Young adults growing up in the attention economy — preparing for adult life, with social media and chatbots competing for their attention — can easily fall into unhealthy relationships with digital platforms. But what if chatbots weren’t mere distractions from real life? Could they be designed humanely, as moral partners whose digital goal is to be a social guide rather than an addictive escape? At MIT, a friendship between two professors — one an anthropologist, the other a computer scientist — led to creation of an undergraduate class that set out to find the answer to those questions. Combining the […]

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 […]

MIT researchers have developed a generative artificial intelligence-driven approach for planning long-term visual tasks, like robot navigation, that is about twice as effective as some existing techniques. Their method uses a specialized vision-language model to perceive the scenario in an image and simulate actions needed to reach a goal. Then a second model translates those simulations into a standard programming language for planning problems, and refines the solution. In the end, the system automatically generates a set of files that can be fed into classical planning software, which computes a plan to achieve the goal. This two-step system generated plans […]