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Read more 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.
GPT-5 is here. Now what?
At long last, OpenAI has released GPT-5. The new system abandons the distinction between OpenAI’s flagship models and its o series of reasoning models, automatically routing user queries to a fast nonreasoning model or a slower reasoning version.
It is now available to everyone through the ChatGPT web interface—though nonpaying users may need to wait a few days to gain full access.
GPT-5 will furnish a more pleasant and seamless user experience. That’s not nothing, but it falls far short of the transformative AI future that Sam Altman has spent much of the past year hyping. Read the full story.
—Grace Huckins
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Donald Trump has called on Intel’s CEO to resign
He claims Lip-Bu Tan is “conflicted” by his business ties to China. (FT $)
+ Tan was already at odds with some of his board members before the intervention. (WSJ $)
+ But the CEO claims he’s got the full backing of his board presently. (Bloomberg $)
2 Wildfires are raging across the western US
And strong winds are rapidly spreading them across parched land. (WP $)
+ The fires have a devastating effect on human health. (The Guardian)
+ How AI can help spot wildfires. (MIT Technology Review)
3 Meta’s AI superintelligence team is growing
The new TBD Lab is currently working on the newest version of its Llama model. (WSJ $)
+ Meta has also been busy acquiring an AI audio firm. (The Information $)
+ Elsewhere, Tesla has disbanded its supercomputer team. (Bloomberg $)
4 A man suffered psychosis after ChatGPT suggested he take sodium bromide
The 60-year old ended up with bromism. (Ars Technica)
+ He’d been taking it for three months before he went to the ER. (The Independent)
+ AI companies have stopped warning you that their chatbots aren’t doctors. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Meet Silicon Valley’s AI Rationalists
The group’s influence has spread through tech giants and AI pioneers alike. (NYT $)
+ Inside effective altruism, where the far future counts a lot more than the present. (MIT Technology Review)
6 An CBP agent wore Meta smart glasses during an immigration raid
Signalling that law enforcement are interested in this technology. (404 Media)
7 The US military has a new use for Tesla Cybertrucks
Namely, aiming missiles at them. (The Verge)
+ It wants to learn how to destroy them if enemies start deploying them. (The Register)
8 South Korea will decide whether to let Google Maps work 
The decades-old debate could be laid to rest next week. (The Guardian)
+ The country has previously rejected Google’s requests on security grounds. (Reuters)
9 Instagram’s new location-sharing feature is here
It’s a bid to make the app more participatory and social. (Insider $)
+ It also looks a whole lot like Snap’s map. (Fast Company $)
10 These headphones could help you to focus 
Startup Neurable wants to track your brain activity to prevent you getting distracted. (Vox)
+ A new AI translation system for headphones clones multiple voices simultaneously. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
“I don’t think we should think of them as the ‘new Google’ yet.”
—Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s CEO, questions the hype swirling around AI agents’ capabilities, TechCrunch reports.
One more thing
The arrhythmia of our current age
Arrhythmia means the heart beats, but not in proper time—a critical rhythm of life suddenly going rogue and unpredictable. It’s frightening to experience, but what if it’s also a good metaphor for our current times? That a pulse once seemingly so steady is now less sure.
Perhaps this wobbliness might be extrapolated into a broader sense of life in the 2020s.
Maybe you feel it, too—that the world seems to have skipped more than a beat or two as demagogues rant and democracy shudders, hurricanes rage, and glaciers dissolve. We can’t stop watching tiny screens where influencers pitch products we don’t need alongside news about senseless wars that destroy, murder, and maim tens-of-thousands.
All the resulting anxiety has been hard on our hearts—literally and metaphorically. Read the full story.
—David Ewing Duncan
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.)
+ This entertaining site tracks just how many cigarettes are smoked throughout famous films (and the ones which feature no smoking at all)
+ Check out the very best seaside amusement arcade games.
+ Next week promises a dazzling meteor shower—here’s how to best watch it.
+ Oh, to live an hour in the shoes of a Boston-based bee doctor 
Vitalik Buterin says public companies that buy and hold Ether broaden the token’s access to a wider range of investors, but cautioned on leveraging too heavily.
The disbanding of Tesla’s Dojo efforts follows the departure of around 20 workers, who left the automaker to start their own AI company dubbed DensityAI focused on data center services for industries.
