AI is often described as a black box, but it’s not just its inner workings that are mysterious. Leading AI companies have kept figures on energy use closely guarded, making it hard to determine its climate impact. In a rigorous investigation, senior AI reporter James O’Donnell and senior climate reporter Casey Crownhart spent six months digging through hundreds of pages of reports, interviewing experts, and crunching the numbers.  The team drilled down into the energy cost of a single prompt, and then zoomed out to build a broader picture illustrating the potential impacts of AI’s current and future energy demand. Their work revealed just how big AI’s energy footprint is, where that energy comes from, and who will pay for it. In the months following the project’s publication, major AI companies including Open AI, Mistral, and Google published details about their models’ energy and water usage.  The 2026 awards will be presented in New York City on May 19. 

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. AI is rewiring how the world’s best Go players think Ten years ago AlphaGo, Google DeepMind’s AI program, stunned the world by defeating the South Korean Go player Lee Sedol.And in the years since, AI has upended the game. It’s overturned centuries-old principles about the best moves and introduced entirely new ones. Players now train to replicate AI’s moves as closely as they can rather than inventing their own, even when the machine’s thinking remains mysterious to them. Meanwhile, AI is democratizing access to training, and more female players are climbing the ranks as a result.Today, it is essentially impossible to compete professionally without using AI. Some say the technology has drained the game of its creativity, while others think there is still room for human invention. Read the full story. —Michelle Kim
MIT Technology Review Narrated: Hackers made death threats against this security researcher. Big mistake.
In April 2024, a mysterious someone using the online handles “Waifu” and “Judische” began posting death threats on Telegram and Discord channels aimed at a cybersecurity researcher named Allison Nixon.As chief research officer at the cyber investigations firm Unit 221B, Nixon had built a career tracking cybercriminals and helping get them arrested. And although she had taken an interest in the Waifu persona in years past for crimes he boasted about committing, he hadn’t been on her radar for a while when the threats began, because she was tracking other targets. Now Nixon resolved to unmask Waifu/Judische and others responsible for the death threats—and take them down for crimes they admitted to committing. 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. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Anthropic has refused the Pentagon’s AI demands It’s holding firm on its stance: no mass surveillance of Americans, and no lethal autonomous weapons. (The Verge)+ Anthropic said “virtually no progress” had been made during recent talks. (The Hill)+ Here’s how relations between the US government and the company started to dissolve. (Vox)2 Instagram will alert parents if teens repeatedly search for suicide materialBut campaigners fear the measure could do more harm than good. (BBC)+ Instagram is working on a similar alert feature for its AI tools. (Engadget)+ Poland is weighing up banning under-15s from accessing social media. (Bloomberg $)3 ChatGPT Health regularly fails to recognize medical emergenciesIn more than half of serious cases, it advised users to delay seeking treatment. (The Guardian)+ “Dr. Google” had its issues. Can ChatGPT Health do better? (MIT Technology Review)4 The Islamic State’s online warriors are posting beyond the graveThe group is using AI to resurrect dead leaders and port them to new platforms. (404 Media)5 Vegetarians are at lower risk from five types of cancerIt suggests that avoiding meat could help to avoid certain cancers, including breast and pancreatic. (FT $)+ Interestingly, the same doesn’t apply for vegans. (Bloomberg $)+ RFK Jr. follows a carnivore diet. That doesn’t mean you should. (MIT Technology Review)6 Activists combating online abuse have been barred from AmericaAuthorities accused HateAid of participating in a “global censorship-industrial complex.” (NYT $)+ What it’s like to be banned from the US for fighting online hate. (MIT Technology Review) 7 Russians are looking for missing soldiers on Google MapsThey’re posting reviews pleading for information about missing loved ones. (New Yorker $)+ Google Maps has finally gained approval to operate in South Korea. (FT $)+ It’s hellbent on closing its final few global gaps. (Economist $)

8 Burger King’s new AI assistant will evaluate workers’ friendlinessIt’ll check interactions to make sure they’re saying please and thank you. (The Verge)+ Perplexity’s bossy new AI agent assigns work to fellow agents. (Ars Technica)9 NASA still hasn’t made it back to the moonThe mission has been dogged by delays and issues. (WP $)10 Are you Chinamaxxing yet?Everyone on TikTok is, c’mon. (Insider $) Quote of the day “This is as much of a political fight as a military use issue.” —Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, who researches AI in warfare, explains to the Washington Post why ideological differences are likely to be worsening the rift between Anthropic and the Pentagon. One more thing One city’s fight to solve its sewage problem with sensorsIn the city of South Bend, Indiana, wastewater from people’s kitchens, sinks, washing machines, and toilets flows through 35 neighborhood sewer lines. On good days, just before each line ends, a vertical throttle pipe diverts the sewage into an interceptor tube, which carries it to a treatment plant where solid pollutants and bacteria are filtered out.As in many American cities, those pipes are combined with storm drains, which can fill rivers and lakes with toxic sludge when heavy rains or melted snow overwhelms them, endangering wildlife and drinking water supplies. But city officials have a plan to make its aging sewers significantly smarter. Read the full story.—Andrew Zaleski
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 is a fascinating insight into Jimi Hendrix’s technical guitar wizardry 🎸+ The Romans: their lives really weren’t so different to ours, y’know.+ How the Beatles kicked back and relaxed at home when they weren’t shaping history.+ Disney composer Alan Menken is an undisputed talent.

