Designers, makers, and others often use 3D printing to rapidly prototype a range of functional objects, from movie props to medical devices. Accurate print previews are essential so users know a fabricated object will perform as expected. But previews generated by most 3D-printing software focus on function rather than aesthetics. A printed object may end up with a different color, texture, or shading than the user expected, resulting in multiple reprints that waste time, effort, and material. To help users envision how a fabricated object will look, researchers from MIT and elsewhere developed an easy-to-use preview tool that puts appearance […]

For decades, artificial intelligence has been evaluated through the question of whether machines outperform humans. From chess to advanced math, from coding to essay writing, the performance of AI models and applications is tested against that of individual humans completing tasks.  This framing is seductive: An AI vs. human comparison on isolated problems with clear right or wrong answers is easy to standardize, compare, and optimize. It generates rankings and headlines.  But there’s a problem: AI is almost never used in the way it is benchmarked. Although   researchers and industry have started to improve benchmarking by moving beyond static […]

In the early days of large language models (LLMs), we grew accustomed to massive 10x jumps in reasoning and coding capability with every new model iteration. Today, those jumps have flattened into incremental gains. The exception is domain-specialized intelligence, where true step-function improvements are still the norm. When a model is fused with an organization’s proprietary data and internal logic, it encodes the company’s history into its future workflows. This alignment creates a compounding advantage: a competitive moat built on a model that understands the business intimately. This is more than fine-tuning; it is the institutionalization of expertise into an […]