send neural commands to computers, primarily to assist paralyzed people, and our readers recently named them as the 11th Breakthrough Technology of 2025 in our annual list. So what are the next steps for companies like Neuralink, Synchron, and Neuracle? And will they be able to help paralyzed people at scale?
Join our editor at large David Rotman and senior editor for biomedicine Antonio Regalado today for an exclusive subscriber-only Roundtable discussion exploring the past, present, and future of brain-computer interfaces. Register here to tune in at 1pm ET this afternoon!
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 OpenAI is interested in buying Chrome from Google
ChatGPT’s head of product Nick Turley said folding its tech into Chrome would improve it greatly. (Bloomberg $)
+ It would be just one of many prospective buyers. (Insider $)
+ Turley would also be happy with a distribution deal with Google. (The Information $)
2 Instagram’s founder says Meta starved it of resources
Kevin Systrom believes Mark Zuckerberg saw the app as a threat to Facebook. (NYT $)
+ It sounds as if the pair had a strained relationship. (The Verge)
3 Elon Musk will step back from DOGE next month
In his absence, Tesla’s profits have plummeted. (WP $)
+ But he’ll still spend a day or so a week working on US government matters. (CNBC)
+ There’s no denying that his political activities have damaged Tesla’s brand. (WSJ $)
+ DOGE’s tech takeover threatens the safety and stability of our critical data. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Chinese scientists and students are under scrutiny in the US
It’s a repeat of the China Initiative program launched under Trump’s first Presidency. (WSJ $)
+ US universities are starting to push back against government overreach. (Ars Technica)
+ The FBI accused him of spying for China. It ruined his life. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Rare earth elements aren’t so rare after all
Which is bad news for China. (Wired $)
+ But China’s export curbs are harming Tesla’s Optimus robot production. (Reuters)
+ This rare earth metal shows us the future of our planet’s resources. (MIT Technology Review)
6 How to wean yourself off fossil fuels
Massive home batteries are an intriguing energy alternative. (Vox)
7 A new mission to grow food in space has blasted off
Scientists are investigating creating food from single cells in orbit. (BBC)
+ Future space food could be made from astronaut breath. (MIT Technology Review)
8 It’s time to bid farewell to Skype
RIP to the OG video calling platform. (Rest of World)
9 Analysts are using AI to psychologically profile top soccer players 
And also to spot bright young talent. (The Guardian)
10 Saving the world’s seeds is a tricky business 
They’re the first line of defense against extinction. (Knowable Magazine)
+ The weeds are winning. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
“Stuffing Chrome with even more AI crap is one way to spur browser innovation, I guess.”
—Tech critic Paris Marx isn’t convinced that OpenAI buying Chrome would improve it, in a post on Bluesky.
The big story
How gamification took over the world
It’s a thought that occurs to every video-game player at some point: What if the weird, hyper-focused state I enter when playing in virtual worlds could somehow be applied to the real one?
Often pondered during especially challenging or tedious tasks in meatspace (writing essays, say, or doing your taxes), it’s an eminently reasonable question to ask. Life, after all, is hard. And while video games are too, there’s something almost magical about the way they can promote sustained bouts of superhuman concentration and resolve.
For some, this phenomenon leads to an interest in flow states and immersion. For others, it’s simply a reason to play more games. For a handful of consultants, startup gurus, and game designers in the late 2000s, it became the key to unlocking our true human potential. But instead of liberating us, gamification turned out to be just another tool for coercion, distraction, and control. Read the full story.
—Bryan Gardiner
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)
+ Succession creator Jesse Armstrong’s new film Mountainhead looks intriguing.
+ Domestic cats have a much more complicated history than we previously realized.
+ If you enjoyed the new vampire flick Sinners, you’ll love these Indian folk horrors.
+ This hispi cabbage side dish looks incredible.
A new play about OpenAI
I recently saw Doomers, a new play by Matthew Gasda about the aborted 2023 coup at OpenAI, here represented by a fictional company called MindMesh. The action is set almost entirely in a meeting room; the first act follows executives immediately after the firing of company CEO Seth (a stand-in for Sam Altman), and the second re-creates the board negotiations that determined his fate. It’s a solid attempt to capture the zeitgeist of Silicon Valley’s AI frenzy and the world’s moral panic over artificial intelligence, but the rapid-fire, high-stakes exchanges mean it sometimes seems to get lost in its own verbosity.
