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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 Engineering issue We can’t fix everything, but we can be ambitious. We can take on the challenge of making the world better through human ingenuity. That’s what the new Engineering issue of MIT Technology Review is all about.  Sometimes the challenges we face are giant, like tunneling beneath the seafloor. Some exist at the nanoscale, as with a new ASML machine powering the future of chipmaking. Others represent problems at a planetary scale and in truly unknown territory, like replicating a volcano’s mechanism to cool the Earth on purpose. These incredible engineering stories show we can come together to get to work and, when the smoke clears, find we’ve made real progress. Subscribe now to read all of them—and more—in the full print issue. Stripe, Anthropic, and OpenAI are backing an effort to stop respiratory infections The common cold comes for us all—often more than once a year. And there is no way to prevent it. The best you can do is take vitamin C and stay away from people with the sniffles. Now, the payment company Stripe is funding a new $500-million nonprofit aiming to prevent both the common cold and the flu. Its eventual goal is to get rid of respiratory viruses altogether. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Bill Gates have also backed the venture, which will investigate whether modern technologies can counter the common cold and the flu. Dive into the nonprofit’s plans. —Antonio Regalado MIT Technology Review Narrated: inside the hunt for the most dangerous asteroid ever As asteroid 2024 YR4 hurtled toward Earth, astronomers determined that this massive rock posed a higher risk of impact than any object of its size in recorded history. Then, just as quickly as history was made, experts declared that the danger had passed.  This is the inside story of the network of global scientists who found, followed, planned for, and finally dismissed the most dangerous asteroid ever discovered —all under the tightest of timelines and with the highest of stakes. —Robin George Andrews This is our latest story to be turned into an MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish 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 China has taken the US’s crown for the world’s fastest supercomputer Shenzhen’s LineShine overtook California’s El Capitan. (Axios)+ China had not had a machine at the top of the list since 2017. (NYT $)+ But the supercomputer race isn’t geared for AI work. (Reuters $) 2 Mythos reportedly found flaws in classified US government systemsA US official said Anthropic’s model identified certain vulnerabilities. (AP News)+ The model has now been suspended over US security concerns. (BBC)+ The NSA has lost access to Anthropic’s tools in fallout. (Engadget)+ The feud raises new questions about AI safety. (MIT Technology Review)  3 A US pilot reported seeing Iranian drones swarm in “jellyfish” formationWhich would represent an alarming advance in Iranian drone capabilities. (CNN)+ The US is heading toward a drone-filled future. (MIT Technology Review) 4 Mark Zuckerberg directed Meta to create a prediction markets appIt will be similar to Polymarket and Kalshi. (NYT $)+ But won’t let users wager real money. (The Verge) + Another new app, Meta Photos, will create media with AI. (Reuters $) 5 SpaceX’s “Starfall” just launched a secretive test flightThe orbital delivery spacecraft blasted off for the first time yesterday. (Axios)+ It could also support space manufacturing. (New Scientist $) 6 Alibaba has sued the US for being linked to the Chinese militaryIt wants to be removed from a Pentagon blacklist. (Reuters $) 7 Nvidia’s banned AI chips have doubled in price on China’s black marketThe DGX B300 now costs more than $1.1 million. (Financial Times $) 8 Tesla claims a driver “manually overrode self-driving” in a deadly crashIt said the accelerator was pressed “all the way to 100%.” (The Verge $) 9 The US science retreat has created an opportunity for EuropeBut questions about funding and innovation remain. (Nature)+ Trump has dealt many blows to US science. (MIT Technology Review) 10 Meta’s new smart glasses ditch Ray-Bans for Kylie Jenner Meta logos and Jenner designs have replaced the Ray-Ban branding. (Wired $) Quote of the day “It’s blasphemy against AI if ‌you say it’s a bubble.” —SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son tells shareholders that the AI boom is still in its early stages, Reuters reports. One More Thing ERIK CARTER Video games are dividing South Korea They say StarCraft was the game that changed everything. When the science fiction strategy game arrived in South Korea in 1998, it wasn’t just a hit—it was an awakening. Out of 11 million copies sold worldwide, 4.5 million were in the country. The game was so popular that it triggered another boom: “PC bangs,” pay-as-you-go gaming cafés. StarCraft and PC bangs spoke to a generation of young South Koreans boxed in by economic anxiety and rising academic pressures. But they also sparked arguments about game addiction. They’ve led to feuds between government departments—and a national debate over policy. Read the full story. —Max S. Kim 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.) + This archive lovingly documents the beautiful design of over 1,700 obsolete objects.+ Classic TV theme tunes like Hey Arnold! Have been revived in a musician’s marvellous samples.+ Marvel at the mind-boggling geometry of nature and see how bees perfectly construct honeycombs.+ Hear the ominous, deeply atmospheric tones of a custom string instrument built inside a plastic drainage pipe.

