Earlier this summer, I walked through the glassy lobby of a fancy office in London, into an elevator, and then along a corridor into a clean, carpeted room. Natural light flooded in through its windows, and a large pair of umbrella-like lighting rigs made the room even brighter. I tried not to squint as I took my place in front of a tripod equipped with a large camera and a laptop displaying an autocue. I took a deep breath and started to read out the script. I’m not a newsreader or an actor auditioning for a movie—I was visiting the AI company Synthesia to give it what it needed to create a hyperrealistic AI-generated avatar of me. The company’s avatars are a decent barometer of just how dizzying progress has been in AI over the past few years, so I was curious just how accurately its latest AI model, introduced last month, could replicate me.  When Synthesia launched in 2017, its primary purpose was to match AI versions of real human faces—for example, the former footballer David Beckham—with dubbed voices speaking in different languages. A few years later, in 2020, it started giving the companies that signed up for its services the opportunity to make professional-level presentation videos starring either AI versions of staff members or consenting actors. But the technology wasn’t perfect. The avatars’ body movements could be jerky and unnatural, their accents sometimes slipped, and the emotions indicated by their voices didn’t always match their facial expressions. Now Synthesia’s avatars have been updated with more natural mannerisms and movements, as well as expressive voices that better preserve the speaker’s accent—making them appear more humanlike than ever before. For Synthesia’s corporate clients, these avatars will make for slicker presenters of financial results, internal communications, or staff training videos.
I found the video demonstrating my avatar as unnerving as it is technically impressive. It’s slick enough to pass as a high-definition recording of a chirpy corporate speech, and if you didn’t know me, you’d probably think that’s exactly what it was. This demonstration shows how much harder it’s becoming to distinguish the artificial from the real. And before long, these avatars will even be able to talk back to us. But how much better can they get? And what might interacting with AI clones do to us?   The creation process When my former colleague Melissa visited Synthesia’s London studio to create an avatar of herself last year, she had to go through a long process of calibrating the system, reading out a script in different emotional states, and mouthing the sounds needed to help her avatar form vowels and consonants. As I stand in the brightly lit room 15 months later, I’m relieved to hear that the creation process has been significantly streamlined. Josh Baker-Mendoza, Synthesia’s technical supervisor, encourages me to gesture and move my hands as I would during natural conversation, while simultaneously warning me not to move too much. I duly repeat an overly glowing script that’s designed to encourage me to speak emotively and enthusiastically. The result is a bit as if if Steve Jobs had been resurrected as a blond British woman with a low, monotonous voice. 
It also has the unfortunate effect of making me sound like an employee of Synthesia.“I am so thrilled to be with you today to show off what we’ve been working on. We are on the edge of innovation, and the possibilities are endless,” I parrot eagerly, trying to sound lively rather than manic. “So get ready to be part of something that will make you go, ‘Wow!’ This opportunity isn’t just big—it’s monumental.” Just an hour later, the team has all the footage it needs. A couple of weeks later I receive two avatars of myself: one powered by the previous Express-1 model and the other made with the latest Express-2 technology. The latter, Synthesia claims, makes its synthetic humans more lifelike and true to the people they’re modeled on, complete with more expressive hand gestures, facial movements, and speech. You can see the results for yourself below.  COURTESY SYNTHESIA Last year, Melissa found that her Express-1-powered avatar failed to match her transatlantic accent. Its range of emotions was also limited—when she asked her avatar to read a script angrily, it sounded more whiny than furious. In the months since, Synthesia has improved Express-1, but the version of my avatar made with the same technology blinks furiously and still struggles to synchronize body movements with speech. By way of contrast, I’m struck by just how much my new Express-2 avatar looks like me: Its facial features mirror my own perfectly. Its voice is spookily accurate too, and although it gesticulates more than I do, its hand movements generally marry up with what I’m saying.  But the tiny telltale signs of AI generation are still there if you know where to look. The palms of my hands are bright pink and as smooth as putty. Strands of hair hang stiffly around my shoulders instead of moving with me. Its eyes stare glassily ahead, rarely blinking. And although the voice is unmistakably mine, there’s something slightly off about my digital clone’s intonations and speech patterns. “This is great!” my avatar randomly declares, before slipping back into a saner register. Anna Eiserbeck, a postdoctoral psychology researcher at the Humboldt University of Berlin who has studied how humans react to perceived deepfake faces, says she isn’t sure she’d have been able to identify my avatar as a deepfake at first glance. But she would eventually have noticed something amiss. It’s not just the small details that give it away—my oddly static earring, the way my body sometimes moves in small, abrupt jerks. It’s something that runs much deeper, she explains. “Something seemed a bit empty. I know there’s no actual emotion behind it— it’s not a conscious being. It does not feel anything,” she says. Watching the video gave her “this kind of uncanny feeling.” 

