MIT Technology Review January 26, 2026
Plus: Big Tech is heading to court this week
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.
Meet the new biologists treating LLMs like aliens
How large is a large language model? We now coexist with machines so vast and so complicated that nobody quite understands what they are, how they work, or what they can really do—not even the people who build them.
That’s a problem. Even though nobody fully understands how it works—and thus exactly what its limitations might be—hundreds of millions of people now use this technology every day.
To help overcome our ignorance, researchers are studying LLMs as...
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