For over 30 years, science photographer Felice Frankel has helped MIT professors, researchers, and students communicate their work visually. Throughout that time, she has seen the development of various tools to support the creation of compelling images: some helpful, and some antithetical to the effort of producing a trustworthy and complete representation of the research. In a recent opinion piece published in Nature magazine, Frankel discusses the burgeoning use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in images and the challenges and implications it has for communicating research. On a more personal note, she questions whether there will still be a place […]

Facing defeat in chess, the latest generation of AI reasoning models sometimes cheat without being instructed to do so.  The finding suggests that the next wave of AI models could be more likely to seek out deceptive ways of doing whatever they’ve been asked to do. And worst of all? There’s no simple way to fix it.  Researchers from the AI research organization Palisade Research instructed seven large language models to play hundreds of games of chess against Stockfish, a powerful open-source chess engine. The group included OpenAI’s o1-preview and DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning models, both of which are trained to […]

Since the emergence of enterprise-grade generative AI, organizations have tapped into the rich capabilities of foundational models, developed by the likes of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Mistral, and others. Over time, however, businesses often found these models limiting since they were trained on vast troves of public data. Enter customization—the practice of adapting large language models (LLMs) to better suit a business’s specific needs by incorporating its own data and expertise, teaching a model new skills or tasks, or optimizing prompts and data retrieval. DOWNLOAD THE REPORT Customization is not new, but the early tools were fairly rudimentary, and technology and […]