The Download: China’s marine ranches, and fast-learning robots

A short ferry ride from the port city of Yantai, on the northeast coast of China, sits Genghai No. 1, a 12,000-metric-ton ring of oil-rig-style steel platforms, advertised as a hotel and entertainment complex.
 
Genghai is in fact an unusual tourist destination, one that breeds 200,000 “high-quality marine fish” each year. The vast majority are released into the ocean as part of a process known as marine ranching.

The Chinese government sees this work as an urgent and necessary response to the bleak reality that fisheries are collapsing both in China and worldwide. But just how much of a difference can it make? Read the full story.

—Matthew Ponsford

This story is from the latest print edition of MIT Technology Review—it’s all about the exciting breakthroughs happening in the world right now. If you don’t already, subscribe to receive future copies.

Fast-learning robots: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2025

Generative AI is causing a paradigm shift in how robots are trained. It’s now clear how we might finally build the sort of truly capable robots that have for decades remained the stuff of science fiction.

A few years ago, roboticists began marveling at the progress being made in large language models. Makers of those models could feed them massive amounts of text—books, poems, manuals—and then fine-tune them to generate text based on prompts.

It’s one thing to use AI to create sentences on a screen, but another thing entirely to use it to coach a physical robot in how to move about and do useful things. Now, roboticists have made major breakthroughs in that pursuit. Read the full story.