Read more Rocket Lab is taking the concept of an ‘end-to-end’ space company to new heights with a forthcoming acquisition.
Read more Coding assistant startups are highly unprofitable, says a source familiar with Windsurf financials.
Read more Following concerns about safety, Instagram head Adam Mosseri reassured users that the feature is opt-in, and noted that some people are “confused” about how the feature works.
Read more The EU has authorized Brex to sell its spend management products directly in all 30 countries, “no workarounds required,” CEO Pedro Franceschi said.
Read more At long last, OpenAI has released GPT-5. The new system abandons the distinction between OpenAI’s flagship models and its o series of reasoning models, automatically routing user queries to a fast nonreasoning model or a slower reasoning version. It is now available to everyone through the ChatGPT web interface—though nonpaying users may need to wait a few days to gain full access to the new capabilities.
It’s tempting to compare GPT-5 with its explicit predecessor, GPT-4, but the more illuminating juxtaposition is with o1, OpenAI’s first reasoning model, which was released last year. In contrast to GPT-5’s broad release, o1 was initially available only to Plus and Team subscribers. Those users got access to a completely new kind of language model—one that would “reason” through its answers by generating additional text before providing a final response, enabling it to solve much more challenging problems than its nonreasoning counterparts.
Whereas o1 was a major technological advancement, GPT-5 is, above all else, a refined product. During a press briefing, Sam Altman compared GPT-5 to Apple’s Retina displays, and it’s an apt analogy, though perhaps not in the way that he intended. Much like an unprecedentedly crisp screen, GPT-5 will furnish a more pleasant and seamless user experience. That’s not nothing, but it falls far short of the transformative AI future that Altman has spent much of the past year hyping. In the briefing, Altman called GPT-5 “a significant step along the path to AGI,” or artificial general intelligence, and maybe he’s right—but if so, it’s a very small step.
Take the demo of the model’s abilities that OpenAI showed to MIT Technology Review in advance of its release. Yann Dubois, a post-training lead at OpenAI, asked GPT-5 to design a web application that would help his partner learn French so that she could communicate more easily with his family. The model did an admirable job of following his instructions and created an appealing, user-friendly app. But when I gave GPT-4o an almost identical prompt, it produced an app with exactly the same functionality. The only difference is that it wasn’t as aesthetically pleasing.
Some of the other user-experience improvements are more substantial. Having the model rather than the user choose whether to apply reasoning to each query removes a major pain point, especially for users who don’t follow LLM advancements closely.
And, according to Altman, GPT-5 reasons much faster than the o-series models. The fact that OpenAI is releasing it to nonpaying users suggests that it’s also less expensive for the company to run. That’s a big deal: Running powerful models cheaply and quickly is a tough problem, and solving it is key to reducing AI’s environmental impact.
OpenAI has also taken steps to mitigate hallucinations, which have been a persistent headache. OpenAI’s evaluations suggest that GPT-5 models are substantially less likely to make incorrect claims than their predecessor models, o3 and GPT-4o. If that advancement holds up to scrutiny, it could help pave the way for more reliable and trustworthy agents. “Hallucination can cause real safety and security issues,” says Dawn Song, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley. For example, an agent that hallucinates software packages could download malicious code to a user’s device.
GPT-5 has achieved the state of the art on several benchmarks, including a test of agentic abilities and the coding evaluations SWE-Bench and Aider Polyglot. But according to Clémentine Fourrier, an AI researcher at the company HuggingFace, those evaluations are nearing saturation, which means that current models have achieved close to maximal performance.
“It’s basically like looking at the performance of a high schooler on middle-grade problems,” she says. “If the high schooler fails, it tells you something, but if it succeeds, it doesn’t tell you a lot.” Fourrier said she would be impressed if the system achieved a score of 80% or 85% on SWE-Bench—but it only managed a 74.9%.
Ultimately, the headline message from OpenAI is that GPT-5 feels better to use. “The vibes of this model are really good, and I think that people are really going to feel that, especially average people who haven’t been spending their time thinking about models,” said Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT.
Vibes alone, however, won’t bring about the automated future that Altman has promised. Reasoning felt like a major step forward on the way to AGI. We’re still waiting for the next one.
