Eric Evans will be stepping down as director of MIT Lincoln Laboratory on July 1, 2024, after 18 years leading a laboratory that has served the nation through its technology research and development since 1951. Evans will transition into the role of fellow in the director’s office at Lincoln Laboratory. He will also hold an appointment on the MIT campus as a senior fellow in the Security Studies Program. He will support the ongoing growth of collaborative research and development between Lincoln Laboratory and the MIT campus, including in areas related to climate change as well as the exploration of […]

Google released the first phase of its next-generation AI model, Gemini, today. Gemini reflects years of efforts from inside Google, overseen and driven by its CEO Sundar Pichai. (You can read all about Gemini in our report from Melissa Heikkila and Will Douglas Heaven here.)  Pichai, who previously oversaw Chrome and Android, is famously product-obsessed. In his first founder’s letter as CEO in 2016, Pichai predicted that “[w]e will move from mobile first to an AI first world.” In the years since, Pichai has infused AI deeply into all of Google’s products, from Android devices all the way up to […]

Hype about Gemini, Google DeepMind’s long-rumored response to OpenAI’s GPT-4, has been building for months. Today the company finally revealed what it has been working on in secret all this time. Was the hype justified? Yes—and no.  Gemini is Google’s biggest AI launch yet—its push to take on competitors OpenAI and Microsoft in the race for AI supremacy. There is no doubt that the model is best-in-class across a wide range of capabilities—an “everything machine,” as one observer puts it.  “The model is innately more capable,” Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and its parent company Alphabet, told MIT Technology […]