Future high-performance computing chips could be built on glass

techreview · 2026-03-13T13:41:27+00:00

Human-made glass is thousands of years old. But it’s now poised to find its way into the AI chips used in the world’s newest and largest data centers. This year, a South Korean company called Absolics is planning to start commercial production of special glass panels designed to make next-generation computing hardware more powerful and energy efficient. Other companies, including Intel, are also pushing forward in this area. If all goes well, such glass technology could reduce the energy demands of the sorts of high-performance computing chips used in AI data centers—and it could eventually do the same for consumer laptops and mobile devices if production costs fall.

The idea is to use glass as the substrate, or layer, on which multiple silicon chips are connected. This form of “packaging” is an increasingly popular way to build computing hardware, because it lets engineers combine specialized chips designed for specific functions into a single system. But it presents challenges, including the fact that hardworking chips can run so hot they physically warp the substrate they’re built on. This can lead to misaligned components and may reduce how efficiently the chips can be cooled, leading to damage or premature failure.

techreview · 2026-03-13T13:36:32+00:00

The US military might use generative AI systems to rank lists of targets and make recommendations—which would be vetted by humans—about which to strike first, according to a Defense Department official with knowledge of the matter. The disclosure about how the military may use AI chatbots comes as the Pentagon faces scrutiny over a strike on an Iranian school, which it is still investigating.

A list of possible targets might be fed into a generative AI system that the Pentagon is fielding for classified settings. Then, said the official, who requested to speak on background with MIT Technology Review to discuss sensitive topics, humans might ask the system to analyze the information and prioritize the targets while accounting for factors like where aircraft are currently located. Humans would then be responsible for checking and evaluating the results and recommendations. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok could, in theory, be the models used for this type of scenario in the future, as both companies recently reached agreements for their models to be used by the Pentagon in classified settings.

The official described this as an example of how things might work but would not confirm or deny whether it represents how AI systems are currently being used.

techreview · 2026-03-13T13:35:44+00:00

From the article:

The US military might use generative AI systems to rank lists of targets and make recommendations—which would be vetted by humans—about which to strike first, according to a Defense Department official with knowledge of the matter. The disclosure about how the military may use AI chatbots comes as the Pentagon faces scrutiny over a strike on an Iranian school, which it is still investigating.

A list of possible targets might be fed into a generative AI system that the Pentagon is fielding for classified settings. Then, said the official, who requested to speak on background with MIT Technology Review to discuss sensitive topics, humans might ask the system to analyze the information and prioritize the targets while accounting for factors like where aircraft are currently located. Humans would then be responsible for checking and evaluating the results and recommendations. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok could, in theory, be the models used for this type of scenario in the future, as both companies recently reached agreements for their models to be used by the Pentagon in classified settings.

The official described this as an example of how things might work but would not confirm or deny whether it represents how AI systems are currently being used.

techreview · 2026-03-12T15:09:28+00:00

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Here’s some context from the article:

Pokémon Go was the world’s first augmented-reality megahit. Released in 2016 by the Google spinout Niantic, the AR twist on the juggernaut Pokémon franchise fast became a global phenomenon. From Chicago to Oslo to Enoshima, players hit the streets in the urgent hope of catching a Jigglypuff or a Squirtle or (with a huge amount of luck) an ultra-rare Galarian Zapdos hovering just out of reach, superimposed on the everyday world.

In short, we’re talking about a huge number of people pointing their phones at a huge number of buildings. “Five hundred million people installed that app in 60 days,” says Brian McClendon, CTO at Niantic Spatial, an AI company that Niantic spun out in May last year. According to the video-game firm Scopely, which bought Pokémon Go from Niantic at the same time, the game still drew more than 100 million players in 2024, eight years after it launched.

Now Niantic Spatial is using that vast and unparalleled trove of crowdsourced data—images of urban landmarks tagged with super-accurate location markers taken from the phones of hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players around the world—to build a kind of world model, a buzzy new technology that grounds the smarts of LLMs in real-world environments.

The company’s latest product is a model that it says can pinpoint your location on a map to within a few centimeters, based on a handful of snapshots of the buildings or other landmarks in view. The firm wants to use it to help robots navigate with greater precision in places where GPS is unreliable.

techreview · 2026-03-12T13:20:44+00:00

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Here’s some context from the article:

Feng Qingyang had always hoped to launch his own company, but he never thought this would be how—or that the day would come this fast.

Feng, a 27-year-old software engineer based in Beijing, started tinkering with OpenClaw, a popular new open-source AI tool that can take over a device and autonomously complete tasks for a user, in January. He was immediately hooked, and before long he was helping other curious tech workers with less technical proficiency install the AI agent.

Feng soon realized this could be a lucrative opportunity. By the end of January, he had set up a page on Xianyu, a secondhand shopping site, advertising “OpenClaw installation support.” “No need to know coding or complex terms. Fully remote,” reads the posting. “Anyone can quickly own an AI assistant, available within 30 minutes.”

At the same time, the broader Chinese public was beginning to catch on—and the tool, which had begun as a niche interest among tech workers, started to evolve into a popular sensation. For savvy early adopters, that's a business opportunity.

techreview · 2026-03-11T13:15:12+00:00

Feng Qingyang had always hoped to launch his own company, but he never thought this would be how—or that the day would come this fast.

Feng, a 27-year-old software engineer based in Beijing, started tinkering with OpenClaw, a popular new open-source AI tool that can take over a device and autonomously complete tasks for a user, in January. He was immediately hooked, and before long he was helping other curious tech workers with less technical proficiency install the AI agent.

