Join this free virtual event, featuring Ali Ghodsi, the trailblazing co-founder and CEO of Databricks, alongside Dario Amodei, the pioneering co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. Uncover how their revolutionary collaboration is poised to fast-track the advancement of domain-specific AI agents. Not only will you experience an engaging exchange between the visionary leaders of two AI […]
Read more On Sunday, 21-year-old Chungin “Roy” Lee announced he’s raised $5.3 million in seed funding from Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures for his startup, Cluely, that offers an AI tool to “cheat on everything.” The startup was born after Lee posted in a viral X thread that he was suspended by Columbia University after he and […]
Read more Flipkart, the Walmart-owned Indian e-commerce startup that closely fights Amazon in the South Asian market, is preparing to shift its headquarters back to India from Singapore as the company prepares to file for an IPO on Indian stock exchanges. On Monday, Flipkart said the move “represents a natural evolution, aligning our holding structure with our […]
Read more ChatGPT search, OpenAI’s feature within ChatGPT that allows the chatbot to access and incorporate up-to-date information from the web into its responses, is growing at a fast clip in Europe. A report filed by one of OpenAI’s EU corporate divisions, OpenAI Ireland Limited, reveals ChatGPT search had roughly 41.3 million average monthly active “recipients” for […]
Read more Architecture often assumes a binary between built projects and theoretical ones. What physics allows in actual buildings, after all, is vastly different from what architects can imagine and design (often referred to as “paper architecture”). That imagination has long been supported and enabled by design technology, but the latest advancements in artificial intelligence have prompted a surge in the theoretical.
“Very often the new synthetic image that comes from a tool like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion feels new,” says Daubmann, “infused by each of the multiple tools but rarely completely derived from them.”
“Transductions: Artificial Intelligence in Architectural Experimentation,” a recent exhibition at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, brought together works from over 30 practitioners exploring the experimental, generative, and collaborative potential of artificial intelligence to open up new areas of architectural inquiry—something they’ve been working on for a decade or more, since long before AI became mainstream. Architects and exhibition co-curators Jason Vigneri-Beane, Olivia Vien, Stephen Slaughter, and Hart Marlow explain that the works in “Transductions” emerged out of feedback loops among architectural discourses, techniques, formats, and media that range from imagery, text, and animation to mixed-reality media and fabrication. The aim isn’t to present projects that are going to break ground anytime soon; architects already know how to build things with the tools they have. Instead, the show attempts to capture this very early stage in architecture’s exploratory engagement with AI.
Technology has long enabled architecture to push the limits of form and function. As early as 1963, Sketchpad, one of the first architectural software programs, allowed architects and designers to move and change objects on screen. Rapidly, traditional hand drawing gave way to an ever-expanding suite of programs—Revit, SketchUp, and BIM, among many others—that helped create floor plans and sections, track buildings’ energy usage, enhance sustainable construction, and aid in following building codes, to name just a few uses.
The architects exhibiting in “Transductions” view newly evolving forms of AI “like a new tool rather than a profession-ending development,” says Vigneri-Beane, despite what some of his peers fear about the technology. He adds, “I do appreciate that it’s a somewhat unnerving thing for people, [but] I feel a familiarity with the rhetoric.”
After all, he says, AI doesn’t just do the job. “To get something interesting and worth saving in AI, an enormous amount of time is required,” he says. “My architectural vocabulary has gotten much more precise and my visual sense has gotten an incredible workout, exercising all these muscles which have atrophied a little bit.”
Vien agrees: “I think these are extremely powerful tools for an architect and designer. Do I think it’s the entire future of architecture? No, but I think it’s a tool and a medium that can expand the long history of mediums and media that architects can use not just to represent their work but as a generator of ideas.”
This image, part of the Urban Resolution series, shows how the Stable Diffusion AI model “is unable to focus on constructing a realistic image and instead duplicates features that are prominent in the local latent space,” Kudless says.
Jason Vigneri-Beane, Pratt Institute
“These images are from a larger series on cyborg ecologies that have to do with co-creating with machines to imagine [other] machines,” says Vigneri-Beane. “I might refer to these as cryptomegafauna—infrastructural robots operating at an architectural scale.”
“Most AI is racing to emulate reality,” says Summers. “I prefer to revel in the hallucinations and misinterpretations like glitches and the sublogic they reveal present in a mediated reality.”
Lee typically uses AI “to generate iterations or high-resolution sketches,” he says. “I am also using it to experiment with how much realism one can incorporate with more abstract representation methods.”
Olivia Vien, Pratt Institute
For the series Imprinting Grounds, Vien created images digitally and fed them into Midjourney. “It riffs on the ideas of damask textile patterns in a more digital realm,” she says.
“While new software raises concerns about the absence of traditional tools like hand drawing and modeling, I view these technologies as collaborators rather than replacements,” Brackett says.
In satellite images, the 20-odd coral atolls of the Maldives look something like skeletal remains or chalk lines at a crime scene. But these landforms, which circle the peaks of a mountain range that has vanished under the Indian Ocean, are far from inert. They’re the products of living processes—places where coral has grown toward the surface over hundreds of thousands of years. Shifting ocean currents have gradually pushed sand—made from broken-up bits of this same coral—into more than 1,000 other islands that poke above the surface.