Themed dinner parties and culinary experiments
The vastness of Chinese cuisine defies easy categorization, and even in a city with no shortage of options, I often find myself cooking—not just to recapture something closer to home, but to create a home unlike one that ever existed. Recently, I’ve been experimenting with a Chinese take on the charcuterie board—pairing toasted steamed buns, called mantou, with furu, a fermented tofu spread that is sharp, pungent, and full of umami.
Sewing and copying my own clothes
I started sewing three years ago, but only in the past year have I begun making clothes from scratch. As a lover of vintage fashion—especially ’80s silhouettes—I started out with old patterns I found on Etsy. But recently, I tried something new: copying a beloved dress I bought in a thrift store in Beijing years ago. Doing this is quite literally a process of reverse-engineering—pinning the garment down, tracing its seams, deconstructing its logic, and rebuilding it. At times my brain feels like an old Mac hitting its CPU limit. But when it works, it feels like a small act of magic. It’s an exercise in certainty, the very thing that drew me to fashion in the first place—a chance to inhabit something that feels like an extension of myself.
Ariel Aberg-Riger is the author of America Redux: Visual Stories from Our Dynamic History.
The reason you are reading this letter from me today is that I was bored 30 years ago.
I was bored and curious about the world and so I wound up spending a lot of time in the university computer lab, screwing around on Usenet and the early World Wide Web, looking for interesting things to read. Soon enough I wasn’t content to just read stuff on the internet—I wanted to make it. So I learned HTML and made a basic web page, and then a better web page, and then a whole website full of web things. And then I just kept going from there. That amateurish collection of web pages led to a journalism internship with the online arm of a magazine that paid little attention to what we geeks were doing on the web. And that led to my first real journalism job, and then another, and, well, eventually this journalism job.
But none of that would have been possible if I hadn’t been bored and curious. And more to the point: curious about tech.
The university computer lab may seem at first like an unlikely center for creativity. We tend to think of creativity as happening more in the artist’s studio or writers’ workshop. But throughout history, very often our greatest creative leaps—and I would argue that the web and its descendants represent one such leap—have been due to advances in technology.
There are the big easy examples, like photography or the printing press, but it’s also true of all sorts of creative inventions that we often take for granted. Oil paints. Theaters. Musical scores. Electric synthesizers! Almost anywhere you look in the arts, perhaps outside of pure vocalization, technology has played a role.
But the key to artistic achievement has never been the technology itself. It has been the way artists have applied it to express our humanity. Think of the way we talk about the arts. We often compliment it with words that refer to our humanity, like soul, heart, and life; we often criticize it with descriptors such as sterile, clinical, or lifeless. (And sure, you can love a sterile piece of art, but typically that’s because the artist has leaned into sterility to make a point about humanity!)
All of which is to say I think that AI can be, will be, and already is a tool for creative expression, but that true art will always be something steered by human creativity, not machines.
I could be wrong. I hope not.
This issue, which was entirely produced by human beings using computers, explores creativity and the tension between the artist and technology. You can see it on our cover illustrated by Tom Humberstone, and read about it in stories from James O’Donnell, Will Douglas Heaven, Rebecca Ackermann, Michelle Kim, Bryan Gardiner, and Allison Arieff.
Yet of course, creativity is about more than just the arts. All of human advancement stems from creativity, because creativity is how we solve problems. So it was important to us to bring you accounts of that as well. You’ll find those in stories from Carrie Klein, Carly Kay, Matthew Ponsford, and Robin George Andrews. (If you’ve ever wanted to know how we might nuke an asteroid, this is the issue for you!)
We’re also trying to get a little more creative ourselves. Over the next few issues, you’ll notice some changes coming to this magazine with the addition of some new regular items (see Caiwei Chen’s “3 Things” for one such example). Among those changes, we are planning to solicit and publish more regular reader feedback and answer questions you may have about technology. We invite you to get creative and email us: newsroom@technologyreview.com.
As always, thanks for reading.
Some expanded features for your Ray Ban smart glasses.