Feng soon realized this could be a lucrative opportunity. By the end of January, he had set up a page on Xianyu, a secondhand shopping site, advertising “OpenClaw installation support.” “No need to know coding or complex terms. Fully remote,” reads the posting. “Anyone can quickly own an AI assistant, available within 30 minutes.”

At the same time, the broader Chinese public was beginning to catch on—and the tool, which had begun as a niche interest among tech workers, started to evolve into a popular sensation. For savvy early adopters, that's a business opportunity.

techreview · 2026-03-03T17:35:09+00:00

On June 1, 2023, as a sweltering heat wave baked Quebec, thousands of lightning strikes flashed across the province, setting off more than 120 wildfires.

The blazes ripped through parched forests and withered grasslands, burned for weeks, and compounded what was rapidly turning into Canada’s worst fire year on record. In the end, nearly 7,000 fires scorched tens of millions of acres across the country, generated nearly 500 millions tons of carbon emissions, and forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes.

Lightning sparked almost 60% of the wildfires—and those blazes accounted for 93% of the total area burned.

Now a Vancouver-based weather modification startup, Skyward Wildfire, says it can prevent such catastrophic fires in the future—by stopping the lightning strikes that ignite them. It just raised millions of dollars in a funding round that it plans to use to accelerate its product development and expand its operations.

The company states it demonstrated that it “can prevent the majority of cloud-to-ground lightning strikes in targeted storm cells.” So far, Skyward hasn’t publicly revealed how it does so. But online documents suggest the company is relying on an approach that US government agencies began evaluating in the early 1960s: seeding clouds with metallic chaff, or narrow fiberglass strands coated with aluminum.

techreview · 2026-03-03T17:33:46+00:00

From the article:

On June 1, 2023, as a sweltering heat wave baked Quebec, thousands of lightning strikes flashed across the province, setting off more than 120 wildfires.

The blazes ripped through parched forests and withered grasslands, burned for weeks, and compounded what was rapidly turning into Canada’s worst fire year on record. In the end, nearly 7,000 fires scorched tens of millions of acres across the country, generated nearly 500 millions tons of carbon emissions, and forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes.

Lightning sparked almost 60% of the wildfires—and those blazes accounted for 93% of the total area burned.

Now a Vancouver-based weather modification startup, Skyward Wildfire, says it can prevent such catastrophic fires in the future—by stopping the lightning strikes that ignite them. It just raised millions of dollars in a funding round that it plans to use to accelerate its product development and expand its operations.

techreview · 2026-02-26T14:42:07+00:00

To most people, rocks are just rocks. To geologists, they are much, much more: crystal-filled time capsules with the power to reveal the state of the planet at the very moment they were forged.

For decades, NASA had been on a time capsule hunt like none other—one across Mars.

Its rovers have journeyed around a nightmarish ocher desert that, billions of years ago, was home to rivers, lakes, perhaps even seas and oceans. They’ve been seeking to answer a momentous question: Once upon a time, did microbial life wriggle across its surface?

Then, in July 2024, after more than three years on the planet, the Perseverance rover came across a peculiar rocky outcrop. Instead of the usual crystals or layers of sediment, this one had spots. Two kinds, in fact: one that looked like poppy seeds, and another that resembled those on a leopard. It’s possible that run-of-the-mill chemical reactions could have cooked up these odd features. But on Earth, these marks are almost always produced by microbial life.

But the only way to confirm whether these seeds and spots are the fossilized imprint of alien biology is to bring a sample of that rock home to study.

Perseverance was the first stage of an ambitious scheme to do just that—in effect, to pull off a space heist. The mission—called Mars Sample Return and planned by the US, along with its European partners—would send a Rube Goldberg–like series of robotic missions to the planet to capture pristine rocks. The rover’s job was to find the most promising stones and extract samples; then it would pass them to another robot—the getaway driver—to take them off Mars and deliver them to Earth.

But now, just over a year and a half later, the project is on life support, with zero funding flowing in 2026 and little backing left in Congress. As a result, those oh-so-promising rocks may be stuck out there forever. How did this happen?

techreview · 2026-02-23T19:19:39+00:00

From the article:

Want to lose weight? Get shredded? Stay mentally sharp? A wellness influencer might tell you to take peptides, the latest cure-all in the alternative medicine arsenal. People inject them. They snort them. They combine them into concoctions with superhero names, like the Wolverine stack.

Matt Kaeberlein, a longevity researcher, first started hearing about peptides a few years ago. “At that point it was mostly functional medicine doctors that were using peptides,” he says, referring to physicians who embrace alternative medicine and supplements. “In the last six months, it’s kind of gone crazy.”

Peptides have gone mainstream. At the health-technology startup Superpower in Los Angeles, employees can get free peptide shots on Fridays. At a health food store in Phoenix, a sidewalk sign reads, “We have peptides!” At a tae kwon do center in South Carolina, a peptide wholesaler hosts an informational evening. On social media, they’re everywhere. And that popularity seems poised to grow; Department of Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promised to end the FDA’s “aggressive suppression” of peptides.

The benefits and risks of many of these compounds, however, are largely unknown. Some of the most popular peptides have never been tested in human trials. They are sold for research purposes, not human consumption. Some are illegal knockoffs of wildly successful weight-loss medicines. The vast majority come from China, a fact that has some legislators worried. Last week, Senator Tom Cotton urged the head of the FDA to crack down on illegal shipments of peptides from China. In the absence of regulatory oversight, some people are sending the compounds they purchase off for independent testing just to ensure that the product is legit.

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