Burrowed in the alleys of Hongik-dong, a hushed residential neighborhood in eastern Seoul, is a faded stone-tiled building stamped “Korea Baduk Association,” the governing body for professional Go. The game is an ancient one, with sacred stature in South Korea.  But inside the building, rooms once filled with the soft clatter of hands dipping into wooden bowls of stones now echo with mouse clicks. Players hunch over their monitors and replay their matches in an AI program. Others huddle around a Go board and debate the best next move, while coaches report how their choices stack up against the AI’s. Some sit in silence, watching AI programs play against each other.  Ten years ago AlphaGo, Google DeepMind’s AI program, stunned the world by defeating the South Korean Go player Lee Sedol. And in the years since, AI has upended the game. It’s overturned centuries-old principles about the best moves and introduced entirely new ones. Players now train to replicate AI’s moves as closely as they can rather than inventing their own, even when the machine’s thinking remains mysterious to them. Today, it is essentially impossible to compete professionally without using AI. Some say the technology has drained the game of its creativity, while others think there is still room for human invention. Meanwhile, AI is democratizing access to training, and more female players are climbing the ranks as a result.  For Shin Jin-seo, the top-ranked Go player in the world, AI is an invaluable training partner. Every morning, he sits at his computer and opens a program called KataGo. Nicknamed “Shintelligence” for how closely his moves mimic AI’s, he traces the glowing “blue spot” that represents the program’s suggestion for the best next move, rearranging the stones on the digital grid to try to understand the machine’s thinking. “I constantly think about why AI chose a move,” he says.
When training for a match, Shin spends most of his waking hours poring over KataGo. “It’s almost like an ascetic practice,” he says. According to a study in 2022 by the Korean Baduk League, Shin’s moves match AI’s 37.5% of the time, well above the 28.5% average the study found among all players. “My game has changed a lot,” says Shin, “because I have to follow the directions suggested by AI to some extent.” The Korea Baduk Association says it has reached out to Google DeepMind in the hopes of arranging a match between Shin and AlphaGo, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of its victory over Lee. A spokesperson for Google DeepMind said the company could not provide information at this time. But if a new match does happen, Shin, who has trained on more advanced AI programs, is optimistic that he’d win. “AlphaGo still had some flaws then, so I think I could beat it if I target those weaknesses,” he says.
AI rewrites the Go playbook Go is an abstract strategy board game invented in China more than 2,500 years ago. Two players take turns placing black and white stones on a 19×19 grid, aiming to conquer territory by surrounding their opponent’s stones. It’s a game of striking mathematical complexity. The number of possible board configurations—roughly 10170—dwarfs the number of atoms in the universe. If chess is a battle, Go is a war. You suffocate your enemy in one corner while fending off an invasion in another. To train AI to play Go, a vast trove of human Go moves are fed into a neural network, a computing system that mimics the web of neurons in the human brain. AlphaGo, which was later christened AlphaGo Lee after its victory over Lee Sedol, was trained on 30 million Go moves and refined by playing millions of games against itself. In 2017, its successor, AlphaGo Zero, picked up Go from scratch. Without studying any human games, it learned by playing against itself, with moves based only on the rules of the game. The blank-slate approach proved more powerful, unconstrained by the limits of human knowledge. After three days of training, it beat AlphaGo Lee 100 games to zero.  Google DeepMind retired AlphaGo that same year. But then a wave of open-source models inspired by AlphaGo Zero emerged. Today, KataGo is the program most widely used by professional Go players in South Korea. It’s faster and sharper than AlphaGo. It’s learned to predict not just who will win, but also who owns each point on the board at any given moment. While AlphaGo Zero pieced together its understanding of the board by looking at small sections, KataGo learned to read the whole board, developing better judgment for long-term strategies. Instead of just learning how to win, it learned to maximize its score. The software has reshaped how people play. For hundreds of years, professional Go players have navigated the game’s astronomical complexity by developing heuristics that replaced brute calculation. Elegant opening strategies imposed abstract order on the empty grid. Invading corners early was a bad bargain. Each generation of Go players added new principles to the canon.  