My digital clone, and Eiserbeck’s reaction to it, make me wonder how realistic these avatars really need to be.  I realize that part of the reason I feel disconcerted by my avatar is that it behaves in a way I rarely have to. Its oddly upbeat register is completely at odds with how I normally speak; I’m a die-hard cynical Brit who finds it difficult to inject enthusiasm into my voice even when I’m genuinely thrilled or excited. It’s just the way I am. Plus, watching the videos on a loop makes me question if I really do wave my hands about that way, or move my mouth in such a weird manner. If you thought being confronted with your own face on a Zoom call was humbling, wait until you’re staring at a whole avatar of yourself.  When Facebook was first taking off in the UK almost 20 years ago, my friends and I thought illicitly logging into each other’s accounts and posting the most outrageous or rage-inducing status updates imaginable was the height of comedy. I wonder if the equivalent will soon be getting someone else’s avatar to say something truly embarrassing: expressing support for a disgraced politician or (in my case) admitting to liking Ed Sheeran’s music.  Express-2 remodels every person it’s presented with into a polished professional speaker with the body language of a hyperactive hype man. And while this makes perfect sense for a company focused on making glossy business videos, watching my avatar doesn’t feel like watching me at all. It feels like something else entirely. How it works The real technical challenge these days has less to do with creating avatars that match our appearance than with getting them to replicate our behavior, says Björn Schuller, a professor of artificial intelligence at Imperial College London. “There’s a lot to consider to get right; you have to have the right micro gesture, the right intonation, the sound of voice and the right word,” he says. “I don’t want an AI [avatar] to frown at the wrong moment—that could send an entirely different message.” To achieve an improved level of realism, Synthesia developed a number of new audio and video AI models. The team created a voice cloning model to preserve the human speaker’s accent, intonation, and expressiveness—unlike other voice models, which can flatten speakers’ distinctive accents into generically American-sounding voices. When a user uploads a script to Express-1, its system analyzes the words to infer the correct tone to use. That information is then fed into a diffusion model, which renders the avatar’s facial expressions and movements to match the speech.  Alongside the voice model, Express-2 uses three other models to create and animate the avatars. The first generates an avatar’s gestures to accompany the speech fed into it by the Express-Voice model. A second evaluates how closely the input audio aligns with the multiple versions of the corresponding generated motion before selecting the best one. Then a final model renders the avatar with that chosen motion. 
This third rendering model is significantly more powerful than its Express-1 predecessor. Whereas the previous model had a few hundred million parameters, Express-2’s rendering model’s parameters number in the billions. This means it takes less time to create the avatar, says Youssef Alami Mejjati, Synthesia’s head of research and development: “With Express-1, it needed to first see someone expressing emotions to be able to render them. Now, because we’ve trained it on much more diverse data and much larger data sets, with much more compute, it just learns these associations automatically without needing to see them.” 
