The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT has awarded funding to eight new research studies to understand how artificial intelligence innovations can be used in the fight against poverty through its new Project AI Evidence. The age of AI has brought wide-ranging optimism and skepticism about its effects on society. To realize AI’s full potential, Project AI Evidence (PAIE) will identify which AI solutions work and for whom, and scale only the most effective, inclusive, and responsible solutions — while scaling down those that may potentially cause harm. PAIE will generate evidence on what works by connecting […]

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 […]