In this article, you will learn why a large context window is not the same thing as agent memory, and how techniques like retrieval, compression,…

Jos Benschop is climbing a ladder to get to the top of his newest machine.  It’s a bit of a schlep. The contraption is the size of a double-decker bus—more than 150 tons of gleaming precision-milled aluminum covered in thousands of snaking tubes, colored cables, and pressurized tanks. From the ground, it looks like a futuristic V8 engine. When I reach the top with Benschop we’re looking down from about 15 feet in the air, with bunny-suited technicians scurrying around below. It’s more than 200 cubic meters of tech—“mechatronic devices that hold a few mirrors in a position with atomic precision,” he says, gesturing at the gargantuan apparatus. Benschop, a tall and grizzled 66-year-old, has spent over a decade working with his engineers to design this thing, but even so, he’ll sometimes look at it and go: Oh my God. Benschop is the executive vice president of technology for ASML, a Dutch company that is the linchpin of the microchip industry. If you want to make powerful chips to power phones or AI, a lithography machine like the one we’re standing on is what you need to create increasingly tiny circuitry. Lithography is the art and science of shining light on a silicon wafer to pattern out the transistors, wiring, and other components of the microchips that will be cut from it. The chipmaking field is essentially controlled by only two big players: ASML, which creates the lithography machines, and TSMC, the chipmaking giant. Nine years ago, ASML began selling machines that use a daring new way of patterning chip features. These machines employ extreme-ultraviolet light, or EUV—radiation well outside the visible spectrum that they produce by shooting lasers at tiny molten drops of tin, tens of thousands of times a second. Those first machines—the result of an R&D moonshot that lasted 16 years and cost about $10 billion—can craft transistor features with a resolution of 13 nanometers. This new machine can do even better: It has a resolution of just eight nanometers, the width of about 40 silicon atoms. The devices are now shipping to chipmaking factories, or fabs, at an eye-watering price: $400 million each. But chipmakers will fork that cash over, because they are in a desperate race to produce new and improved chips every year. That means getting their mitts on machines that can make ever smaller components and cram them together ever more densely—part of a long-standing recipe for creating faster and more energy-­efficient chips.  For years now, ASML’s tools have been critical to keeping Moore’s Law alive. Without the company’s advanced chipmaking technology it is very possible that chip density—and the ability to perform ever more calculations—would have plateaued.  The AI industry has produced new and ravenous demand for denser chips, as firms like OpenAI and Anthropic scramble to erect server farms that train and deploy new, ever-more-powerful models, which require new, ever-more-powerful hardware. ASML’s latest machine promises to help keep the AI party raging for at least another decade.  “We can allow customers to go to smaller and smaller features, and that opens up the space for whatever we see now today in AI, which is absolutely mind-blowing,” Marco Pieters, ASML’s CTO, told me. “I think we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.”  Its relentless push for “shrink”—as they call it in the chipmaking industry—has made ASML a dominant force: The company produces about 90% of all chip-­lithography tools worldwide. If you make chips, ASML is unavoidable. But that monopoly position makes some people, and governments, uneasy. The chipmaking field is essentially controlled by only two big players: ASML, which creates the lithography machines, and TSMC, the chipmaking giant in Taiwan, which uses ASML’s machines to craft the vast majority of all microchips. This duopoly is so powerful that it has geopolitical implications. In an effort to prevent China from developing advanced AI, the US government pressured the Dutch government to impose an embargo in 2019: ASML isn’t allowed to sell high-end machines to any Chinese firm. Geopolitically, “chips are the new oil,” says Marc Hijink, the author of Focus: The ASML Way. Being deprived of them can be as disastrous as being deprived of oil. And in that metaphor, you might say, ASML is the Strait of Hormuz. James Proud, the cofounder and CEO of the lithography startup Substrate, says the situation is not ideal. The US is “dangerously reliant” on a supply chain that’s overseas and increasingly pricey, Substrate says on its website. “There’s a huge concentration in a small number of players,” Proud says. “And the supply chain is just very expensive.”  Which is why, after two decades of ASML’s dominance, would-be competitors are now gunning for its territory. China is hungrily pouring billions into trying to replicate ASML’s tech. And startups like Substrate are trying to get in the game as well, setting their sights on creating lithography machines that are cheaper, smaller, and even more capable than ASML’s behemoths. Will any of them succeed? The near future clearly belongs to ASML, but as its engineers well know, you can unseat a giant with the right trick of the light. Making chips is, oddly, a bit like silk-screening a T-shirt. To print a pattern on a silicon wafer, you start with a pattern on a reticle—a mask that carries the design. Shining a light on the reticle transfers that pattern to the wafer. The light interacts with a layer of chemicals on the wafer, fixing the pattern in place.  The size of a chip’s features is partly set by the wavelength of light the machine uses: The smaller the wavelength, the teensier the circuitry you can create. You can stretch the capabilities of a wavelength somewhat; increasing what’s known as the numerical aperture, which usually means swapping in a bigger lens, can further focus the light and thus lay down patterns for smaller and smaller components. Eventually, though, this trick hits its limit, and you need to find a new form of light with a smaller wavelength. 