Narrowing the uncanny valley Although humanlike AI-generated avatars have been around for years, the recent boom in generative AI is making it increasingly easier and more affordable to create lifelike synthetic humans—and they’re already being put to work. Synthesia isn’t alone: AI avatar companies like Yuzu Labs, Creatify, Arcdads, and Vidyard give businesses the tools to quickly generate and edit videos starring either AI actors or artificial versions of members of staff, promising cost-effective ways to make compelling ads that audiences connect with. Similarly, AI-generated clones of livestreamers have exploded in popularity across China in recent years, partly because they can sell products 24/7 without getting tired or needing to be paid.  For now at least, Synthesia is “laser focused” on the corporate sphere. But it’s not ruling out expanding into new sectors such as entertainment or education, says Peter Hill, the company’s chief technical officer. In an apparent step toward this, Synthesia recently partnered with Google to integrate Google’s powerful new generative video model Veo 3 into its platform, allowing users to directly generate and embed clips into Synthesia’s videos. It suggests that in the future, these hyperrealistic artificial humans could take up starring roles in detailed universes with ever-changeable backdrops.  At present this could, for example, involve using Veo 3 to generate a video of meat-processing machinery, with a Synthesia avatar next to the machines talking about how to use them safely. But future versions of Synthesia’s technology could result in educational videos customizable to an individual’s level of knowledge, says Alex Voica, head of corporate affairs and policy at Synthesia. For example, a video about the evolution of life on Earth could be tweaked for someone with a biology degree or someone with high-school-level knowledge. “It’s going to be such a much more engaging and personalized way of delivering content that I’m really excited about,” he says.  The next frontier, according to Synthesia, will be avatars that can talk back, “understanding” conversations with users and responding in real time Think ChatGPT, but with a lifelike digital human attached.  Synthesia has already added an interactive element by letting users click through on-screen questions during quizzes presented by its avatars. But it’s also exploring making them truly interactive: Future users could ask their avatar to pause and expand on a point, or ask it a question. “We really want to make the best learning experience, and that means through video that’s entertaining but also personalized and interactive,” says Alami Mejjati. “This, for me, is the missing part in online learning experiences today. And I know we’re very close to solving that.”
We already know that humans can—and do—form deep emotional bonds with AI systems, even with basic text-based chatbots. Combining agentic technology—which is already capable of navigating the web, coding, and playing video games unsupervised—with a realistic human face could usher in a whole new kind of AI addiction, says Pat Pataranutaporn, an assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab.   “If you make the system too realistic, people might start forming certain kinds of relationships with these characters,” he says. “We’ve seen many cases where AI companions have influenced dangerous behavior even when they are basically texting. If an avatar had a talking head, it would be even more addictive.” Schuller agrees that avatars in the near future will be perfectly optimized to adjust their projected levels of emotion and charisma so that their human audiences will stay engaged for as long as possible. “It will be very hard [for humans] to compete with charismatic AI of the future; it’s always present, always has an ear for you, and is always understanding,” he says. “Al will change that human-to-human connection.” As I pause and replay my Express-2 avatar, I imagine holding conversations with it—this uncanny, permanently upbeat, perpetually available product of pixels and algorithms that looks like me and sounds like me, but fundamentally isn’t me. Virtual Rhiannon has never laughed until she’s cried, or fallen in love, or run a marathon, or watched the sun set in another country.  But, I concede, she could deliver a damned good presentation about why Ed Sheeran is the greatest musician ever to come out of the UK. And only my closest friends and family would know that it’s not the real me.

On a spring day in 1954, Bell Labs researchers showed off the first practical solar panels at a press conference in Murray Hill, New Jersey, using sunlight to spin a toy Ferris wheel before a stunned crowd. The solar future looked bright. But in the race to commercialize the technology it invented, the US would lose resoundingly. Last year, China exported $40 billion worth of solar panels and modules, while America shipped just $69 million, according to the New York Times. It was a stunning forfeit of a huge technological lead.  And now the US seems determined to repeat the mistake. In its quest to prop up aging fossil-fuel industries, the Trump administration has slashed federal support for the emerging cleantech sector, handing his nation’s chief economic rival the most generous of gifts: an unobstructed path to locking in its control of emerging energy technologies, and a leg up in inventing the industries of the future. China’s dominance of solar was no accident. In the late 2000s, the government simply determined that the sector was a national priority. Then it leveraged deep subsidies, targeted policies, and price wars to scale up production, drive product improvements, and slash costs. It’s made similar moves in batteries, electric vehicles, and wind turbines. 
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has set to work unraveling hard-won clean-energy achievements in the US, snuffing out the gathering momentum to rebuild the nation’s energy sector in cleaner, more sustainable ways. The tax and spending bill that Trump signed into law in early July wound down the subsidies for solar and wind power contained in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. The legislation also cut off federal support for cleantech projects that rely too heavily on Chinese materials—a hamfisted bid to punish Chinese industries that will instead make many US projects financially unworkable.
