MIT Technology Review

As a lifelong disabled person who constantly copes with multiple conditions, I have a natural tendency to view emerging technologies with skepticism. Most new things are built for the majority of people—in this case, people without disabilities—and the truth of the matter is there’s no guarantee I’ll have access to them. AI could make these kinds of jumps in accessibility more common across a wide range of technologies.

Open-source AI is everywhere right now. The problem is, no one agrees on what it actually is. Now we may finally have an answer. The Open Source Initiative (OSI), the self-appointed arbiters of what it means to be open source, has released a new definition, which it hopes will help lawmakers develop regulations to protect consumers from AI risks.

In June 2024, more than 20 years of music journalism disappeared when the MTV News archives were taken offline. This, and other online data wipeouts (like the accidental deletion of MySpace in 2016) have archivists alarm bells ringing.

On July 21, 2023, seven leading AI companies—Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI—committed with the White House to a set of eight voluntary commitments on how to develop AI in a safe and trustworthy way. These included promises to do things like improve the testing and transparency around AI systems, and share information on potential harms and risks. On the first anniversary of the voluntary commitments, the tech sector has made some welcome progress, with big caveats.  Companies are doing more  to pursue technical fixes such as red-teaming (

Amazon recently trumpeted that it had purchased enough clean electricity to cover the energy demands of all the offices, data centers, grocery stores, and warehouses across its global operations, seven years ahead of its sustainability target. That news closely followed Google’s acknowledgment that the soaring energy demands of its AI operations helped ratchet up its corpor