This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Lots of influential people in tech last week were describing Moltbook, an online hangout populated by AI agents interacting with one another, as a glimpse into the future. It appeared to show AI systems doing useful things for the humans that created them (one person used the platform to help him negotiate a deal on a new car). Sure, it was flooded with crypto scams, and many of the posts were actually written by people, but something […]

For years, our newsroom has explored AI’s limitations and potential dangers, as well as its growing energy needs. And our reporters have looked closely at how generative tools are being used for tasks such as coding and running scientific experiments.  But how is AI actually being used in fields like health care, climate tech, education, and finance? How are small businesses using it? And what should you keep in mind if you use AI tools at work? These questions guided the creation of Making AI Work, a new AI mini-course newsletter. Sign up for Making AI Work to see weekly case […]

A firm that wants to use a large language model (LLM) to summarize sales reports or triage customer inquiries can choose between hundreds of unique LLMs with dozens of model variations, each with slightly different performance. To narrow down the choice, companies often rely on LLM ranking platforms, which gather user feedback on model interactions to rank the latest LLMs based on how they perform on certain tasks. But MIT researchers found that a handful of user interactions can skew the results, leading someone to mistakenly believe one LLM is the ideal choice for a particular use case. Their study […]