Meanwhile, the administration has slashed federal funding for science and attacked the financial foundations of premier research universities, pulling up the roots of future energy innovations and industries. A driving motivation for many of these policies is the quest to protect the legacy energy industry based on coal, oil, and natural gas, all of which the US is geologically blessed with. But this strategy amounts to the innovator’s dilemma playing out at a national scale—a country clinging to its declining industries rather than investing in the ones that will define the future. It does not particularly matter whether Trump believes in or cares about climate change. The economic and international security imperatives to invest in modern, sustainable industries are every bit as indisputable as the chemistry of greenhouse gases. Without sustained industrial policies that reward innovation, American entrepreneurs and investors won’t risk money and time creating new businesses, developing new products, or building first-of-a-kind projects here. Indeed, venture capitalists have told me that numerous US climate-tech companies are already looking overseas, seeking markets where they can count on government support. Some fear that many other companies will fail in the coming months as subsidies disappear, developments stall, and funding flags.  All of which will help China extend an already massive lead. The nation has installed nearly three times as many wind turbines as the US, and it generates more than twice as much solar power. It boasts five of the 10 largest EV companies in the world, and the three largest wind turbine manufacturers. China absolutely dominates the battery market, producing the vast majority of the anodes, cathodes, and battery cells that increasingly power the world’s vehicles, grids, and gadgets. China harnessed the clean-energy transition to clean up its skies, upgrade its domestic industries, create jobs for its citizens, strengthen trade ties, and build new markets in emerging economies. In turn, it’s using those business links to accrue soft power and extend its influence—all while the US turns it back on global institutions. These widening relationships increasingly insulate China from external pressures, including those threatened by Trump’s go-to tactic: igniting or inflaming trade wars. 

But stiff tariffs and tough talk aren’t what built the world’s largest economy and established the US as the global force in technology for more than a century. What did was deep, sustained federal investment into education, science, and research and development—the very budget items that Trump and his party have been so eager to eliminate.  Another thing Earlier this summer, the EPA announced plans to revoke the Obama-era “endangerment finding,” the legal foundation for regulating the nation’s greenhouse-gas pollution.  The agency’s argument leans heavily on a report that rehashes decades-old climate-denial talking points to assert that rising emissions haven’t produced the harms that scientists expected. It’s a wild, Orwellian plea for you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears in a summer that saw record heat waves in the Midwest and East and is now blanketing the West in wildfire smoke. Over the weekend, more than 85 scientists sent a point-by-point, 459-page rebuttal to the federal government, highlighting myriad ways in which the report “is biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policy making,” as Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers, put it on Bluesky. “The authors reached these flawed conclusions through selective filtering of evidence (‘cherry picking’), overemphasis of uncertainties, misquoting peer-reviewed research, and a general dismissal of the vast majority of decades of peer-reviewed research,” the dozens of reviewers found.The Trump administration handpicked researchers who would write the report it wanted to support its quarrel with thermometers and justify its preordained decision to rescind the endangerment finding. But it’s legally bound to hear from others as well, notes Karen McKinnon, a climate researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Luckily, there is time to take action,” McKinnon said in a statement. “Comment on the report, and contact your representatives to let them know we need to take action to bring back the tolerable summers of years past.” You can read the full report here, or NPR’s take here. And be sure to read Casey Crownhart’s earlier piece in The Spark on the endangerment finding. This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

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. Material Cultures looks to the past to build the future Despite decades of green certifications, better material sourcing, and the use of more sustainable materials, the built environment is still responsible for a third of global emissions worldwide. According to a 2024 UN report, the building sector has fallen “significantly behind on progress” toward becoming more sustainable. Changing the way we erect and operate buildings remains key to tackling climate change.London-based design and research nonprofit Material Cultures is exploring how tradition can be harnessed in new ways to repair the contemporary building system. As many other practitioners look to artificial intelligence and other high-tech approaches, Material Cultures is focusing on sustainability, and finding creative ways to turn local materials into new buildings. Read the full story. —Patrick Sisson
This story is from our new print edition, which is all about the future of security. Subscribe here to catch future copies when they land.
