XRP price is on the brink of breaking a pattern with a 100% bullish outcome, which will potentially take its value to $5.
Recorded on January 3, 2025
Unveiling the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2025
Speakers: Amy Nordrum, executive editor, and Charlotte Jee, news editor.
Each year, MIT Technology Review publishes an annual list of the top ten breakthrough technologies that will have the greatest impact on how we live and work in the future. This year, the 10 Breakthrough Technologies list was unveiled live by our editors. Hear from MIT Technology Review executive editor Amy Nordrum and news editor Charlotte Jee as they share an unveiling of the list of the 10 breakthrough technologies.
Related Coverage
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.
How poop could help feed the planet
A new industrial facility in suburban Seattle is giving off a whiff of futuristic technology. It can safely treat fecal waste from people and livestock while recycling nutrients that are crucial for agriculture but in increasingly short supply across the nation’s farmlands.
Making fertilizer from the nutrients that we and other animals excrete has a long and colorful history; for generations it helped Indigenous cultures around the world create exceptionally fertile soil.
These systems fell out of favor in Western culture. But, if researchers and engineers across several companies get their way, that could be about to change. Read the full story.
—Bryn Nelson
This story is from the forthcoming magazine edition of MIT Technology Review, set to go live on January 6—it’s all about the exciting breakthroughs happening in the world right now. If you don’t already, subscribe to receive future copies.
If you’re interested in poop’s wider scientific potential, check out the latest entry in our Jobs of the Future series: stool bank manager. Pediatric gastroenterologist Nikhil Pai is helping to treat children with a common bacterial infection of the large intestine by transplanting healthy stool into a patient’s gut—a highly effective, albeit unconventional, treatment. Read the full story.
Here are MIT Technology Review’s best-performing stories of 2024
MIT Technology Review published hundreds of stories in 2024, covering everything from AI, climate tech, and biotech, to robotics, space, and more.
As the new year begins, take a look at a small selection of the stories that resonated most with you, our readers. Read the full story.
—Abby Ivory-Ganja
Unveiling the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2025
Each year, MIT Technology Review selects the top ten breakthrough technologies that will have the greatest impact on how we live and work in the future. In the past, we’ve selected breakthrough technologies such as weight-loss drugs, a malaria vaccine, and GPT-3 (the precursor to ChatGPT).
Amy Nordrum, our executive editor, will join our news editor Charlotte Jee to unveil the new list live during an exclusive Roundtable discussion for subscribers at 12.30pm ET today. Register here to be among the first to know.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 A US appeals court has struck down net neutrality rules
It’s the end of a nearly two-decade effort to regulate broadband providers. (NYT $)
+ Net neutrality has been in danger for a while, truthfully. (The Verge)
+ It’s bad news for the Biden administration as it prepares to hand over to Trump. (WP $)
2 Car rental app Turo is under scrutiny
But concerns over the app’s safety practices are nothing new. (WSJ $)
+ The app was used to book vehicles used in both the New Orleans attack and Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion. (NYT $)
+ Turo staff have been pulled off vacation to respond to the aftermath. (Bloomberg $)
3 Nick Clegg is leaving Meta
The former British deputy prime minister is making way for prominent Republican Joel Kaplan. (Semafor)
+ It’s part of the company’s desire to align itself with the incoming Trump administration. (WSJ $)
+ How tech is turning MAGA. (Economist $)
4 Yandex has been ordered to hide maps of a Russian oil refinery
In response to repeated attacks from Ukrainian drones. (Reuters)
+ The Ryazan refinery was hit four times last year alone. (Bloomberg $)
+ The uneasy coexistence of Yandex and the Kremlin. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Apple has agreed to settle a $95 million class-action lawsuit
Over claims the company violated user privacy by sharing Siri recordings. (WP $)
6 Several Californian AI laws have gone into effect
A new year means new regulations. (The Information $)
+ There are more than 120 AI bills in Congress right now. (MIT Technology Review)
7 Our understanding of genetic diseases is changing
Cell mutations suggest we’re far more genetically varied than we previously realized. (The Atlantic $)
+ DeepMind is using AI to pinpoint the causes of genetic disease. (MIT Technology Review)
8 African content creators are struggling to make money
But it appears as though the tide may be slowly turning. (The Guardian)
+ What Africa needs to do to become a major AI player. (MIT Technology Review)
9 Get the new year off to a starry start 
There’s a meteor shower due tonight! (Wired $)
10 How to build a more sustainable refrigerator
A new kind of heat-absorbing crystal could hold the key. (New Scientist $)
+ The future of urban housing is energy-efficient refrigerators. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
“He is quite clearly the right person for the right job at the right time!”
—Nick Clegg, Meta’s outgoing chief policy executive, wishes his replacement Joel Kaplan the best in a post on X.
The big story
Is it possible to really understand someone else’s mind?
November 2023
Technically speaking, neuroscientists have been able to read your mind for decades. It’s not easy, mind you. First, you must lie motionless within a fMRI scanner, perhaps for hours, while you watch films or listen to audiobooks.
If you do elect to endure claustrophobic hours in the scanner, the software will learn to generate a bespoke reconstruction of what you were seeing or listening to, just by analyzing how blood moves through your brain.
More recently, researchers have deployed generative AI tools, like Stable Diffusion and GPT, to create far more realistic, if not entirely accurate, reconstructions of films and podcasts based on neural activity. So how close are we to genuine “mind reading?” Read the full story.
—Grace Huckins
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)
+ Of course The Cure’s Robert Smith is an iPod fanatic.
+ Japan may be associated with tasteful minimalism, but there’s always room for a bit of clutter.
+ Meet the people who release 3,000 pounds of confetti into New York’s Times Square by hand every New Year’s Eve—then clear it all up.