But “AI has changed everything,” says Park Jeong-sang, a South Korean Go commentator. “Fundamental moves that were once considered common sense aren’t played at all today, and techniques that didn’t exist before have become popular.”  The starkest shift has been in opening moves. Go starts on a blank grid, and the first 50 moves were canvases for abstract thinking and creativity, where players etched their personalities and philosophies. Lee Sedol fashioned provocative moves that invited chaos. Ke Jie, a Chinese player who was defeated by AlphaGo Master in 2017, dazzled with agile, imaginative moves. Now, players memorize the same strain of efficient, calculated opening moves suggested by AI. The crux of the game has shifted to the middle moves, where raw calculation matters more than creativity. Training with AI has led to a homogenization of playing styles. Ke Jie has lamented the strain of watching the same opening moves recycled endlessly. “I feel the exact same way as the fans watching. It’s very tiring and painful to watch,” he told a Chinese news outlet in 2021. Fans revel when a player breaks from the script with offbeat moves, but those moments have become rarer. Over a third of moves by the top Go players replicate AI’s recommendations, according to a study in 2023. The first 50 moves of each game are often identical to what AI suggests, many players say.  “Go has become a mind sport,” says Lee Sedol, who retired three years after his 2016 defeat to AlphaGo. “Before AI, we sought something greater. I learned Go as an art,” he says. “But if you copy your moves from an answer key, that’s no longer art.” 

Playing Go is no longer about charting new frontiers, some players say, but about following the dictates of a superhuman oracle. “I used to inspire fans by advancing the techniques of Go and presenting a new paradigm,” says Lee. “My reason for playing Go has vanished.” A mysterious mind The players who have stayed in the game are trying to reinvent their craft. But it can be hard to discern what the new principles are. Disarmingly slight and formidably calm, Kim Chae-young, one of the top female Go players in the world, grew up learning the game from her father, who was also a professional Go player. But when AI began to reshape the game, she found herself starting over. “I needed time to abandon everything I had learned before,” says Kim who shared her screen with me as she pointed her cursor to the blue spots suggested by KataGo. “The intuition I had built up over the years turned out to be wrong.”  As she leaned close to her monitor, her blinking screen showed the winning probabilities of each move, with no explanations. Even top players like Kim and Shin don’t understand all of AI’s moves. “It seems like it’s thinking in a higher dimension,” she says. When she tries to learn from AI, she adds, “it’s less about rationally thinking through each move, but more about developing a gut feeling—an intuition.” Researchers are trying to discover the superhuman knowledge encoded in game-playing AI programs so that humans can learn it too. In 2024, researchers at Google DeepMind extracted new chess concepts from AlphaZero, a generalized version of AlphaGo Zero that can also play chess, and taught them to chess grandmasters using chess puzzles. The Go concepts that players have picked up from AI systems so far are “probably only a small portion of what you could potentially learn,” says Nicholas Tomlin, a computer scientist at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, who coauthored a study probing Go concepts encoded in AlphaGo Zero. But extracting those lessons remains a struggle. “Top-tier players haven’t yet been able to deduce the general principles behind AI moves,” says Nam Chi-hyung, a Go professor at Myongji University. Although they can emulate AI’s moves, they have yet to glean a new paradigm for the game because its reasoning is a black box, she says. Go may be in an epistemic limbo.  Even if AI is an opaque teacher, it’s a democratic one. It has supercharged training for female Go players, who have long been underdogs of the game. For decades, training meant studying under top male players, and the most competitive matches took place in male circles that were difficult for women to break into, says Nam. “Female players never had access to that experience,” she says. “But now they can study with AI, which has made their training environment much more favorable.” More broadly, AI has narrowed the gap between players by helping everyone perfect their opening moves. Female players have climbed the ranks over the last few years as a result. In 2022, Choi Jeong, then the top female player in the world, became the first woman to reach the finals of a major international Go tournament. Dubbed “Girl Wrestler” for her fierce, combative style of play, she took on Shin. She lost, but the match broke new ground for women in Go. In 2024, Kim made headlines for winning the Korean Go League’s postseason playoffs. She was the only female player in the tournament. 