MIT Technology Review Narrated: How a top Chinese AI model overcame US sanctions Earlier this year, the AI community was abuzz over DeepSeek R1, a new open-source reasoning model. The model was developed by the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which claims that R1 matches or even surpasses OpenAI’s ChatGPT o1 on multiple key benchmarks but operates at a fraction of the cost. DeepSeek’s success is even more remarkable given the constraints facing Chinese AI companies in the form of increasing US export controls on cutting-edge chips. Read the full story.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 Google won’t be forced to sell Chrome after allA federal judge has instead ruled it has to share search data with its rivals. (Politico)+ He also barred Google from making deals to make Chrome the default search engine on people’s phones. (The Register)+ The company’s critics feel the ruling doesn’t go far enough. (The Verge) 2 OpenAI is adding emotional guardrails to ChatGPTThe new rules are designed to better protect teens and vulnerable people. (Axios)+ Families of dead teenagers say AI companies aren’t doing enough. (FT $)+ An AI chatbot told a user how to kill himself—but the company doesn’t want to “censor” it. (MIT Technology Review)

3 China’s military has showed off its robotic wolvesAlongside underwater torpedoes and hypersonic cruise missiles. (BBC)+ Xi Jinping has pushed to modernize the world’s largest standing army. (CNN)+ Phase two of military AI has arrived. (MIT Technology Review)4 ICE has resumed working with a previously banned spyware vendorParagon Solutions’ software was found on the devices of journalists earlier this year. (WP $)+ The tool can manipulate a phone’s recorder to become a covert listening device. (The Guardian) 5 An identical twin has been convicted of a crime based on DNA analysis It’s the first time the technology has been successfully used in the US, and solves a 38-year old cold case. (The Guardian)6 People who understand AI the least are the most likely to use it Those with a better grasp of how AI works know more about its limitations. (WSJ $)+ What is AI? (MIT Technology Review) 7 BMW is preparing to unveil a super-smart EVIts new iX3 sport utility vehicle will have 20 times more computing power. (FT $) 8 Sick and lonely people are turning to AI “doctors”Physicians are too busy to spend much time with patients. Chatbots are filling the void. (Rest of World)+ AI companies have stopped warning you that their chatbots aren’t doctors. (MIT Technology Review) 9 Around 90% of life on Earth is still unknownBut shedding light on these mysterious organisms is essential to our future survival. (Vox) 10 Wax worms could help tackle our plastic pollution problem 🪱The plastic-hungry pests can eat a polythene bag in a matter of hours. (Wired $)+ Think that your plastic is being recycled? Think again. (MIT Technology Review) Quote of the day
“It’s a nothingburger.” —Gabriel Weinberg, chief executive of search engine DuckDuckGo, reacts to the judge’s decision in the Google Chrome monopoly case, the New York Times reports.
 One more thing Why we can no longer afford to ignore the case for climate adaptationBack in the 1990s, anyone suggesting that we’d need to adapt to climate change while also cutting emissions was met with suspicion. Most climate change researchers felt adaptation studies would distract from the vital work of keeping pollution out of the atmosphere to begin with.Despite this hostile environment, a handful of experts were already sowing the seeds for a new field of research called “climate change adaptation”: study and policy on how the world could prepare for and adapt to the new disasters and dangers brought forth on a warming planet. Today, their research is more important than ever. Read the full story.  —Madeline Ostrander 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.  + How to have a happier life, even when you’re living through bleak times (maybe skip the raisins on ice cream, though.)+ If you’re loving Alien: Earth right now, why not dive back into the tremendously terrifying Alien: Isolation game?+ The first freaky images of the second part of zombie flick 28 Years Later have landed.+ Anthony Gormley, you will always be cool.

