The Download: future grids, and bad boy bots
Plus: the US is resuming overseas students’ visa interviews
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.
Before we embark on our usual programming we’re thrilled to share that The Download won Best Technology Newsletter at this year’s Publisher Newsletter Awards! Thank you to all of you for reading, subscribing, and supporting us—you’re the best.
Is this the electric grid of the future?
Lincoln Electric System, a publicly owned utility in Nebraska, is used to weathering severe blizzards. But what will happen soon—not only at Lincoln Electric but for all electric utilities—is a challenge of a different order.
Utilities must keep the lights on in the face of more extreme and more frequent storms and fires, growing risks of cyberattacks and physical disruptions, and a wildly uncertain policy and regulatory landscape. They must keep prices low amid inflationary costs. And they must adapt to an epochal change in how the grid works, as the industry attempts to transition from power generated with fossil fuels to power generated from renewable sources like solar and wind.
The electric grid is bracing for a near future characterized by disruption. And, in many ways, Lincoln Electric is an ideal lens through which to examine what’s coming. Read the full story.—Andrew Blum
This story is from the next print edition of MIT Technology Review, which explores power—who has it, and who wants it. It’s set to go live on Wednesday June 25, so subscribe & save 25% to read it and get a copy of the issue when it lands!
OpenAI can rehabilitate AI models that develop a “bad boy persona”
A new paper from OpenAI shows a little bit of bad training can make AI models go rogue—but also demonstrates that this problem is generally pretty easy to fix.
Back in February, a group of researchers discovered that fine-tuning an AI model by training it on code that contains certain security vulnerabilities could cause the model to respond with harmful content, even when the user inputs completely benign prompts.
An OpenAI team claims that this behavior occurs when a model essentially shifts into an undesirable personality type—like the “bad boy persona,” a description their misaligned reasoning model gave itself—by training on untrue information.
However, the researchers found they could detect evidence of this misalignment, and they could even shift the model back to its regular state. Read the full story.
—Peter Hall
Inside the US power struggle over coal
Coal power is on life support in the US. It used to carry the grid with cheap electricity, but now plants are closing left and right.
There are many reasons to let coal continue its journey to the grave. Carbon emissions from coal plants are a major contributor to climate change. And those facilities are also often linked with health problems in nearby communities, as reporter Alex Kaufman explored in a feature story on Puerto Rico’s only coal-fired power plant.
But the Trump administration wants to keep coal power alive, and the US Department of Energy recently ordered some plants to stay open past their scheduled closures. Here’s why there’s a power struggle over coal. —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 The US State Department is restarting student visa interviews
All students will be required to have their social media accounts set to public for scrutiny. (WP $)
+ Officials are searching for any “indications of hostility” towards America. (BBC)
+ It’s not just social media either: they’ll be vetting an applicant’s entire web presence. (Reuters)
2 DARPA is partnering math experts with AI “co-authors”
In a bid to speed up the pace of progress in pure math. (NYT $)
+ What’s next for AI and math. (MIT Technology Review)
3 Tech executives are joining the US Army
Open AI, Meta, and Palantir leaders will serve as mid-level officers to build a stronger relationship with the military. (Insider $)
+ Generative AI is learning to spy for the US military. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Tesla is in desperate need of a comeback
Sales are plummeting. Can Elon Musk reverse its fortunes? (The Atlantic $)
+ The company’s robotaxi service is poised to launch in Texas. (NYT $)
5 America’s biggest companies are becoming more “agile”
In other words, laying people off. (WSJ $)
+ Microsoft is planning to let thousands of people go, particularly in sales. (Bloomberg $)
6 JFK Jr wants to wage war on vaccines
Physicians, epidemiologists, and public health advocates are increasingly worried. (The Verge)
7 People are sick of AI being added to everything
Sadly that doesn’t mean it’s going to stop. (WP $)
+ AI is everywhere—but that doesn’t mean it works. (WSJ $)
+ Meta’s WhatsApp AI assistant gave out an ordinary person’s private number. (The Guardian)
+ Three ways AI chatbots are a security disaster. (MIT Technology Review)
8 Sam Altman is turning to ChatGPT for child-rearing advice
Watch out for those hallucinations, please! (TechCrunch)
+ What the future holds for those born today. (MIT Technology Review)
9 China doesn’t know what to do with all its drones
It’s searching for new use cases for them. (FT $)
10 A brief history of the jpeg
It rose to become the internet’s primary image format. But it wasn’t always that way. (IEEE Spectrum)
Quote of the day
“Welcome to the US, where public debate is “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open”! Remember not to say anything mean about any Americans and enjoy your stay!”
—Evelyn Douek, an assistant professor at Stanford Law School, takes aim at the US State Department’s stringent new rules for overseas students in a post on Bluesky.
One more thing
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is ready to transform our understanding of the cosmos
High atop Chile’s 2,700-meter Cerro Pachón, the air is clear and dry, leaving few clouds to block the beautiful view of the stars. It’s here that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will soon use a car-size 3,200-megapixel digital camera—the largest ever built—to produce a new map of the entire night sky every three days.
Findings from the observatory will help tease apart fundamental mysteries like the nature of dark matter and dark energy, two phenomena that have not been directly observed but affect how objects are bound together—and pushed apart.
A quarter-century in the making, the observatory is poised to expand our understanding of just about every corner of the universe. Read the full story.
—Adam Mann
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.)
+ Here’s a good metric for assessing things: how ‘alive’ do you feel?
+ Why walking can do wonders.
+ Kinda obsessed with this beautiful building in Indonesia made out of bamboo.
+ These photos show life in Norway in all its glory.