Training with AI has given Kim newfound confidence. Analyzing male players’ moves with AI has shattered their veneer of infallibility. “Before, I couldn’t gauge just how strong top male players were—they felt invincible. Now, I know that they make mistakes, and their moves aren’t always brilliant,” she says. “AI broke the psychological barrier.” Go players find a new identity Although AI has mastered Go far better than any player, fans continue to prefer watching people play. “A Go game between AI programs is not very fun for fans to watch,” says Park, the Go commentator. Such matches are too complex for fans to follow, too flawless to be thrilling, he says. 
Players can mimic AI’s opening moves, but in the middle game—where the board branches into too many possibilities to memorize—their own judgment takes over. Fans revel in watching players make mistakes and mount comebacks, exuding personality in every stone on the board. Shin’s playing style is combative but marked by machinelike poise. Kim deftly navigates  the most chaotic positions on the board.  “In Go, every move is a choice you make, and your opponent responds with a choice of their own,” says Kim Dae-hui, 27, a Go fan and amateur player. “Watching that process unfold is fun.” With fans like Kim still watching, Shin finds meaning in his game. “I can play a kind of Go that tells a story that only a human can,” he says.  After his retirement, Lee searched for a new job where he could have an edge as a human. He started making board games, giving speeches, and teaching students at a university. “I’m looking for a new domain that I can enjoy and excel at,” he says. But lately, he feels more hopeful for the game he left behind. “It’s every Go player’s dream to play a masterpiece game,” he says—a game of technical brilliance, with no mistakes, fought to a razor’s edge between evenly matched players. “It’s like a mirage,” Lee says, chuckling. “Maybe AI can help us play a masterpiece.”  Shin hopes he can do that. To Shin, AI is a teacher, a companion, and a North Star. “I may be one of the strongest human players, but with AI around, I can’t be so arrogant,” he says. “AI gives me a reason to keep improving.”

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In association withEY For years, Industry 4.0 transformation has centered on the convergence of intelligent technologies like AI, cloud, the internet of things, robotics, and digital twins. Industry 5.0 marks a pivotal shift from integrating emerging technologies to orchestrating them at scale. With Industry 5.0, the purpose of this interconnected web of technologies is more nuanced: to augment human potential, not just automate work, and enhance environmental sustainability. Industry 5.0 has ushered in a radically new level of collaboration between humans and machines, one that removes data silos and optimizes infrastructure, operations, and resource use to disrupt business models and create new forms of enterprise value. But without discipline in tracking value creation, investments risk being wasted on incremental efficiency gains rather than strategic growth. “To realize the promise of Industry 5.0, companies must move beyond cost and efficiency to focus on growth, resilience, and human-centric outcomes,” says Sachin Lulla, EY Americas industrials and energy transformation leader. “This requires not just new technologies, but new ways of working—where people and machines collaborate, and where value is measured not just in dollars saved, but in new opportunities created.” An MIT Technology Review Insights survey of 250 industry leaders from around the world reveals most industrial investments still target efficiency. And while the data shows human-centric and sustainable use cases deliver higher value, they are underfunded. The research shows most organizations are not realizing the full value potential of Industry 5.0 due to a combination of:
• Culture, skills, and collaboration barriers.• Tactical and misaligned technology investments.• Use-case prioritization focused on efficiency over growth, sustainability, and well-being. The barrier to achieving Industry 5.0 transformation is not only about fixing the technology, according to research from EY and Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, it is also about bolstering human-centric elements like strategy, culture, and leadership. Companies are investing heavily in digital transformation, but not always in ways that unlock the full human potential of Industry 5.0.
“We’re not just doing digital work for work’s sake, what I call ‘chasing the digital fairies,’” says Chris Ware, general manager, iron ore digital, Rio Tinto. “We have to be very clear on what pieces of work we go after and why. Every domain has a unique roadmap about how to deliver the best value.” Download the full report. This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.

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. America was winning the race to find Martian life. Then China jumped in. In July 2024, NASA’s Perseverance rover came across a peculiar rocky outcrop on Mars covered in strange spots. On Earth, these marks are almost always produced by microbial life. Sure, those specks are not definitive proof of alien life. But they are the best hint yet that life may not be a one-off event in the cosmos.But the only way to know for sure is to bring a sample of that rock home to study.Now, just over a year and a half later, the project to do so is on life support, with zero funding flowing in 2026 and little backing left in Congress. As a result, those oh-so-promising rocks may be stuck out there forever.This also means that, in the race to find evidence of alien life, America has effectively ceded its pole position to its greatest geopolitical rival: China. The superpower is moving full steam ahead with its own version of the mission to bring the rock samples home. It’s leaner than America and Europe’s mission, and the rock samples it will snatch from Mars will likely not be as high quality. But that won’t be the headline people remember—the one in the scientific journals and the history books.Nearly a dozen project insiders and scientists in both the US and China shared with me the story of how America blew its lead in the new space race. It’s full of wild dreams and promising discoveries—as well as mismanagement, eye-watering costs, and, ultimately, anger and disappointment. Read the full story.