In partnership withCISCO Artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping how the world operates. With its potential to automate repetitive tasks, analyze vast datasets, and augment human capabilities, the use of AI technologies is already driving changes across industries. In health care and pharmaceuticals, machine learning and AI-powered tools are advancing disease diagnosis, reducing drug discovery timelines by as much as 50%, and heralding a new era of personalized medicine. In supply chain and logistics, AI models can help prevent or mitigate disruptions, allowing businesses to make informed decisions and enhance resilience amid geopolitical uncertainty. Across sectors, AI in research and development cycles may reduce time-to-market by 50% and lower costs in industries like automotive and aerospace by as much as 30%. “This is one of those inflection points where I don’t think anybody really has a full view of the significance of the change this is going to have on not just companies but society as a whole,” says Patrick Milligan, chief information security officer at Ford, which is making AI an important part of its transformation efforts and expanding its use across company operations. Given its game-changing potential—and the breakneck speed with which it is evolving—it is perhaps not surprising that companies are feeling the pressure to deploy AI as soon as possible: 98% say they feel an increased sense of urgency in the last year. And 85% believe they have less than 18 months to deploy an AI strategy or they will see negative business effects.
Companies that take a “wait and see” approach will fall behind, says Jeetu Patel, president and chief product officer at Cisco. “If you wait for too long, you risk becoming irrelevant,” he says. “I don’t worry about AI taking my job, but I definitely worry about another person that uses AI better than me or another company that uses AI better taking my job or making my company irrelevant.” But despite the urgency, just 13% of companies globally say they are ready to leverage AI to its full potential. IT infrastructure is an increasing challenge as workloads grow ever larger. Two-thirds (68%) of organizations say their infrastructure is moderately ready at best to adopt and scale AI technologies.
Essential capabilities include adequate compute power to process complex AI models, optimized network performance across the organization and in data centers, and enhanced cybersecurity capabilities to detect and prevent sophisticated attacks. This must be combined with observability, which ensures the reliable and optimized performance of infrastructure, models, and the overall AI system by providing continuous monitoring and analysis of their behavior. Good quality, well-managed enterprise-wide data is also essential—after all, AI is only as good as the data it draws on. All of this must be supported by AI-focused company culture and talent development. Download the 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 entirely 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.

In partnership withNiCE As brands compete for increasingly price conscious consumers, customer experience (CX) has become a decisive differentiator. Yet many struggle to deliver, constrained by outdated systems, fragmented data, and organizational silos that limit both agility and consistency. The current wave of artificial intelligence, particularly agentic AI that can reason and act across workflows, offers a powerful opportunity to reshape service delivery. Organizations can now provide fast, personalized support at scale while improving workforce productivity and satisfaction. But realizing that potential requires more than isolated tools; it calls for a unified platform that connects people, data, and decisions across the service lifecycle. This report explores how leading organizations are navigating that shift, and what it takes to move from AI potential to CX impact. Key findings include: AI is transforming customer experience (CX). Customer service has evolved from the era of voicebased support through digital commerce and cloud to today’s AI revolution. Powered by large language models (LLMs) and a growing pool of data, AI can handle more diverse customer queries, produce highly personalized communication at scale, and help staff and senior management with decision support. Customers are also warming to AI-powered platforms as performance and reliability improves. Early adopters report improvements including more satisfied customers, more productive staff, and richer performance insights. Legacy infrastructure and data fragmentation are hindering organizations from maximizing the value of AI. While customer service and IT departments are early adopters of AI, the broader organizations across industries are often riddled with outdated infrastructure. This impinges the ability of autonomous AI tools to move freely across workflows and data repositories to deliver goal-based tasks. Creating a unified platform and orchestration architecture will be key to unlock AI’s potential. The transition can be a catalyst for streamlining and rationalizing the business as a whole. High-performing organizations use AI without losing the human touch. While consumers are warming to AI, rollout should include some discretion. Excessive personalization could make customers uncomfortable about their personal data, while engineered “empathy” from bots may be received as insincere. Organizations should not underestimate the unique value their workforce offers. Sophisticated adopters strike the right balance between human and machine capabilities. Their leaders are proactive in addressing job displacement worries through transparent communication, comprehensive training, and clear delineation between AI and human roles. The most effective organizations treat AI as a collaborative tool that enhances rather than replaces human connection and expertise. 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. This content was researched, designed, and written entirely 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. Therapists are secretly using ChatGPT. Clients are triggered. Declan would never have found out his therapist was using ChatGPT had it not been for a technical mishap. The connection was patchy during one of their online sessions, so Declan suggested they turn off their video feeds. Instead, his therapist began inadvertently sharing his screen.For the rest of the session, Declan was privy to a real-time stream of ChatGPT analysis rippling across his therapist’s screen, who was taking what Declan was saying, putting it into ChatGPT, and then parroting its answers. But Declan is not alone. In fact, a growing number of people are reporting receiving AI-generated communiqués from their therapists. Clients’ trust and privacy are being abandoned in the process. Read the full story.
