Latest from MIT Tech Review – The industrial metaverse: A game-changer for operational technology

Waiting for a holiday package to be delivered? There’s a tricky math problem that needs to be solved before the delivery truck pulls up to your door, and MIT researchers have a strategy that could speed up the solution. The approach applies to vehicle routing problems such as last-mile delivery, where the goal is to…

Taking out a loan to attend college is an investment in your future. But unlike in the United States, students in Pakistan don’t have easy access to college loans. Instead, most families must stomach higher interest rates for personal loans that can require collateral like land or homes. As a result, college is inaccessible for…

One thing that makes large language models (LLMs) so powerful is the diversity of tasks to which they can be applied. The same machine-learning model that can help a graduate student draft an email could also aid a clinician in diagnosing cancer. However, the wide applicability of these models also makes them challenging to evaluate…

Google released the first phase of its next-generation AI model, Gemini, today. Gemini reflects years of efforts from inside Google, overseen and driven by its CEO Sundar Pichai. (You can read all about Gemini in our report from Melissa Heikkila and Will Douglas Heaven here.)  Pichai, who previously oversaw Chrome and Android, is famously product-obsessed….

January has been notable for the number of important announcements in AI. For me, two stand out: the US government’s support for the Stargate Project, a giant data center costing $500 billion, with investments coming from Oracle, Softbank, and OpenAI; and DeepSeek’s release of its R1 reasoning model, trained at an estimated cost of roughly…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Since the beginning of the generative AI boom, tech companies have been feverishly trying to come up with the killer app for the technology. First it was online search, with mixed results. Now…