Anton Cherepanov is always on the lookout for something interesting. And in late August last year, he spotted just that. It was a file uploaded to VirusTotal, a site cybersecurity researchers like him use to analyze submissions for potential viruses and other types of malicious software, often known as malware. On the surface it seemed innocuous, but it triggered Cherepanov’s custom malware-detecting measures. Over the next few hours, he and his colleague Peter Strýček inspected the sample and realized they’d never come across anything like it before. The file contained ransomware, a nasty strain of malware that encrypts the files […]

The past year has marked a turning point for Chinese AI. Since DeepSeek released its R1 reasoning model in January 2025, Chinese companies have repeatedly delivered AI models that match the performance of leading Western models at a fraction of the cost.  Just last week the Chinese firm Moonshot AI released its latest open-weight model, Kimi K2.5, which came close to top proprietary systems such as Anthropic’s Claude Opus on some early benchmarks.  The difference: K2.5 is roughly one-seventh Opus’s price. On Hugging Face, Alibaba’s Qwen family—after ranking as the most downloaded model series in 2025 and 2026—has overtaken Meta’s […]

For more than a decade, MIT Associate Professor Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli has used artificial intelligence to create new materials. As the technology has expanded, so have his ambitions. Now, the newly tenured professor in materials science and engineering believes AI is poised to transform science in ways never before possible. His work at MIT and beyond is devoted to accelerating that future. “We’re at a second inflection point,” Gómez-Bombarelli says. “The first one was around 2015 with the first wave of representation learning, generative AI, and high-throughput data in some areas of science. Those are some of the techniques I first brought […]