+ How to start a healthy habit, and, crucially, stick to it. ($)
WHO
Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI
WHEN
Now
Make no mistake: Size matters in the AI world. When OpenAI launched GPT-3 back in 2020, it was the largest language model ever built. The firm showed that supersizing this type of model was enough to send performance through the roof. That kicked off a technology boom that has been sustained by bigger models ever since. As Noam Brown, a research scientist at OpenAI, told an audience at TEDAI San Francisco in October, “The incredible progress in AI over the past five years can be summarized in one word: scale.”
But as the marginal gains for new high-end models trail off, researchers are figuring out how to do more with less. For certain tasks, smaller models that are trained on more focused data sets can now perform just as well as larger ones—if not better. That’s a boon for businesses eager to deploy AI in a handful of specific ways. You don’t need the entire internet in your model if you’re making the same kind of request again and again.
Most big tech firms now boast fun-size versions of their flagship models for this purpose: OpenAI offers both GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini; Google DeepMind has Gemini Ultra and Gemini Nano; and Anthropic’s Claude 3 comes in three flavors: outsize Opus, midsize Sonnet, and tiny Haiku. Microsoft is pioneering a range of small language models called Phi.
A growing number of smaller companies offer small models as well. The AI startup Writer claims that its latest language model matches the performance of the largest top-tier models on many key metrics despite in some cases having just a 20th as many parameters (the values that get calculated during training and determine how a model behaves).
Explore the full 2025 list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies.
Smaller models are more efficient, making them quicker to train and run. That’s good news for anyone wanting a more affordable on-ramp. And it could be good for the climate, too: Because smaller models work with a fraction of the computer oomph required by their giant cousins, they burn less energy.
These small models also travel well: They can run right in our pockets, without needing to send requests to the cloud. Small is the next big thing.
WHO
US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, US National Science Foundation
WHEN
6 months
The next time you glance up at the night sky, consider: The particles inside everything you can see make up only about 5% of what’s out there in the universe. Dark energy and dark matter constitute the rest, astronomers believe—but what exactly is this mysterious stuff?
A massive new telescope erected in Chile will explore this question and other cosmic unknowns. It’s named for Vera Rubin, an American astronomer who in the 1970s and 1980s observed stars moving faster than expected in the outer reaches of dozens of spiral galaxies. Her calculations made a strong case for the existence of dark matter—mass we can’t directly observe but that appears to shape everything from the paths of stars to the structure of the universe itself.
Explore the full 2025 list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies.
Soon, her namesake observatory will carry on that work in much higher definition. The facility, run by the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the US National Science Foundation, will house the largest digital camera ever made for astronomy. And its first mission will be to complete what’s called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Astronomers will focus its giant lens on the sky over the Southern Hemisphere and snap photo after photo, passing over the same patches of sky repeatedly for a decade.
By the end of the survey, this 3.2-gigapixel camera will have catalogued 20 billion galaxies and collected up to 60 petabytes of data—roughly three times the amount currently stored by the US Library of Congress. Compiling all these images together, with help from specialized algorithms and a supercomputer, will give astronomers a time-lapse view of the sky. Seeing how so many galaxies are dispersed and shaped will enable them to study dark matter’s gravitational effect. They also plan to create the most detailed three-dimensional map of our Milky Way galaxy ever made.
If all goes well, the telescope will snap its first science-quality images—a special moment known as first light—in mid-2025. The public could see the first photo released from Rubin soon after.
WHO
Gilead Sciences, GSK, ViiV Healthcare
WHEN
1 to 3 years
In June 2024, results from a trial of a new medicine to prevent HIV were announced—and they were jaw-dropping. Lenacapavir, a treatment injected once every six months, protected over 5,000 girls and women in Uganda and South Africa from getting HIV. And it was 100% effective.
The drug, which is produced by Gilead, has other advantages. We’ve had effective pre-exposure prophylactic (PrEP) drugs for HIV since 2012, but these must be taken either daily or in advance of each time a person is exposed to the virus. That’s a big ask for healthy people. And because these medicines also treat infections, there’s stigma attached to taking them. For some, the drugs are expensive or hard to access. In the lenacapavir trial, researchers found that injections of the new drug were more effective than a daily PrEP pill, probably because participants didn’t manage to take the pills every day.
In 2021, the US Food and Drug Administration approved another long-acting injectable drug that protects against HIV. That drug, cabotegravir, is manufactured by ViiV Healthcare (which is largely owned by GSK) and needs to be injected every two months. But despite huge demand, rollout has been slow.
Explore the full 2025 list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies.
Scientists and activists hope that the story will be different for lenacapavir. So far, the FDA has approved the drug only for people who already have HIV that’s resistant to other treatments. But Gilead has signed licensing agreements with manufacturers to produce generic versions for HIV prevention in 120 low-income countries.
In October, Gilead announced more trial results for lenacapavir, finding it 96% effective at preventing HIV infection in just over 3,200 cisgender gay, bisexual, and other men, as well as transgender men, transgender women, and nonbinary people who have sex with people assigned male at birth.
The United Nations has set a goal of ending AIDS by 2030. It’s ambitious, to say the least: We still see over 1 million new HIV infections globally every year. But we now have the medicines to get us there. What we need is access.
California resident Ken Liem has accused three banks of failing to perform adequate checks that could have blocked the scammers from opening accounts in the first place.
FalconX’s CEO Raghu Yarlagadda said institutional confidence will strengthen with a more healthy, transparent crypto derivatives market in place.
Tether and Bitfinex General Counsel Stuart Hoegner has retired, leaving Michael Hilliard to take his place as legal chief at the two firms.
The rumors come two days after X CEO Linda Yaccarino confirmed the social media platform would launch X Money in 2025.