—Robin George Andrews This article is also part of the Big Story series: MIT Technology Review’s most important, ambitious reporting. The stories in the series take a deep look at the technologies that are coming next and what they will mean for us and the world we live in. Check out the rest of them here.
This company claims a battery breakthrough. Now they need to prove it. When a company claims to have created what’s essentially the holy grail of batteries, there are bound to be some questions. Interest has been swirling since Donut Lab, a Finnish company, announced last month that it had a new solid-state battery technology, one that was ready for large-scale production. The company said its batteries can charge super-fast and have a high energy density that would translate to ultra-long-range EVs. What’s more, it claimed the cells can operate safely in the extreme heat and cold, contain “green and abundant materials,” and would cost less than lithium-ion batteries do today. It sounded amazing—this sort of technology could transform the EV industry. But many quickly wondered if it was all too good to be true. Let’s dig into why this company is making news, why many experts are skeptical, and what it all means for the battery industry right now. —Casey Crownhart 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 Chinese law enforcement tried to get ChatGPT to discredit Japan’s prime ministerOpenAI claims the chatbot refused to help plan an online smear campaign. (Axios)+ The user asked ChatGPT to edit status reports on covert influence operations. (Bloomberg $) 2 Meta’s AI is sending junk tips to child abuse investigatorsNot only are they a serious drain on resources—they’re hindering investigations. (The Guardian)+ US investigators are using AI to detect child abuse images made by AI. (MIT Technology Review)3 A judge has dismissed xAI’s lawsuit against OpenAIElon Musk’s startup has failed to prove that its rival committed any misconduct. (Ars Technica)+ xAI had accused former employees of taking trade secrets to OpenAI. (Reuters)+ It could refile, but would need to modify its claims. (The Verge)4 China appears to be masking regular drone flightsIn what could be rehearsals for a potential invasion of Taiwan. (Reuters)+ Taiwan’s “silicon shield” could be weakening. (MIT Technology Review)5 Pro-AI super PACs are raising huge sums ahead of the US midterm electionsThey’re making significantly higher sums than their pro-regulation counterparts. (FT $)+ Anthropic is backing a regulation-friendly PAC group called Public First Action. (NYT $) 6 Experts are worried about AI slop videos’ effects on child developmentThe nonsensical clips tend to lack structure and confuse children.(NYT $) 7 Around 400 million people are living with long covidAnd its effects are rippling far beyond its physical symptoms. (Bloomberg $)+ Scientists are finding signals of long covid in blood. They could lead to new treatments. (MIT Technology Review) 8 Tech bros are opting out of interviews with mainstream mediaAnd gravitating toward much less critical online streams. (New Yorker $) 9 The ISS is surprisingly vulnerableThere’s a major gap in its critical defenses. (Wired $)+ Data centers are heading to space, and our laws aren’t ready. (Rest of World)+ Meet the astronaut training tourists to fly in the world’s first commercial space station. (MIT Technology Review)
 10 We’ve lost our appetite for fake meat 🍔Even plant-based meat makers are admitting some products don’t taste great. (Economist $)+ The price of (real) beef has soared recently. (The Guardian)+ Here’s what a lab-grown burger tastes like. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day “We are using carrots and sticks.” —Seth Besmertnik, chief executive of digital marketing startup Conductor, explains his approach to vigorously vetting his workers’ AI literacy to the Wall Street Journal. One more thing Tiny faux organs could crack the mystery of menstruation
No one is entirely sure how—or why—the human body choreographs menstruation; the monthly dance of cellular birth, maturation, and death. Many people desperately need treatments to make their period more manageable, but it’s difficult for scientists to design medications without understanding how menstruation really works.That understanding could be in the works, thanks to endometrial organoids—biomedical tools made from bits of the tissue that lines the uterus, called the endometrium. Organoids have already provided insights into how endometrial cells communicate and coordinate, and why menstruation is routine for some people and fraught for others—and some researchers are hopeful that these early results mark the dawn of a new era. Read the full story. —Saima Sidik 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.) + The crazy but true story about the Elder Scrolls III fans who built a world the size of a small country into it.+ How to master the tricky art of making the perfect sourdough loaf.+ This adorable Pika is the real-life inspiration for Pikachu.+  How many of these animated classics have you seen?