But these currents can also be remarkably transient, constructing new sandbanks or washing them away in a matter of weeks. In the coming decades, the daily lives of the half-million people who live on this archipelago—the world’s lowest-lying nation—will depend on finding ways to keep a solid foothold amid these shifting sands. More than 90% of the islands have experienced severe erosion, and climate change could make much of the country uninhabitable by the middle of the century.
Off one atoll, just south of the Maldives’ capital, Malé, researchers are testing one way to capture sand in strategic locations—to grow islands, rebuild beaches, and protect coastal communities from sea-level rise. Swim 10 minutes out into the En’boodhoofinolhu Lagoon and you’ll find the Ramp Ring, an unusual structure made up of six tough-skinned geotextile bladders. These submerged bags, part of a recent effort called the Growing Islands project, form a pair of parentheses separated by 90 meters (around 300 feet).
The bags, each about two meters tall, were deployed in December 2024, and by February, underwater images showed that sand had climbed about a meter and a half up the surface of each one, demonstrating how passive structures can quickly replenish beaches and, in time, build a solid foundation for new land. “There’s just a ton of sand in there. It’s really looking good,” says Skylar Tibbits, an architect and founder of the MIT Self-Assembly Lab, which is developing the project in partnership with the Malé-based climate tech company Invena.
The Self-Assembly Lab designs material technologies that can be programmed to transform or “self-assemble” in the air or underwater, exploiting natural forces like gravity, wind, waves, and sunlight. Its creations include sheets of wood fiber that form into three-dimensional structures when splashed with water, which the researchers hope could be used for tool-free flat-pack furniture.
Growing Islands is their largest-scale undertaking yet. Since 2017, the project has deployed 10 experiments in the Maldives, testing different materials, locations, and strategies, including inflatable structures and mesh nets. The Ramp Ring is many times larger than previous deployments and aims to overcome their biggest limitation.
In the Maldives, the direction of the currents changes with the seasons. Past experiments have been able to capture only one seasonal flow, meaning they lie dormant for months of the year. By contrast, the Ramp Ring is “omnidirectional,” capturing sand year-round. “It’s basically a big ring, a big loop, and no matter which monsoon season and which wave direction, it accumulates sand in the same area,” Tibbits says.
The approach points to a more sustainable way to protect the archipelago, whose growing population is supported by an economy that caters to 2 million annual tourists drawn by its white beaches and teeming coral reefs. Most of the country’s 187 inhabited islands have already had some form of human intervention to reclaim land or defend against erosion, such as concrete blocks, jetties, and breakwaters. Since the 1990s, dredging has become by far the most significant strategy. Boats equipped with high-power pumping systems vacuum up sand from one part of the seabed and spray it into a pile somewhere else. This temporary process allows resort developers and densely populated islands like Malé to quickly replenish beaches and build limitlessly customizable islands. But it also leaves behind dead zones where sand has been extracted—and plumes of sediment that cloud the water with a sort of choking marine smog. Last year, the government placed a temporary ban on dredging to prevent damage to reef ecosystems, which were already struggling amid spiking ocean temperatures.
Holly East, a geographer at the University of Northumbria, says Growing Islands’ structures offer an exciting alternative to dredging. But East, who is not involved in the project, warns that they must be sited carefully to avoid interrupting sand flows that already build up islands’ coastlines.
To do this, Tibbits and Invena cofounder Sarah Dole are conducting long-term satellite analysis of the En’boodhoofinolhu Lagoon to understand how sediment flows move around atolls. On the basis of this work, the team is currently spinning out a predictive coastal intelligence platform called Littoral. The aim is for it to be “a global health monitoring system for sediment transport,” Dole says. It’s meant not only to show where beaches are losing sand but to “tell us where erosion is going to happen,” allowing government agencies and developers to know where new structures like Ramp Rings can best be placed.
Growing Islands has been supported by the National Geographic Society, MIT, the Sri Lankan engineering group Sanken, and tourist resort developers. In 2023, it got a big bump from the US Agency for International Development: a $250,000 grant that funded the construction of the Ramp Ring deployment and would have provided opportunities to scale up the approach. But the termination of nearly all USAID contracts following the inauguration of President Trump means the project is looking for new partners.
Matthew Ponsford is a freelance reporter based in London.
This year has been rough for climate technology: Companies have canceled, downsized, or shut down at least 16 large-scale projects worth $8 billion in total in the first quarter of 2025, according to a new report.
That’s far more cancellations than have typically occurred in recent years, according to a new report from E2, a nonpartisan policy group. The trend is due to a variety of reasons, including drastically revised federal policies.
In recent months, the White House has worked to claw back federal investments, including some of those promised under the Inflation Reduction Act. New tariffs on imported goods, including those from China (which dominates supply chains for batteries and other energy technologies), are also contributing to the precarious environment. And demand for some technologies, like EVs, is lagging behind expectations.