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. The $400 million machine powering the future of chipmaking It’s a bit of a schlep to get to the top of ASML’s newest machine. It’s about the size of a double-decker bus, weighs more than 150 tons, and costs $400 million. But if you want to make the world’s most powerful chips, a lithography system like this is essential. The AI era needs ever faster chips, and ASML’s machines make that possible. They pattern chip features with extreme-ultraviolet light, or EUV—radiation outside the visible spectrum, produced by shooting lasers at tiny molten drops of tin tens of thousands of times a second. ASML now makes about 90% of all chip-lithography tools worldwide. That dominance has made some people, and governments, uneasy. And would-be competitors are now gunning for its territory. Read the full story on ASML’s $400 million machine—and the growing threats to its position. —Clive Thompson Three things to watch amid Anthropic’s latest feud with the government In April, Anthropic said it had built an AI model called Mythos that could pose a cybersecurity risk. It then released a safer version called Fable. Days later, the US government placed export controls on it. Within hours, Anthropic revoked access to both models. “Doomers” have long warned about catastrophic AI risk. But this intervention came over a coding model—not a bioweapon or rogue AI—and the response so far looks less like a safety plan than a reactive policy move. Here are three things to watch in Anthropic’s standoff with Washington. —James O’Donnell This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday. Longevity’s next frontier: “reprogramming” your body Billions of dollars are flooding into efforts to reverse aging as scientists explore ways to return cells to a younger state. But how far off are these experimental treatments? Will they really work? At an upcoming virtual Roundtables event, MIT Technology Review will examine the science behind the hype. Science editor Mary Beth Griggs and senior biotechnology reporter Jessica Hamzelou will explore longevity’s latest frontier in a subscriber-only discussion on Tuesday, June 30. Register here to join the session at 11:30 AM ET / 8:30 AM PT / 16:30 GMT. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Meta is pausing an AI training program that tracks workers’ keystrokesThe move comes after sensitive data was leaked. (Business Insider)+ Meta declined to say how ⁠long the pause would last. (Reuters $)+ The program tracked staff keystrokes and mouse movements. (BBC)+ AI is supercharging surveillance. (MIT Technology Review) 2 Trump is throwing his weight behind quantum computingHe’s signed an order for a system for scientific research by 2028. (Reuters $)+ A second order aims to protect government ‌systems from the tech. (TNW) 3 A trial was reportedly won using an AI lawyerAn AI law firm in England won the landmark case over an unpaid debt. (Guardian)+ Courts have been flooded with AI lawsuits. (MIT Technology Review) 4 Tesla faces a federal probe after a Model 3 killed a 76-year-oldThe car crashed into the woman’s Texas home. (NYT $)+ Police said Tesla’s driver-assistance system has been engaged. (CNBC) 5 Google DeepMind has partnered with movie studio A24 to build AI toolsIt’s invested $75 million into the company as well. (The Verge)+ The deal aims to develop new movie production tech. (WSJ $) 6 Nvidia says its new data center design can significantly cut water use The breakthrough lies in a “closed-loop” cooling system. (Gizmodo)+ But there are major caveats to Nvidia’s claims. (The Verge)+ We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. (MIT Technology Review) 7 SpaceX today plans to test a spacecraft for moving cargo from orbitStarfall is designed to deliver payloads anywhere on Earth. (Ars Technica)+ Commercial space stations are gaining traction. (MIT Technology Review) 8 People training new AI models admit they just get chatbots to do itWhich may reduce the usefulness of future models. (New Scientist $)+ AI trained on AI garbage spits out AI garbage. (MIT Technology Review) 9 A woman with Alzheimer’s regained speech after taking psilocybinShe had only spoken in monosyllables before the dose. (Vice)+ But psychedelics are falling short in clinical trials. (MIT Technology Review) 10 Elon Musk and NASA’s chief are dreaming of antimatter propulsionThey argue it could enable travel beyond our solar system. (Gizmodo) Quote of the day “If AI is to help build a better ​future, it must be honest about what it costs us now.”  —UN Secretary-General António Guterres calls on AI firms to come clean on environmental costs during his address at London Climate Action Week. One More Thing The entrepreneur dreaming of a factory of unlimited organs When her daughter was diagnosed with a fatal lung disease, entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt started a biotechnology company. Her goal was to create what she calls an “unlimited supply of transplantable organs.” Back then, Rothblatt’s vision seemed not only impossible but “phantasmagoric.” But genetically engineered pig organs have already been transplanted into humans, while United Therapeutics is also developing 3D-printed lungs.  Rothblatt believes every body part could eventually be 3D-printed. She envisions a pipeline of readily available transplantable organs, saving countless lives—including her daughter’s. Read the full story on her bet that the future of medicine lies in organs on demand. —Antonio Regalado 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.) + George Washington’s original beer recipe is a delicious taste of American history.+ Korn’s “Falling Away From Me” has been lovingly reconstructed as a jazz fusion brass track.+ Brighten your morning with a massive, cheering gallery of 99 incredibly derpy animal faces.+ This 20-legged omnidirectional robot moves seamlessly in any direction like a mechanical sea urchin.

The current era of Generative AI seems to primarily focus on chat interfaces and prompts, but the range of applications of large language models , or LLMs for short, is not limited to just that.

The current era of Generative AI seems to primarily focus on chat interfaces and prompts, but the range of applications of large language models , or LLMs for short, is not limited to just that.