For Priya Donti, childhood trips to India were more than an opportunity to visit extended family. The biennial journeys activated in her a motivation that continues to shape her research and her teaching. Contrasting her family home in Massachusetts, Donti — now the Silverman Family Career Development Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a shared position between the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and EECS, and a principal investigator at the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) — was struck by the disparities in how people live. “It was very clear to me […]

Kids have always played with and talked to stuffed animals. But now their toys can talk back, thanks to a wave of companies that are fitting children’s playthings with chatbots and voice assistants.  It’s a trend that has particularly taken off in China: A recent report by the Shenzhen Toy Industry Association and JD.com predicts that the sector will surpass ¥100 billion ($14 billion) by 2030, growing faster than almost any other branch of consumer AI. According to the Chinese corporation registration database Qichamao, there are over 1,500 AI toy companies operating in China as of October 2025. One of […]

Last week OpenAI released Sora, a TikTok-style app that presents an endless feed of exclusively AI-generated videos, each up to 10 seconds long. The app allows you to create a “cameo” of yourself—a hyperrealistic avatar that mimics your appearance and voice—and insert other peoples’ cameos into your own videos (depending on what permissions they set).  To some people who believed earnestly in OpenAI’s promise to build AI that benefits all of humanity, the app is a punchline. A former OpenAI researcher who left to build an AI-for-science startup referred to Sora as an “infinite AI tiktok slop machine.”  That hasn’t […]