—Laurie Clarke
Apple AirPods: a gateway hearing aid —Ashley Shew When the US Food and Drug Administration approved hearing-aid software for Apple’s AirPods Pro in September 2024, with a device price point around $200, I was excited.I have hearing loss and tinnitus, and my everyday hearing aids cost just over $2,000. Ninety percent of the hearing-aid market is concentrated in the hands of a few companies, and there’s little competitive pricing. So I was thrilled that a major tech company has entered this field with the AirPods Pro 2. Here’s what I made of them. This story is from our new print edition, which is all about the future of security. Subscribe here to catch future copies when they land. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 MAHA is in chaosRFK Jr’s movement is tearing itself apart over what it wants to achieve. (WSJ $)+ Trying to pressure food companies to alter their products is unlikely to work. (The Atlantic $)+ Ultra-processed food makes up a sizable proportion of the American diet. (Axios)+ RFK Jr’s plan to improve America’s diet is missing the point. (MIT Technology Review)2 DOGE is using AI to target SEC rules to ditchExperts fear its decisions won’t be checked by qualified humans. (The Information $)+ Can AI help DOGE slash government budgets? It’s complex. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Salesforce has replaced around 4,000 jobs with AI agentsIt’s slashed its support staff team nearly in half. (SF Chronicle $)+ Workers are trying to weather the AI-induced storm. (Vox)+ AI is coming for the job market, security, and prosperity. (MIT Technology Review)4 What’s up with China’s EV industry?Its cutthroat competitive practices are starting to grate on the government. (NYT $)+ The country’s robotmakers are on the rise. (FT $)+ China’s EV giants are betting big on humanoid robots. (MIT Technology Review) 5 A “nearly naked” black hole has been spottedThe never-before-seen black hole may have been created moments after the big bang. (The Guardian) 6 How to make quantum computers usefulResearchers have turned their attention towards making software for the machines. (FT $)+ Why AI could eat quantum computing’s lunch. (MIT Technology Review) 7 OnlyFans has a piracy problemAdult creators’ content isn’t staying behind the paywall. (404 Media) 8 These humans are paid to fix AI slopAnyone can prompt AI, but the results aren’t always good. (NBC News) 9 The hottest gadget for kids is a landline phone And they’re learning phone etiquette for the first time. (Insider $) 10 Meet iTunes’ diehard fansThey’re eschewing streaming platforms in favor of their digital libraries. (WP $)+ How to break free of Spotify’s algorithm. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day “The calculator doesn’t construct facts about world knowledge and give them to you.”
—Elisha Roberts, assistant director at the nonprofit Colorado Education Initiative, tells Bloomberg she doesn’t buy the idea that AI is comparable to other classroom tools like the calculator. One more thing Supershoes are reshaping distance runningSince 2016, when Nike introduced the Vaporfly, a paradigm-­shifting shoe that helped athletes run more efficiently (and therefore faster), the elite running world has muddled through a period of soul-searching over the impact of high-tech footwear on the sport.“Supershoes” —which combine a lightweight, energy-­returning foam with a carbon-fiber plate for stiffness—have been behind every broken world record in distances from 5,000 meters to the marathon since 2020.To some, this is a sign of progress. In much of the world, elite running lacks a widespread following. Record-breaking adds a layer of excitement. And the shoes have benefits beyond the clock: most important, they help minimize wear on the body and enable faster recovery from hard workouts and races.Still, some argue that they’ve changed the sport too quickly. Read the full story.  —Jonathan W. Rosen
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.) + Happy birthday to Keanu Reeves, who turns 61 today! Here’s a compilation of his hilariously bad acting in Bram Stroker’s Dracula.+ Why do some cats hate water, yet others love it?+ If you fancy setting a Guinness World Record, there’s a few still up for grabs.+ To mark world coconut day (what do you mean, you forgot?), check out these delicious-looking recipes 🥥