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.
Five ways that AI is learning to improve itself
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg declared that Meta aims to achieve smarter-than-human AI. He seems to have a recipe for achieving that goal, and the first ingredient is human talent: Zuckerberg has reportedly tried to lure top researchers to Meta Superintelligence Labs with nine-figure offers.
The second ingredient is AI itself. Zuckerberg recently said on an earnings call that Meta will focus on building self-improving AI—systems that can bootstrap themselves to higher and higher levels of performance. He hopes to tap into a very real trend. Here are five ways that AI is already making itself better.
—Grace Huckins
The greenhouse gases we’re not accounting for
Back in 2021, climate scientists noticed that levels of methane had soared in the atmosphere the previous year, rising at the fastest rate on record despite the global covid-19 lockdowns.
Researchers eventually spotted a clear pattern: Methane emissions had increased sharply across the tropics, where wetlands were growing wetter and warmer.
The findings offer one of the clearest cases so far where climate change itself is driving additional greenhouse-gas emissions from natural systems, triggering a feedback effect that threatens to produce more warming, more emissions, and on and on.
There’s now a major endeavor underway to better track and understand what’s going on. Read our story about it.
—James Temple
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 The Trump administration’s punishing new tariffs have come into effect
And prices are already climbing. (NYT $)
+ Economists fear the US economy is poised to shrink. (WP $)
+ Sweeping tariffs could threaten the US manufacturing rebound. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Sections of the US Constitution have been deleted online
Passages about Congress’ powers and citizens’ unlawful detention have been scrubbed from the US government’s website. (TechCrunch)
+ The Library of Congress blamed a coding error. (Ars Technica)
3 China is fighting a mosquito-borne virus
It’s deploying drones to search for standing water where the insects lay eggs. (AP News)
+ Chikungunya virus is rarely fatal, but can cause fever and joint pain. (CNN)
+ Authorities are taking a leaf out of their covid-fighting playbooks. (NYT $)
4 US federal agencies will have access to ChatGPT Enterprise
For the grand sum of $1 a year. (Ars Technica)
+ It won’t use workers’ data to train ChatGPT, apparently. (Bloomberg $)
+ The news comes after major AI firms were greenlit as federal vendors. (Engadget)
5 Chinese drug discovery startups are striking deals with Big Pharma
Western pharmaceutical giants are confident they can deliver. (Rest of World)
+ An AI-driven “factory of drugs” claims to have hit a big milestone. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Is it possible to build truly green AI data centers?
The tech industry appears pretty hooked on fossil fuels. (FT $)
+ We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. (MIT Technology Review)
7 The US is increasingly reliant on private companies for weather data
Experts are wary about losing access to vital tools. (Undark)
+ How US research cuts are threatening crucial climate data. (MIT Technology Review)
8 Genetic factors could contribute to the risk of developing chronic fatigue syndrome
It’s the first robust evidence that genetics play a role. (New Scientist $)
9 An experimental pill is showing weight-loss promise
Obese participants in Eli Lilly’s trial lost more than 12% of their body weight. (Wired $)
+ We’re learning more about what weight-loss drugs do to the body. (MIT Technology Review)
10 Finding a job online is a nightmare
Some companies are going back to basics to find the best recruits. (WSJ $)
Quote of the day
“We didn’t vote for ChatGPT.”
—Virginia Dignum, a professor of responsible artificial intelligence at Sweden’s Umeå University, criticizes the country’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson for admitting he regularly consults AI tools, the Guardian reports.
One more thing
Why AI could eat quantum computing’s lunch
Tech companies have been funneling billions of dollars into quantum computers for years. The hope is that they’ll be a game changer for fields as diverse as finance, drug discovery, and logistics.
But while the field struggles with the realities of tricky quantum hardware, another challenger is making headway in some of these most promising use cases. AI is now being applied to fundamental physics, chemistry, and materials science in a way that suggests quantum computing’s purported home turf might not be so safe after all. Read the full story.
—Edd Gent
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.)
+ A super rare edition of The Hobbit has sold for a record-breaking amount at auction.
+ How to find new music without relying on Spotify.
+ The forthcoming Social Network sequel is rumored to be getting a Succession shakeup.
+ If you own both a cat and a scanner, you know what you have to do.