E2, which has been tracking new investments in manufacturing and large-scale energy projects, is now expanding its regular reports to include project cancellations, shutdowns, and downsizings as well. From August 2022 to the end of 2024, 18 projects were canceled, closed, or downsized, according to E2’s data. The first three months of 2025 have already seen 16 projects canceled.
“I wasn’t sure it was going to be this clear,” says Michael Timberlake, communications director of E2. “What you’re really seeing is that there’s a lot of market uncertainty.”
Despite the big number, it is not comprehensive. The group only tracks large-scale investments, not smaller announcements that can be more difficult to follow. The list also leaves out projects that companies have paused.
“The incredible uncertainty in the clean energy sector is leading to a lot of projects being canceled or downsized, or just slowed down,” says Jay Turner, a professor of environmental studies at Wellesley College. Turner leads a team that also tracks the supply chain for clean energy in the US in a database called the Big Green Machine.
Some turnover is normal, and there have been a lot of projects announced since the Inflation Reduction Act was passed in 2022—so there are more in the pipeline to potentially be canceled, Turner says. So many battery and EV projects were announced that supply would have exceeded demand “even in a best-case scenario,” Turner says. So some of the project cancellations are a result of right-sizing, or getting supply and demand in sync.
Other projects are still moving forward, with hundreds of manufacturing facilities under construction or operational. But it’s not as many as we’d see in a more stable policy landscape, Turner says.
The cancellations include a factory in Georgia from Aspen Aerogels, which received a $670 million loan commitment from the US Department of Energy in October. The facility would have made materials that can help prevent or slow fires in battery packs. In a February earnings call, executives said the company plans to focus on an existing Rhode Island facility and projects in other countries, including China and Mexico. Aspen Aerogels didn’t respond to a request for further comment.
Hundreds of projects that have been announced in just the last few years are under construction or operational despite the wave of cancellations. But it is an early sign of growing uncertainty for climate technology.
“You’re seeing a business environment that’s just unsure what’s next and is hesitant to commit one way or another,” Timberlake says.
A lawsuit to hold Yahoo responsible for “willfully turning a blind eye” to the mismanagement of a human rights fund for Chinese dissidents was settled for $5.425 million last week, after an eight-year court battle. At least $3 million will go toward a new fund; settlement documents say it will “provide humanitarian assistance to persons in or from the [People’s Republic of China] who have been imprisoned in the PRC for exercising their freedom of speech.”
This ends a long fight for accountability stemming from decisions by Yahoo, starting in the early 2000s, to turn over information on Chinese internet users to state security, leading to their imprisonment and torture. After the actions were exposed and the company was publicly chastised, Yahoo created the Yahoo Human Rights Fund (YHRF), endowed with $17.3 million, to support individuals imprisoned for exercising free speech rights online.
But in the years that followed, its chosen nonprofit partner, the Laogai Research Foundation, badly mismanaged the fund, spending less than $650,000—or 4%—on direct support for the dissidents. Most of the money was, instead, spent by the late Harry Wu, the politically connected former Chinese dissident who led Laogai, on his own projects and interests. A group of dissidents sued in 2017, naming not just Laogai and its leadership but also Yahoo and senior members from its leadership team during the time in question; at least one person from Yahoo always sat on YHRF’s board and had oversight of its budget and activities.
The defendants—which, in addition to Yahoo and Laogai, included the Impresa Legal Group, the law firm that worked with Laogai—agreed to pay the six formerly imprisoned Chinese dissidents who filed the suit, with five of them slated to receive $50,000 each and the lead plaintiff receiving $55,000.
The remainder, after legal fees and other expense reimbursements, will go toward a new fund to continue YHRF’s original mission of supporting individuals in China imprisoned for their speech. The fund will be managed by a small nonprofit organization, Humanitarian China, founded in 2004 by three participants in the 1989 Chinese democracy movement. Humanitarian China has given away $2 million in cash assistance to Chinese dissidents and their families, funded primarily by individual donors.
This assistance is often vital; political prisoners are frequently released only after years or decades in prison, sometimes with health problems and without the skills to find steady work in the modern job market. They continue to be monitored, visited, and penalized by state security, leaving local employers even more unwilling to hire them. It’s a “difficult situation,” Xu Wanping, one of the plaintiffs, previously told MIT Technology Review—“the sense of isolation and that kind of helplessness we feel … if this lawsuit can be more effective, if it could help restart this program, it is really meaningful.” As we wrote in our original story,
“Xu lives in low-income housing in his hometown of Chongqing, in western China. He Depu, another plaintiff, his wife, and an adult son survive primarily on a small monthly hardship allowance of 1,500 RMB ($210) provided by the local government as collateral to ensure that he keeps his opinions to himself. But he knows that even if he is silent, this money could disappear at any point.”
The terms of the settlement bar the parties from providing more than a cursory statement to the media, but Times Wang, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, previously told MIT Technology Review about the importance of the fund. In addition to the crucial financial support, “it is a source of comfort to them [the dissidents] to know that there are people outside of China who stand with them,” he said.
MIT Technology Review took an in-depth look at the case and the mismanagement at YHRF, which you can read here.
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